• Article of the week: Current landscape of immunotherapy trials in thoracic malignancies (and a completely unrelated bonus: How EU tripped in Covid-19 vaccine race)
• Chart of the week: those vaccines do work.
• Newsletter of the week: Culture Study and the diminishing returns of productivity culture (the French are laughing now aren’t they?)
• Thread of the week: A baton-twirling champion meets David Letterman (video of the week is at the end of that thread)
• Satire of the week: White history month

• Article of the week: MARIETTA
• Meme of the week: Don’t take press releases seriously
• Chart of the week: Vaccinations per 100,000 in Europe and Serbia is in the lead (?!)
• Thread of the week: Skin in the game, the Serbian way (bonus: Venkatesh Rao is only now watching Community)
• Satire of the week: Blue check homes

• Thread of the week: Pandemic doomsaying
• Article of the week: Controversy, what controversy?
• Meme of the week: Research(yes, sure, there is also this)
• Video of the week: Trams
• RIP Mira Furlan

What a week…

• Article of the week: Schrödinger’s cat bias
• Thread of the week: Omega events
• Blog post of the week (remember those?): L’éducation idéologique
• Letter of the week (remember those?): Biden’s to Eric Lander
• Video of the week: Warren Buffett’s house (bonus: wokeness overload)

• The Americans
• The Mandalorian
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
• Peter Thiel’s Zero to One
• Sam Harris’s Waking Up app
• Steven Wolfram’s Mathematica
• The following Mac “productivity” apps: Omnifocus, Omnigraffle, DevonThink Pro, Tinderbox
• Zettelkasten
• Apple hardware
• Electric bicycles
• Birdwatching

Obviously, I recommend all of the above.

See also: Things I used to like but now wonder what in the world I was thinking.

• Social media
• Gmail
• Richard Dawkins and his “New Atheism”
• Ayn Rand’s two books

There must be more, but I am good at suppressing.

See also: Things I heard were good but was holding out for reasons unknown then wondered why I haven’t tried them sooner.

• A few hours before I developed symptoms I had a negative screening nasal swab. By the time I got a positive test three days later the symptoms were well on their way to resolving. Good thing I didn’t believe that first result.
• What helped my not believing was that I had textbook Covid-19 which was moderate bordering on severe: fever 39.5°C (~103°F), chills, body aches, nasal congestion, rhinorhea, and a dry cough that was mild enough for me not to worry. But thankfully no anosmia.
• Read the preceding paragraph again. The nasal swab done just before I developed all those symptoms (and arguably while having chills - though I didn’t know they were chills at the time) was negative. Covid-19 testing is no better or worse than any other clinical test we have, which is to say caveat medicus.
• Considering our family’s practices I was surprised that it managed to get in and suspected it was one of the new strains. Lo and behold not 7 days later the UK strain was found in Maryland. I won’t know the sequence of the one that got me for a few more months, but I’d say it’s likely.
• Said practices did contribute to containment, as there seemed to be no spread outside of the household (there is a small asterisk there which I will leave for another time).
• The new strains being so much easier to get makes any delays in administering the vaccine that more deadly. This is hard to overstate: shots in arms now, doesn’t matter how and to whom.
• Speaking of shots, I did get my first dose a few days before the likely exposure, and plan on getting the second one as scheduled if available.
• Masks aren’t 100% effective, particularly in areas of high prevalence which is right now most of the world. The new strains shift the equilibrium even more. Holier-that-though memes about things being OK again if only people did what’s good for them (i.e. wore a mask) are misguided at best and quite likely counterproductive.
• Another misguided effort: a DC health professional telling the sole member of a large family without a fever to use a separate bathroom, wear a mask at all times and open all the (quite tall) windows of their 1200 sq ft 7th floor apartment. Hard to tell if this was more comical or dangerous.
• DC health professional’s misguided advice #2: to get everyone in the household tested. If mine was positive and four more people also have fevers do we really think they have something else? Why risk the tester’s exposure and waste reagents: count these people as positive and move on.
• But as things stand right now, if these household members don’t get tested they don’t count as positive. How prevalent is this situation, I wonder? Even with test availability not being a bottleneck I’d multiply the current counts by at least 2, probably 3 to get the real number (and I’m sure there are epidemiologists who have a more scientific explanation for why we should be doing that anyway).
• Symptoms in children seem to be no different than any other febrile viremia of childhood (and in fact may be slightly better as they didn’t seem to sap any of their energy, for better or worse). Does this make in-person school more or less safe? I can see both sides of the argument but if you thought children as asymptomatic carriers would be a big risk that risk is probably overblown as they do in fact get symptoms — they just won’t telegraph them.
• And if you are worried about long-term effects of Covid-19 in children, well, sure, but how is that different from long-term effects of any febrile viremia of childhood? I’m sure our parenting style will ruin their prospects enough that Covid-19 will be just a drop in the bucket.
• I have been getting lists of home remedies from people who should know better. This includes aspirin (as an anti-platelet agent, not an antipyretic), azithromycin (still!) zinc, turmeric, propolis. What I took: a little bit of APAP and a lot of H2O.
• I have a new appreciation for the gig workers, who are the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Tip your Dasher.
• 2021 is certainly off to an interesting start.

• Nature Methods method of the year (and deservedly so): spatially resolved transcriptomics
• Transgenic myeloid cells (not the worst idea) from Siddhartha Mukherjee (uhmmmmm…)
• Thread of the week: Adam Cifu doodles
• Pile-on of the week: David Chapman on airmchair philosophy (and a bonus pile-on from last weeek)
• Basketball is easy (when you’re Jokić)

• 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.