• Reading: VAV1 mutations contribute to development of T-cell neoplasms in mice, in addition to the two books I hope to finish this month.
• Watching: A master contortionist.
• Playing: The Dead South, a kids’ favorite.
• Feeling: Quite well actually, considering.

• Reading: T follicular helper phenotype predicts response to histone deacetylase inhibitors in relapsed/refractory peripheral T-cell lymphoma
• Watching: Democracy in action, and freedom of speech. Both are good, no? OK, maybe not
• Playing: Just One which is the perfect game to play with a precocious 8-year-old
• Feeling: Feverish. Let’s hope it’s just the vaccine.

• Reading: The Peripheral T-Cell Lymphomas: an Unusual Path to Cure
• Watching: Vitalik Buterin talks to Tyler Cowen. I don’t understand why this only has 2k views
• Playing: Season 2 of The Americans, and also its most excellent soundtrack
• Feeling: Good about today. Tomorrow, not so much.

• Reading: Edward Tufte’s website, in preparation for his new book which I will also read at some point this year, I hope
• Watching: These Tinderbox video tutorials are an excellent introduction to a powerful application
• Playing: Running with the Wolves at bedtime, on repeat. Don’t ask.
• Feeling: Thankful that my parenting skills aren’t a trending topic on Twitter.

• Video of the week: Arthur C Clarke has a few words about the future (Bonus: I see that the trailer for Half-Life 3 is out)
• Taleb tweet of the week: Stakeholders (and a Taleb-adjacent tweet, I ordered all three)
• App of the week: Drafts
• Thread of the week: How to teach your daughter (no, it’s not that thread)
• Happy New Year!

• Reading: TCR and TCL1A collaboration in T-PLL, an article from late last year about T prolymphocytic leukemia, sometimes called T-CLL, both being misnomers.
• Watching: Video of a hawk (or is it a falcon?) picking on a rat carcass on top of a traffic light in DC, courtesy of my wife. I’ll spare you the gory details.
• Playing: Hunt a Killer, which is a birthday present I may finally get to since we are now 2 for 3 in rainy days this year.
• Thinking: If I am typing this on the phone is it still considered writing?

• Reading: My Name is Red and A Pattern Language, still. The beginning few chapters of the latter give the best explanation for why McMansions are a waste of space, with square foot upon square foot of single-use (or no-use!) space.
• Watching: Season 1 of The Americans soon to be completed. Tough stuff.
• Playing: Dark Souls III (or rather I will attempt to do so… the Elder Signs game went fine yesterday until the youngest decided sucking on monster tokens is great use of his time)
• Eating: black beans (like most cooking websites this one too has SEO’d itself into parody, but it is a good recipe)
• Thinking: Does birdwatching count as playing? Because with the gorgeous weather outside a walk in the woods will be in order.

• Read: Cell Biology by the Numbers online, My Name is Red and A Pattern Language offline. But American Registry of Pathology Expert Opinions: Recommendations for the diagnostic workup of mature T cell neoplasms is the only thing I’ll finish (and you can tell from the title it’s a page-turner)
• Watch: Season 1 of The Americans and also this YouTube channel in the background, as one of the children is quite the car enthusiast.
• Play: Elder Sign which is the perfect game to play on a rainy day, and what better way to welcome in the New Year than by fighting the Ancient Ones.
• Eat: Leftovers from The Federalist Pig (or The Capitalist Pig, as a friend tends to mispronounce it constantly in what is quite the Freudian slip).
• Think: How long can I keep this up? I give myself until the end of next week.

March 7, 2020 was a Saturday. I woke up at 8am, which is as late as it gets, since the night before we watched Breathless and The Graduate back-to-back (the 1960s were a good decade for movies). Most of they was spent in visiting friends in downtown DC. They are a family of four in a tiny one-bedroom; we compared notes on where best to stash the extra flour, rice, pasta, and other staples¹ we stocked up on expecting the inevitable. The inevitable came that night as we were heading out, when Mayor Bowser announced in a late news conference that yes indeed Washington DC had its first confirmed case of Covid-19: a man with no recent travel and no confirmed exposures, which is to say, there was already community spread. We got back to our apartment and closed the door; the next time that apartment would be empty of people again, as it usually had been on weekends and later summer afternoons before the pandemic, was more than five months later.

That was 300 days ago to the day, and as my favorite columnist and fellow millennial Janan Ganesh astutely noted, there were no grand lessons that these 300 days gave me, unless you count confirmation that humans can muddle their way through anything as a lesson. Harambe may have been killed in 2016, but 2020 was his year: a tragic, sensless event where everyone is responsible but no one is to blame — though I may be an exception in thinking this, since 2020 was the year of confirmation bias, the year of suppressing the opposing view points, the year of shaming. To complicate matters some more, it was also the year when crackpots and idiots joined into the Grand Coalition of Stoopid, expressing some points of view that maybe ought to be suppressed, and doing some things for which maybe they should be ashamed. Harambe indeed.

I finished the last year with a post about the great things that happened to me personally as the world stagnated in the 2010s. In the spirit of this year, I’ll finish with a list of failures instead, and I’ll do my best not to make it into a thinly veiled list of successes:

• I read far fewer books and watched far fewer movies than any year before.
• I wrote far fewer (medical) articles than planned.
• I wasted time on Twitter like never before (and, let’s hope, never again).
• I dropped more projects than ever before, including piano lessons, learning a new language, speed-completing the Rubik’s cube, and running in cold weather, among many others.
• I walked less than any other year since I started walking.²
• I commuted more by car than ever since moving to DC.
• I ordered more takeout than ever.
• And the one that hurts the most: I did not finish a single video game, or even play anything for more than 15 minutes, unless you count Good Sudoku which is truly a masterpiece of design and the highlight of the year. Yes, the highlight.

There are so many parallels between this movie and Wolfwalkers, which is just as well since they are the two main contenders for the 2021 Academy Awards. Both have masterfully innovative animation, but where Wolfwalkers looked back at the old texts and pre-renaissance perspective for inspiration and side-stepped into something new, Soul pushes La Linea and its own work to 11 with Terry, the best non-villain villain since the wind in Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Note also Trent Reznor’s notes bleeping and blooping away in the background. The soundtrack is another thing on par with Wolfwalkers. As you may have seen in the trailers and guessed from the title, most of the music in Soul is jazz, melded with ethereal electro-something.¹

Both fumble the narrative: Wolfwalkers’ story because it was predictable, Soul’s because incoherence. The presumed big conflict — man v. death — is deemphasized in favor of many small ones: art v. education, passion v. commitment, meaning v. nihilism, hippies v. bureaucrats, moments of inspiration v. the daily grind. It is just too much philosophizing, and this is coming from someone who has, from the age of six, been called a philosopher by exasperated adults.²

Not that the story is bad, it is just not as focused as its closest Pixar ancestor — Inside Out — another villain-less meditation on the internal lives of humans.³ Even so, it takes the top half of the Pixar pantheon, at least a few notches above Docter’s first movie, Up.⁴ Wish other studios put out things that were half as good this year.