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Ada Palmer: How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? This is not the first time I have heard of Ada Palmer’s book about the renaissance. In fact, the book is how I found out about Ada Palmer in the first place. And after this preview it just had to end up on the pile. Ben Taub: Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning? Put this one in the holy smokes category.

I was down on podcasts at the beginning of the year, but three weeks into the year there were quite a few worth highlighting: Statecraft: What’s Wrong with NIH Grants. A level-headed view at the Lovecraftian horror that is the federal grants system, from someone who has been in that world for almost two decades. As I noted previously, anyone who wants to reform NIH should first understand it, and the interviewee Scott Kupor seems to know it well.

In other news, Tyler Cowen has jumped so high over the shark that he is now levitating somewhere in Earth’s orbit, therefore achieving the correct position for a neutral observer of current events. Even the comments to his post were (somewhat surprisingly, but correctly) unkind.

Sam Rodriques: The Humanity Project. The underlying assumption of this proposal is that the magic of AI will bring about thousands of new molecules and hypotheses on how they work, and that many of them will require testing in humans, and that we therefore better streamline how clinical trials are designed and run by yes, using LLMs. It is the healthcare ouroboros, now loaded with AI! Andrew Losowsky for The Markup: We posted a job.

🍿 Tokyo Godfathers (2003) was the perfect Christmas movie that rewards careful viewing, with character design and comedic timing that make all the difference. Unlike other Satoshi Kon fare, it had (mostly) kid-friendly content, no complex cuts, and many laugh-out-loud moments.

There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots. We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours.

🍿 Perfect Blue (1997) is a (gory, adult) masterpiece of storytelling and editing which inspired many more works of art. The blurrying of fantasy and reality lands particularly hard in this era of AI slop, and I suspect Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) will have aged even better.

Corey Ford: The Forwardable Email. How to make email introductions easier for everyone involved. I have been a big proponent of avoiding work emails ever since I read Cal Newport’s book, but they are essential for external communication and bringing people together is a common use case. I have bookmarked the site and will be using it frequently. (↬Ben Werdmuller) Jamie Hardesty on LinkedIn: LinkedIf. Since I never actually log in to LinkedIn, I encountered this as a screenshot on Thought Shrapnel.

Kyla Scanlon: The Great Entertainment. Scanlon doesn’t mention the author or the book, but it is hard not to read her latest essay and not picture David Foster Wallace looking at the news stream of the past year, shaking his head. Because the world he conjured in Infinite Jest is, in fact, becoming real. So maybe his other essay wasn’t as outdated as I had thought. Aidan Walker: Clavicular and contentmaxxing.

🍿 Spellbound (2002) was as delightful as I had remembered it. This is the third or fourth time I have seen it, and as with any good work of art the experience becomes richer each time. What made this viewing the best was that we had our spelling bee-bound kids with us who had never seen it before, providing some hilarious commentary. Somewhat less delightful was seeing how some of the kids did in the 20-some years since, but even those stories — except for one — were more hopeful than I would have imagined.

Two years ago this week, as the implications of widespread LLM use began to crystalize, my (Serbian) podcast co-host and I discussed how ChatGPT would change medicine. It was apparent even back then that we were looking at an onslaught of bullshit — since then rebranded as “slop” — that would inundate platforms of the written word from medical journals to progress notes. Sadly, that ended up being the case sooner than I remember thinking.

The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.

📺 Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials (2026) turned one of Christie’s more pulpy novels into an equally pulpy miniseries — with franchise potential! What is there not to love, other than the camerawork which was performed by someone with an essential tremor and no stabilizing equipment?

Ted Gioia: 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism. Consider this the antidote to the techno-optimist bullshitfesto manifesto. It rings true. Chris Arnade: Engineering as Humanity’s Highest Achievement. But then so des the title of Arnade’s latest essay. The answer, of course, is est modus in rebus, including engineering. Ed Zitron: This Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble. “This” being the AI boom, which is putting its final putrid touches on the American rot economy.

Last year I was quite enthusiastic about Waymo, Google’s self-driving cars that have been on their way to DC for quite a while now with no go-live date in sight. Well just this week I was in San Francisco again and the difference in experience was striking. Last year I had a family member or two with me so it was never a one-person ride. This year I came by myself, and felt lonely sitting in the back seat of a large Jaguar.

There is a big red circle of my MacBook Air’s System Settings icon. Oh no! Is it a system error? Is it an update? No! It is an offer to add the two Apple TV devices I have to an AppleCare One (Plus?) Plan! Yes, these kinds of annoyances are becoming ever more salient.

David Foster Wallace for Review of Contemporary Fiction (1993): E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction. On television as voyeurism-enabling best friend of a young fiction writer, among other things. Look, I know it is too long because DFW loves his asides and his self-references, but in year 2026 those make the actual value of the essay: any points he had about network versus cable TV and how those two affect American fiction have become irrelevant as all three of those things are now dead or dying.