📺 His & Hers (2026) was an interesting contrast to another Netflix murder mystery — Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials — in how much more sex and graphical violence was crammed into it. Whether it is the place or the time that made the difference, who knows? Its TV-MA rating aside, His & Hers had strong acting, a tight story, and a satisfying twist at the very end. Can’t ask for much more than that from the tah-dum company.

“The pessimist and the prophet” is the current title of the online version but only if you read the article itself — everywhere else on the website it is the more verbose and I presume SEO-friendly “The Harvard professor who foresaw our age of anger – and what happens next”. Neither is what is used in the print edition, the more poetic “Meditations in an emergency”. Common to all three is that they are nowhere to be found on the FT’s home page, though to be fair it is referenced in the top right corner of the front page in print, above a Mad Men-esque illustration and with an altogether different teaser title: “The limits of liberalism; Philosopher Michael Sandel”.

The numbered items are from Kelley’s recent post, comments below are mine after a bit more than a decade of experience. Having children is a good – perhaps the best – way to disseminate your values to the next generation. Provided you have values to disseminate, know what they are, and especially know the difference between values and opinions because while your values may be identical your opinions will often clash.

From American Economic Journal: Economic Policy about the effects of ransomware on patients: ⊕ ↬Tyler Cowen Ransomware attacks decrease hospital volume by 17–24 percent during the initial attack week, with recovery occurring within 3 weeks. Among patients already admitted to the hospital when a ransomware attack begins, in-hospital mortality increases by 34–38 percent. The implication is that the computer systems being down has a huge detrimental effect on patient outcomes.

Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on: John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet. Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing.

Technology Connections on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology. Silje Grytli Tveten: Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed Das Surma: Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering Christopher Schwarz: Free Now & Forever: ‘Campaign Furniture’ Doug Belshaw: The strange magic of the third week OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!

Benj Edwards for Ars Technica: New OpenAI tool renews fears that “AI slop” will overwhelm scientific research. The writing has been on the wall for at least a year, but the capitulation of the academic publishing complex is shockingly fast even taking into account its rotten core. Tyler Kingkade for NBC News: To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to AI. The article is even worse than the headline: professors and teaching assistants are the ones turning to AI to tell them whether a student used AI in their work, and will not accept any evidence to the contrary.

Doug Belshaw: Cash Value: Katherine Ryan, William James, and… getting on with it. Katherine Ryan is apparently a comedian (comedienne?) who: …doesn’t spend time worrying whether the entertainment industry should work the way it does. She describes how it actually works and moves forward accordingly. “I love money,” she says simply, without apology or shame. This is pragmatism: the view that some approaches succeed and others fail, so you’d better figure out which ones work and act accordingly.

It’s a web browser. But fun. It comes with a bunch of clever features built-in. It’s super flexible and does not track you. Get the Vivaldi browser for desktop, mobile, and your car!

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.