👑👑👑 = the best traffic congestion on the island of Manhattan

The line in this courageous essay about her child not remembering her broke my heart. I hope she knows what an impact it had on so many people.

“There was so much money that the sector got overbuilt,” said Alexis Borisy, founder of Boston-based Curie.Bio, a biotech venture firm that has raised more than $1 B for early-stage biotechs. “If there was a good idea, there’d be 10 companies all built at the same time to go do it.”

Wish Amtrak would scrub the schmutzy train windows so passengers could take better pictures along the Hudson.

“You may think, as I do, that our society fails to guarantee everyone the level of medical care they should receive.”

Central Park ❄️ wonderland.

New Yorker pre-holiday party dinner plans.

“People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don’t see themselves as storytellers. It’s all the people who are not storytellers who…suddenly now want to be storytellers.”

Midtown Merry. The island of Manhattan holiday light show.

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Adam Douglas Thompson. #NewYorkerCartoons

are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson

As with Shakespeare, I always found myself coming out of a Stoppard play feeling more intelligent than when I went in.

“Nuzzi shows no awareness of Kennedy’s role in cracking consensus reality apart through his anti-vaccine conspiracy mongering. She’s fond of portentous factoids, so here’s one: Last week, Kentucky announced the third infant death from pertussis, or whooping cough.”

I don't need AI to help me overuse em dashes. I've been doing that on my own since middle school.

“The Department of Health and Human Services maintains that it is hewing to ‘gold standard, evidence-based science’ —a piece of doublespeak so thick that it might unsettle Orwell.”

“I went into a room with dark suits and men with gray hair,” she said. “And I sat down and somebody came and told me that these were seats for the doctors, and the drug reps needed to go to the back of the room.” “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m a doctor,” she said she told them. “I’m one of the surgeons.” 😶

>10% of US heart & lung surgeons are women: Dr. Kharazi recalled how she once told a male surgeon that she planned to ask for operating privileges at his hospital in order to expand her practice. “And he told me, ‘Well, it’s generally not a good idea to go where you’re not invited.’”

Hudson River Run.

“Companies that offer concierge medical testing often explicitly lean into frustration with the traditional health care system in their marketing.” Reading this as I help friends and family navigate extravagant health premium increases and long waits for basic care is an interesting experience.

“During the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

A powerful read from Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s granddaughter: “I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the NIH.”

Your perfect Friday biotech and beyond listen. Tom Hanks should make this movie.

"She’s not trying to rebuild her reputation as a journalist—she’s building a different kind of brand entirely, one where being interesting matters more than being ethical, where attention is the only currency that still spends." The best thing I have read about her. www.mediaite.com/opinion/the-...

Revisiting Alison Roman’s piece on the delight and drudgery of social: “While people love to say everyone is ‘a brand’ these days, I would just like to remind everyone that no, they aren’t. They’re humans, people, individuals, and we shouldn’t feel so much pressure to behave as if that’s not true.”

Pretty New York City.

Here for the 🐱 explainers for remarkable science: “It’s as if, instead of creating ‘a better mousetrap, they invented a cat,’ said Fyodor Urnov, a professor of molecular therapeutics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a gene editor at its Innovative Genomics Institute.”

Awkward art direction for awkward art direction sake.

No pressure. “She staged it the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition.”

Presented in parallel.

“In dozens of interviews with The New York Times, Americans described using chatbots to try to compensate for the health system’s shortcomings. A self-employed woman in Wisconsin routinely asked ChatGPT whether it was safe to forgo expensive appointments.” 😶

From the NYT comment section: Wendy from Irvine is spot on.

A theatrical Central Park sunset.

A perfect Central Park cardinal.

In the spring, Ms. Brous said she asked on the chat group if anyone was giving up something for Lent. The women didn’t miss a beat. “The answers were, ‘Yeah, the use of my arms!’” Ms. Brous said. “‘Feeding myself.’ ‘Walking.’ ‘Talking.’”

Another gorgeous rainy day in Central Park.

“This should definitely be an episode of ‘Silicon Valley. Reboot the show!”

😶 PSA: Reading this op-ed is time you can’t get back.

“The worst advice people get when they're being interviewed is to show up with these 3 points that they're supposed to repeat over and over and over again. But the best interviews, the ones that you like the most, are the ones where it feels like the person is actually grappling with the question.”

My kind of longevity story:“somewhere where every subject in the world can come up, and any type of person in the world might walk in.”

NYC Marathon Sunday countdown…

“The vast majority (96%) of investors believe AI will have a net positive impact on worker productivity. However, only 47% of the public say AI will result in a net positive impact on productivity.”

Just out: @wsj.com op-ed I wrote on why I see such hope in the longevity movement, despite often dubious science & frequently exaggerated claims; in short: we're embracing agency, recognizing that we have a measure of control over our long-term health. wsj.com/opinion/nobo... (gift link).

“It is a head trip to think that this very sentence you are reading, and maybe even my willingness to share personal medical details, may, in some minor way, be informed by demyelination in my frontal lobe, an area believed to affect planning, decision-making, and memory.”

Fall games. Washington Square Park.

“Women must now live in a world in which phone manufacturers think we have hands the size of bears and jeans manufacturers think we have hands the size of pixies.”

“Mismanaging HHS endangers America’s health, undermines national security and damages our economic resilience and international credibility.”

When you search the Anthropic database on a lark and find your great aunt’s novels along with a relative’s math books. 😶

Same. “She has developed a habit of texting her daily Wordle score to a selection of friends, including Allison Janney, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Charlize Theron. Burnett doesn’t use a regular starting word, as many players do, but plucks a new guess each day ‘from the universe.’”

Great Q&A with Lisa Suennen, managing partner at AHA Ventures, which oversees $200M in assets: “Inherent in the mission is to reduce barriers to care and to try to make things more accessible. If this is going to make it a lot more expensive to get the same outcome, that is not a good investment.”