🍿️ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) was available on Apple TV and heavily referenced in Ted Lasso, and not having watched it before it was a natural choice for the family’s Saturday night viewing. It aged much better than other 80s teen comedies (looking at you, Revenge of the Nerds). Contains a surprising amount of cursing, but a distinct lack of alcohol, sex or violence. A surprisingly short intro credits scene made me think that this was re-cut for the modern viewer but no, this is the original. Also has a post-credit scene. How very modern. If this were remade, Charlie Sheen’s druggie would have been the main character, no? The mood has shifted away from celebrating rich brats like Ferris, or Saved by the Bell’s Zack Morris. What is the message for the your audience? If you are charming enough and don’t behave too too badly you can get away with much shenanigans? Ain’t that the truth.

📚️ Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino helped me clarify why I liked some authors and not others. ⊕ [Note: Incidentally, M. John Harrison’s latest book is on the short list for the Booker prize this year. I eagerly await October 13 and its US debut. ] There are in fact five memos, named in order Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. The final one, Consistency, was not to be: Calvino died, aged 61, before finishing.

🍿️ The Dead Don’t Die (2019) looked exactly like you would imagine a zombie movie made by Jim Jarmusch to look, especially if you knew that he spent his childhood watching matinee double features. Not his greatest, but it hit the right spot: between the fracking references (the apocalypse came about because some brilliant minds decided to frack the Earth’s poles), Murray and Driver’s deadpanning, Tilda Swinton’s out-of-this-world turn and the Iggy Pop cameo, there was much to love.

A $75 smart ring that records voice notes at the press of a button. No charging, no subscription. Pre-order today.

Without having seen this week’s Apple event, I can feel it in my bones that the future of pocket devices is something small that can on demand turn into something big. No, I’m not preordering — for reasons — but surely the matte screen and other crease-hiding trickery will at some point trickle down to a sub-$1,000 inflation-adjusted level. I can wait.

Clayton Davis for Variety: The smartest defense is baked into the movie’s DNA. This is not a redemption tour. It is a study of the impossibility of ever knowing what is real, which is either the perfect subject for a branch that fetishizes authenticity or a provocation aimed straight at it. Max Fisher for Newpress: China quietly saved the world last month. Max Kozlov for Nature: The NIH is quietly restricting funding for research that evaluates how public policy impacts human health.

Alex Tabarrok writes that it doesn’t matter if the workers’ share of GDP shrinks because of AI. As long as the pie is bigger — and our AI oligarchs say it can be as much as 10% bigger each year! — the average worker will have a bigger share in absolute terms if not in relative. Hogwash. The one who has the bigger slice has the power to lord over the ones with smaller slices so the relative size does in fact matter. Never mind that our sense of wellbeing is itself ties to how we perceive ourselves in the overall community. What Tabarrok proposes is voluntary serfdom. I think not.

Updated September 5th, 2026 at 2:11pm MDT, at a Staybridge Suites… hotel? Or rather, the hotel industry’s answer to AirBnB. Multiple bedrooms, a decent-sized kitchen and a hot breakfast buffet for less than what you’d have to pay to live in someone’s home. No cleaning and service fees either. The whole family is in an extended stay situation because we decided to rip out the wall-to-wall bedroom carpets and install hardwood floors to match the rest of the house. This means actual planks, an oil-based stain and several days’ worth of water-based finishing. Which is to say: stay away for at least a week (in a Staybridge!) lest you are a fan of volatile vapors.

DEVONthink Pro — henceforth DTP — is one of those Swiss Army Knife applications that is different things to different people. ⊕ [Note: At one point or another DTP has also been my app for journaling, structured note-taking (even bought a book about it), managing journal references, reading RSS feeds, archiving podcast episodes, batch renaming and automated file wrangling à la Hazel. Phew. ] After a dozen or so years of dabbling, I have pared down its use cases to a single one: managing documents both electronic (office files and emails, mostly) and physical (thanks to the now discontinued but still phenomenal ScanSnap iX500). The only reason I used DTP and not say Finder was its “intelligent” file sorting, or rather sorting recommendations paired with fast search. So, that was the only thing I had to replicate to get my DTP replacement on Linux now that I am making the slow jump.

Here is the source.

This cross-sectional study estimates all US Food and Drug Administration anticancer approvals in recent years and evaluates if an association exists between their cost and efficacy.

Exclusive: After the devastating news of a terminal cancer diagnosis, Debbie Rhodes and her husband Randy were delivered a gut punch about her life-saving medication. J.R. Duren reports

📺 Only Murders in the Building, Season 5 declined in quality by quite a bit near the middle, enough to have me stop watching. Good thing we are a family of completionistis, because the show picked up steam and pulled off one of the best endings of the run. I for one cannot wait to see the crew in London, schmoozing with all the British guest stars.

Now that I am back in clinic full-time I have tried and failed to pick up on the more clinical podcasts. Both ASCO and ASH have their podcast series, but they are all so formal and scripted you can see the teleprompter scrolling in front of the speakers’ eyes. One potentially bright note could have been Cancer Stories, which are spoken versions of Journal of Clinical Oncology’s Art of Oncology article series. Note the past tense; I have a longstanding antipathy towards “narrative medicine”, a mode of fiction in which doctors combine patient stories, or present a single patient’s story anonymously, to make a point. The fallen king of narrative medicine was the neurologist Oliver Sacks, and look at how that turned out. Social media are of course an even more fertile ground for this kind of fakery; I won’t go into the X, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and YouTube accounts that are completely full of it, but there is a lot of content out there and all of it — all of it — is bullshit.

I am shocked — shocked! — to find a zoomer “AI investor” caught swimming naked at the first turn of the tide: Aschenbrenner, who had no previous trading experience before starting the fund, worked for the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire before it collapsed in late 2022. He later joined OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before being fired over an alleged leak. With such an illustrious pedigree, how could things have possibly gotten so wrong so quickly?