It’s full of style, has excellent casting, and pretty good chess¹, which is enough to make it into an enjoyable but forgettable miniseries. If only they had put in as much effort and thought into character development as they did in Beth Harmon’s dresses…

As long as I can remember¹, any protagonist of a movie or a TV show who wasn’t world-weary and cynical was either naïve, stupid, or both. In American popular culture, “good” people are the way they are only because they don’t understand how the world truly works. As side characters they are mostly comic relief. As protagonists they can only succeed through piercing the veil of ignorance — becoming worse people in the process — or by pure dumb luck. Ned Flanders, Forest Gump, Kimmy Schmidt all come to mind.

Not so with Ted Lasso, the only character in recent memory who is well aware that the world is harsh and that there are people out to get him², yet defaults to thinking the best of everyone he meets. He is still capable of mild deception in the service of punishing the wicked, but he can’t even punish someone without an endearing monologue on what he’s all about: being curious and not judgmental.

Being more curious and less judgemental would serve everyone well at any time, but never more so than this year, when everyone suspects the worst of everyone else. The default behavior is mistrust, the default sentiment cynicism. This show starts with plenty of both, yet they melt away under Lasso’s high-power beam of un-ironic and very self-aware goodness. If the 2000s were the decade of The Wire and the 2010s were the decade of the Game of Thrones, I wish, hope, pray that the 2020s turn out to be the decade of Ted Lasso.

These 250 pages on the many ways that cancer care in America is broken should be read by everyone with even a passing interest in oncology, and must be read by every heme/onc fellow or fellow-to-be. Malignant reminded me of the best days of my own fellowship, when the then-program director Tito Fojo would eviscerate an article — these tended to be poorly thought out phase 3 trials of one TKI or another that somehow made it to the New England Journal — with a few slides made at the last minute.¹ But this is not just a rehash of those lectures, nor is it the best of Prasad’s prolific Twitter feed, nor an overview of his billion meta-science articles and editorials. It is instead a series of lectures — enough to fill a semester — that takes bits and pieces of the above and adds quite a bit of new to make something better.

It is not the easiest of narratives to follow. This is understandable: cancer research, policy, and outcomes are as intertwined as the molecular pathways Prasad valiantly tried to avoid, and mapping their connections will inevitably result in a crazy wall. There are nominally four parts to the book with four chapters each, because you had to put it together somehow, and the parts make sense. Even so, more than once I was wondering what exactly a particular vignette had to do with where it was in the book, and wanted to put it somewhere else. But the feeling goes away quickly — Prasad’s style is entertaining, the puns are clever², and there isn’t a superfluous paragraph in site.

To that last point — if anything, the book is too short. My pet cancer peeve, the disconnect between bioplausability and reality, and the many misuses of animal models to inform clinical trials, was barely mentioned when it could’ve easily made a whole chapter. Same for grant mechanisms, which did get a page and a half — that one half is a figure — but left too many things unexplained and uncovered, particularly for the lay audience. And as to Prasad’s big advice that the federal government should take over running clinical trials from private companies, well, it’s nice to put some pie-in-the-sky proposals out there, but something that is so against the grain should be more fleshed out.³ Or maybe mention some more feasible proposals, in the line of Vincent Rajkumar’s plea to cut down the number of people with veto power over a randomized controlled trial. I could go on, but I’d rather not spend too much time on what can be refuted by a single sentence: “Write your own damn book”.

Written by Vinay Prasad, 2020

• The HBO show manages to be more like the comic book than the movie ever was, even though — or rather exactly because — it is nothing like the original while the movie was for the most part a literal shot-for-shot translation of the comic and therefore missed two things that made the comic great: 1. amplifying the anxiety of the day to intolerable levels, and 2. deconstructing its own medium.
• Re: no 1, the original was all over the place time-wise but mostly set in the 80s and the perceived threat was nuclear holocaust. The movie came out in the mid-2000s, during the time of war against terror and existential angst, but was still set in the 80s and the threat again was nuclear holocaust — two beats already missed. The HBO series is all over the place time-wise but is for the most part set in 2019, and the perceived threat is white supremacy. Note the “perceived” and note that it takes some time for the real villains to be revealed.
• Re: no 2, I’ll pick just one example although there are many. The original featured a comic book within the comic book. Of course, in a world in which super heroes are real, escapist media wouldn’t be doing its job just by featuring even more super heroes. So what kids get instead are pirates, and what you as a reader get are panels featuring ships at sea, pirate raids, and the like, interspersed with the “real” story, to great effect. The movie had… breaks in which it showed panels from that same pirate-themed comic book, with the same story line. Only because you’re not mixing two comic books but instead are interrupting a movie to show some drawings, it doesn’t work at all. The HBO series, brilliantly, has a TV show within a TV show, which is, again brilliantly, not pirate-themed. As to what it is, well, that’s one knock I’d have against the show because it’s trying to be cute and funny, and yes a parody docu-drama about super hero origins in the style of American Crime Story is cute and funny, but it’s not in the spirit of the original.
• Another knock against the HBO series is that it coddles the audience, almost as if HBO got complaints about a few of its other shows being too obtuse. A dialogue line was foreshadowed 10 minutes ago in a different dialogue? Cut to the foreshadowing. Characters recognize a clue in something that occurred two episodes ago? Cut to that scene to remind you what happened. A character breaks an egg? Cut to them holding a different egg in a scene from the same episode. Why?
• Yes, it’s petty criticism, but the show is so masterful in so many other ways that the tiny imperfections stick out. Also, it’s also easier for me to list the few things I didn’t like because everything else (Regina King! Jeremy Irons! Jean Smart! The kid actors! The two skinny white guys who I hope will team up for Season 2! The self-conscious wokeness. That soundtrack!) is pitch perfect.
• A half-sequitur: everything I liked about Lost was put in there by Damon Lindelof, and everything bad about it came from JJ Abrams. I didn’t realize that at the time, but their work post-Lost speaks for itself.
• It ties with Westworld Season 1 as the second-best season of the decade, but The Leftovers Season 2 is still my number 1.

Directed by Various, 2019

• A brief overview of the past, present, and future of capitalism by a Serbian-born and formerly World Bank-employed CUNY professor Branko Milanović, who specializes in income inequality.
• Some parts hit closer to home than others, most of all the idea that you can have a welfare state, and you can have open borders, but that mixing the two is ill-advised. I am also well-acquainted with America’s indirect and informal immigrant tax, a version of which Milanović proposes as one of the solutions to the welfare/immigration dilemma. I am not a fan.
• His big insight before this book was the elephant chart. Capitalism, Alone’s big idea is that communism may not have been the pinnacle of society that Marx and Engels had predicted, but rather a good way of transforming feudal agrarian societies into modern economies. Centralized planning and broad-stroke changes work well up to a point, but the production chains soon get too complex for communism, at which point the invisible hand steps in.
• Second big insight: corruption is hard-wired into how a particular type of capitalism (which he calls “political”, in contrast to the Western “liberal meritocratic”) operates. This is supported by many a “liberal meritocratic capitalism” city and state, their financial services and real estate markets being dependent on the “political capitalism’s” dark money.
• It was an easy read for this non-economist. Recommended.

Written by Branko Milanović, 2019

• The only reason I bought and read this book was the excerpt published in the Atlantic which noted some parallels between 1990s’ Balkans and 2010s’, well, the world, which I was already mulling in my head. Turns out that’s the best part of the book.
• The rest is uneven. Holbrooke was a slime ball of a human and his accomplishments were nil, yet Packer still manages to make the book into a hagiography. Which I guess is an accomplishment.
• Did Holbrooke truly think that his memos would change the world? In the Gervais Principle hierarchy, he was a clueless posing as a sociopath.
• Packer’s account of the Dayton negotiations confirms that the only reason a deal was made was that Milošević wanted it at any cost. The agreement was for Holbrooke to mess up, and he almost did, multiple times.
• There is mention of HBO buying rights to make a show out of Holbrooke’s account of the Bosnian was. I haven’t read “To End a War”, but I like the idea of the Dayton negotiations being the centerpiece of a mini-series, with flash backs to each individual warlord’s (and Dick’s) messy history. Someone please give the idea to Damon Lindelof after he’s done with Watchmen.

Written by George Packer, 2019

1. Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the death of Sandra Bland by the way of the Hitler-Chamberlain meetings, Cuban double-agents, college student alcohol culture, an episode of Friends, and Sylvia Plath’s suicide by gas oven. Huh?
2. The pieces actually fit, and — a few abrupt interludes aside — the story flows nicely. His previous books were also stories and not scientific review articles, which people tend to forget, but this one more so than others. Which is good, since people tend to misunderstood him for a Pinkeresque academic with pop culture pretensions rather than a journalist having fun.
3. A single point of disagreement: his portrayal of Ferguson, MO police as misapplies of hot spot policing rather than racketeers rang false to my layman ears.
4. Gladwell has become a podcaster, and it shows in how the book is structured: it reads like a podcast script. I haven’t listened to the audio version, but this may be the one case of a non-fiction book that is better listened than read.
5. But if you don’t have the actual book, you won’t get to read the extensive notes, on of which directly refutes a whole chapter of Blink. Another is an excellent parallel between indiscriminate police searches and cancer screening tests. Too bad he didn’t use actual footnotes (but then people would also complain, see no.2).

Written by Malcolm Gladwell, 2019

Things I found to be scarier than this movie:

• “Cabin in the Woods”
• “Coraline”
• “Toy Story 3”
• My father upgrading his Windows PC
• My 2-year-old’s diaper
• The thought that I have spent almost two hours watching this drek

That this was co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by the same person who did The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly mind-boggling, but certainly disappointing. I wonder what went wrong.

Directed by André Øvredal, 2019

A collection of essays from the man who wrote Infinite Jest, also known as the 20th century’s best 21st century book. Each one is near-to-completely brilliant and worthy of more thought than a one-line in an inconsequential blog post, but that won’t stop me:

• Big red son is the one where he attends the AVN awards as a magazine correspondent. The more absurd things become, the more encyclopedic he gets. Yes it’s funny, but also existentialist and sad as only pornography can be.
• Certainly the end of something or other, one would have to thing is long title to a short-ish review of a supposedly science fiction book by John Updike. He didn’t like it.

• Some remarks on Kafka’s funnies from which probably not enough has been removed is exactly what it says it is. Having only high-school literature class-level acquaintance with Kafka, I can’t comment.

• Authority and American usage is a review of a dictionary but also the 20th century’s (written in 1999) best 21st century essay, covering issues of political correctness, identity politics, race, alienation, and a brief history of the battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism for the hearts and minds of I don’t know who exactly, but what an exciting battle it is.

• The view from Mrs. Thompson’s is about where he was on 9/11 (spoiler alert: he was at Mrs. Thompson’s).

• How Tracey Austin broke my heart is the reason I’m even sadder than I should be about DFW not still being around, because an essay about the Federer-Đoković-Nadal tennis trio in general and the mental gymnastics going on in Novak Đoković’s head in particular would have been spectacular to read (although there has been a fairly successful attempt). Oh, and it’s also a review of a reasonably bad autobiography of the titular Ms. Austin, who is also a tennis player.
• Up, Simba is DFW following McCaine’s failed 2000 attempt in the Republican primaries, wherein he shows just how walled away from the “real” world candidates were back then, how big of a gatekeeper the media world, and just why Twitter could have made all the difference.
• Consider the lobster is where a travel essay for a cooking magazine from a food festival in Maine turns into an existential crisis and a call for veganism. It’s good
• Host is so messed up by its formatting of footnotes (fortunately there is now a web version which more than makes up for it, and the original article published in The Atlantic was also easier to read, apparently, say people who were able to find it, and yes this should also have been a footnote) that it’s hard at first to appreciate how good of a story interspersed with thoughts on infotainment and talk radio it really is, and even though it was written more than a decade ago you can sort of see what it’s protagonist will eventually become in these troubling times.

Written by David Foster Wallace, 2007

“Diagnosis” is a Netflix reality show first, a comment on American healthcare second, and Lisa Sanders’ medical show on crowdsourcing the diagnostic process a distant third. If you wanted to see more of what made her book and column great, like I did, well, tough luck: this ain’t it. Because — and this isn’t a surprise — most people with access to a tertiary medical center do get an adequate diagnosis. Those who are undiagnosed either lack access, or have a functional-slash-undiagnosable condition that ultimately doesn’t change much in their management.

Realizing this, the producers add a spin: the crowdsourcing they bring is also there for emotional support, connecting with people, getting different treatment recommendations. As if Facebook didn’t exist. If this show were a clinical trial, it would be a phase II with an unimpressive response rate but hey look at those bio markers we hadn’t initially planned on doing!

Warning: spoilers for Episode 1 ahead. I may get to the other ones, eventually.

Only the first episode half-lives up to its promise. A young woman from Las Vegas has a problem. Her local doctors don’t know the cause; I certainly didn’t, but could make a ballpark guess as to which type of a disorder it was and which subspecialist she should see. However, instead of giving her a referral to the nearest university medical center, the doctors flood her medical bills, and sue her for non-payment to boot. Only in America!

Enter Sanders: her NYT article gets a bunch of people across the world sending video suggestions as to the possible diagnosis. A medical student from Turin, Italy, offers a free work-up. Netflix, bless their hearts, films the patient and her partner flying to Italy to get it done, marveling at the wonders of a single payer system. I can only presume travel and boarding were paid for by the production team. But why not pay for a trip to San Francisco instead? Well, the skyline isn’t as dramatic as that of Turin; and it would rob Dr. Sanders of the opportunity to marvel how crowdsourcing brought the answer from half way across the world, literally.

In a nutshell: Because of No Insurance and TV Drama Makes Better Ratings, woman from Nevada flies to Italy — instead of driving to California — to get diagnosed with a rare medical condition.

To be continued…