Friday assorted links

1. Nona Gaprindashvili, female chess pioneer, to sue Netflix (NYT). 2. World Bank to discontinue Doing Business index (NYT).  And more coverage here. 3. A sensory revolution in video games? 4. Sondheim writing a new show at age 91 (NYT). 5. The world’s most expensive animals. 6. Don’t believe the Haiti/DR graph. The post Friday assorted links...

27m

Gödel Prize Winners Don’t Cosplay

Tim Roughgarden, a top-notch computer scientist (co-winner of a Gödel Prize), is teaching a class on blockchains. He’s only just begun to put up material but I liked this bit of “hype” from Lecture One. It’s worth recognizing that we’re currently in a particular moment in time, witnessing a new area of computer science blossom before our eyes in real...

4h

What should I ask David Rubinstein?

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia: David Mark Rubenstein (born August 11, 1949) is an American billionaire businessman. A former government official and lawyer, he is a co-founder and co-executive chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group,[ a global private equity investment company based in Washington, D.C. He is...

9h

What I’ve been reading on Ireland

1. Susan McKay, Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground, and also Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People.  These two books straddle a journalistic and anthropological approach to what the titles indicate.  As one Protestant in the text remarked, Irish reunification would work just fine, it is the ten years getting there that everyone is afraid of. ...

11h

Thursday assorted links

1. “Moreover, we find a marked decay in background parental relatedness co-occurring with or shortly after the advent of sedentary agriculture.” 2. Dwarkesh on Emergent Ventures and searching for talent. 3. The first mention of America in European chronicles? 4. New issue of Works in Progress.  Including update on the future of weight loss. 5. Why...

22h

Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread

Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread is superb. I reviewed it for the WSJ. Here’s one bit: If there’s one overarching theme of “Uncontrolled Spread,” it’s that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed utterly. It’s now well known that the CDC didn’t follow standard operating procedures in its own labs, resulting in contamination and...

1d

Covid markets in everything

A pastor is encouraging people to donate to his Tulsa church so they can become an online member and get his signature on a religious exemption from coronavirus vaccine mandates. The pastor, Jackson Lahmeyer, is a 29-year-old small-business owner running in the Republican primary challenge to Sen. James Lankford in 2022. Lahmeyer,...

1d

My January 2020 Bloomberg column on Covid

I thought this one worthy of a redux, here are a few segments: First, most emergency rooms are not equipped to handle a very high volume of cases, especially infectious diseases…The general economic problem is that emergency rooms typically are not equipped with full surge capacity, nor are there enough emergency room add-ons or substitutes available...

1d

Wednesday assorted links

1. Big excerpt of me on crypto, with Ezra Klein. 2. What should we conclude from the Bangladesh mask study? 3. New Yorker profile of Colm Tóibín. 4. It seems the NBA won’t require player vaccinations? 5. History of mRNA vaccines. 6. New Emily Oster Covid-19 School Data Hub, valuable. 7. Hedgehogs and foxes, for real, not just the usual b.s. The...

1d

What’s the Right Dose for Boosters?

The Biden administration says booster shots are coming, but the FDA hasn’t decided on the dose. Moderna wants a half-shot booster. Pfizer a full shot. But could the best dose for Americans and for the world be even less? COVID-19 vaccines are the first successful use of mRNA vaccine technology, so a lot remains unknown. But identifying the smallest...

2d