I started the decade childless and am ending it with three, so I have missed most of the 2010s’ pop culture. This includes the entire Transformers franchise and most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so, not much missed then?)

• Film: “Get Out”
• Blockbuster/action film: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
• Album: “Hamilton”
• Single: “Rolling in the Deep”
• TV Show: “Veep”
• Single Season: “The Leftovers” season 2
• Book Fiction: “The Dark Forest” (or “Death’s End” if you count the publication of the first Chinese edition, but TDF is superior)
• Book Non Fiction: “Antifragile”
• Athlete of the Decade: The Đoković-Federer-Nadal trio, but if I had to pick one then obviously Đoković.

Movies and music were better in the 2000s, but oh what time to watch TV and follow tennis. It’s too early to judge the books (though it’s telling that my favorite was originally written in 2008).

• Top four South Maui beaches, best one first: Po’olenalena, Keawakapu (a close second), Wailea (only in the afternoons), Mokapu.
• Top guide book is Maui Revealed. NB: Hotel/lodging information is on their app (‎Hawaii Revealed), and that part of the app is free.
• Top place for shopping is Paia, especially if you’re into that 21st century hippie aesthetic that’s popular with Instagram influencers these days (though mine being aware of it means it won’t be popular for much longer).
• There is a notable absence of panhandlers. If there are any homeless, they are indistinguishable from a certain type of tourist. Locals are indifferent to appreciative of your business, but they don’t go out of their way to get you to pay for stuff (which is unlike any other tropical/Mediterranean island I’ve been to, but then again I haven’t been to many).
• The sand sticks to anything and everything. There’s enough of it in the car that I’ll happily pay any extra cleaning fees the rental agency will surely charge.
• Prices at low and mid-scale restaurants are same or just slightly higher than D.C. This does not bode well for D.C.
• There are more veterinarian than human hospitals on Maui.
• The one general hospital on the island is Keiser’s Maui Memorial Medical Center. It looks like they have a heme/onc service with an infusion center, so don’t think I haven’t thought about it.
• Only two days left.

• I used to say Maryland was the best U.S. state. I’d like to change that to the best continental state. I don’t know about the rest of Hawai’i but Maui is spectacular. That 50th star should be gold.
• This is why: there are so many things to do on the island that many visitors get a FOMO-induced urge to do as much as possible. That leaves the wonderful beaches mostly empty during the weekdays, when the locals are working, and quite bearable (compared to the Montenegrin beaches of my youth) on weekends.
• There are at least five kid-friendly beaches within a 5-minute drive from our condo. One is a go-to for snorkeling, one if full of sea turtles for those who enjoy swimming around them (which should be everyone with a heart), one is looong, peaceful, with shallow water no waves, excellent shade, and also an occasional turtle (swimming with sea turtles naturally being better when you didn’t even expect to find them).
• “The road to Hana” would be a great find if you had some business to do in Hana, then stumbled into seeing a few waterfalls and making a pit stop at a black sand beach. It’s overrated otherwise, and the poor residents of Hana and central Maui have to deal with droves of slow-moving tourist vehicles looking for the next instagrammable moment.
• Hana highway is also the home to the best vegan ice cream I’ve ever had, so there’s that.
• No, I’m not vegan. Kalua pork is too good.
• Each new state I visit means I get to learn more about American exceptionalism. The story of Hawai’i’s annexation taught me that it’s OK for a private corporation to hold the ruler of an independent nation hostage in order to control the said nation’s resources, as long as the corporation is American and the nation is not European.
• Yes I’ll keep writing Hawai’i.
• It’s also OK to ban the native language and culture well into the 20th century. Safeway came to the islands well before the Hawaiian language was legal again.
• Having said that, there is now also a Walmart and — crucially — a Costco on Maui. Prices are the same or lower than in D.C. That is how you conquer a nation, Serbia.

1. Plenary Session. Many friends and coworkers are amazed that anyone would voluntarily subject themself to Vinay Prasad‘s tirades, but his podcast is well-behaved and a pleasure to listen. The monologues are better than the interviews, which is to be expected: he’s been monologuing his whole life and interviewing for less than a year. And yes, some of his guests/collaborators need too much coaxing, but sock puppets only reinforce the national meeting atmosphere that the name evokes.
2. Conversations with Tyler. Still great. You can start at the beginning, or with the one with Daniel Kahneman, but start somewhere. Most are excellent and all are good, even the ones you wouldn’t guess from the interviewee’s name and bio.
3. The Knowledge Project. Farnham Street/F.S. has gotten some good press, and for good reason. It’s self-improvement for people allergic to the self-improvement label.
4. Revisionist History. Yet to listen to the latest season, but I can’t see it going badly. Malcolm Gladwell is a pro.
5. The Glass Canon Podcast. In the absence of a regular gaming night (never schedule a campaign around three doctors’ schedules), I listen to other people playing tabletop RPGs. No better entertainment, I say.

Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS (that’s PTC in cyrillic) has a good chunk of its archive spread across multiple YouTube channels, and it is magnificent (this one in particular).

Observe the 1960s-1990s televised plays and TV dramas. I still have vivid memories of watching one particular product the first time it aired, about a Serbian family keeping in touch with their ex-pat relatives in Germany via VHS tapes. Replace camcorders with smart phones and speed up the timeline to account for the internet, and it could have been shot today. Technology changes, people don’t.

My favorite childhood TV show hasn’t aged well at all; then again has anything from the ‘90s? If you consider most of it was made during a civil war and in a time of hyperinflation it is actually quite good. What was 90210’s excuse? Better kids’ shows have been made in Serbia both before and after.

Best for last: the celebration of hard core nerddom that is Serbia’s longest-running quiz show, important enough to have its own channel. It starts with anagrams and math problems, makes a detour to Mastermind, then finishes off with three different ways to test for trivia. Jokes about the autism spectrum would be writing themselves if this were an American show, but it’s not, and (before I left, at least) Serbian viewers still had some admiration for the participants. It is all very serious and competitive, and has been on the air every weekday for the last 24 years. (A political side-note: this does not mean Serbia is free from anti-intellectualism, quite the opposite in fact. Some combination of militant anti-intellectuals, gas-lighters, and proponents of economic/financial scientism has been in positions of power since the early 90s. There are no lessons here, just observations).

(voices as in podcasts, not a psychotic episodes)

• Conversations with Tyler: I much prefer this over his mostly spartan, often cryptic, and always clueless about things medical blog Marginal revolution. Cowen‘s interview style brings out the best from people; it is also a good and rare example of clear thinking. Compare and contrast his chat with Malcolm Gladwell and Patrick Collison’s chat with Cowen: when answering, Gladwell uhms and ahhs and changes direction mid-sentence; Cowen pauses for a half-second, then produces paragraphs of prose that could have been lifted right out of an encyclopedia. Not to belittle Gladwell — for one, I’d be even worse (as anyone who had to finish my sentences for me can confirm); and two, he is responsible for
• Revisionist history: He had me at Food Fight. Gladwell embraces and owns his Well, actually kind of story-telling — even the show’s name is a big Well, actually to the Gladwell-haters. And good for him, because the stories are marvelous in both topic and style, and make me want to read his books again.
• Sources and methods: Two ex-spies talk about learning and cognition. They are still in intelligence-gathering mode, interviewing guests you‘re unlikely to hear anywhere else. It’s how I learned about Tinderbox (and you can too).
• America the bilingual: One part pep-talk to encourage the pre-1990s waves of immigrants to America to take up a second language, one part advice to parents raising multilingual children. The latter validated my plan to ~~save money~~ strengthen the offspring’s Serbian by shipping them across the Atlantic to spend some quality time with the grandparents.
• Novel targets: Finishing of the list of men talking to each other is the best oncology podcast I’ve come across. It may be heavily slanted towards immunotherapy, and not zealous enough in dampening the hype, but it tries.

The next time someone asks me about books to read before residency, I will direct them here. You don’t have to be a medical trainee to benefit from these, but that period of anxious anticipation between match day and orientation is perfect for buffing your attributes.

How to read a book, by Mortimer J. Adler

What better way to start learning about learning than by reading a book about reading books?

The Farnam Street blog has a nice outline of the book’s main ideas. The same establishment is now hocking a $200 course on the same topic. It’s probably good, but at $10 the source material is slightly more affordable.

Getting things done, by David Allen

The first few months you will be neck-deep in scut work no matter what you do. After that, though, you will have to juggle patient care, research, didactics, fellowship/career planning, and piles of administrative drek—and that’s just inside the hospital. At the very least, this book will help you make time for laundry (and maybe some reading).

Thinking, fast and slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Superficially, similar knowledge to what is in these 400+ pages can be found in a few Wikipedia entries. But you would miss out on the how and why cognitive biases and heuristics are so important. Medicine and research are bias-driven endeavors, and not understanding them is not knowing real-world medicine.

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Only three? Yes. If anything, the two and a half months between mid-March and July 1st won’t be enough to read them all with the attention they deserve. But you should try.

Another year, another round of podcast recommendations:

• …
• …
• …

No, it’s not your browser. The list is empty.

After 10 years of attaching electric appendages to my head using flimsy earhooks some call ear-phones, I have decided that one voice in my head at a time is quite enough, thank you, and that there are better ways to muffle the sounds of everyday existence than the nasal overtones of middle-aged white men.

Who will be crushed to lose me as a listener, I am sure.

I haven’t suddenly decided that they are all bad, mind you—I have spent cumulative months listening to them, so they must be good. The problem is, I like them too much.

Behold my modified CAGE questionnaire for podcasts:

1. Have you ever felt you needed to Cut down on your time spent listening to podcasts? Doing it right now.
2. Have people Annoyed you by criticizing your listening to podcasts at inappropriate times? Does my wife count as people? If so, then yes.
3. Have you ever felt Guilty about listening to a podcast instead of doing something else? You mean like sitting in the car 10 extra minutes after coming back home from work, waiting for an episode of Radiolab to finish? Umm…
4. Have you ever felt you needed to put on your headphones first thing in the morning (Eye-opener) to finish listening to last night’s podcast, or to get a head start on completing the unplayed list. “Felt like?” I do it all the time.

Aced it.

Granted, being mostly free, not too hard on your body, sometimes educational, and often entertaining, podcasts are not the worst thing in the world to be addicted to. But to be alone with your thoughts is exceedingly rare when there is a toddler in the house—rare enough that you do not want to spoil it by introducing external stimuli which make it impossible to string a chain of thought longer than the 30-second commercial break for Squarespace.

Farewell, voices. It was good while it lasted.

• Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance
• Deep Habits: When the Going Gets Tough, Build a Temporary Plan

The GTD weekly review does a good of job keeping my task list managable, but not all tasks and projects are equal. It’s good to have a sense of when you might have time for deep thinking versus mindless task processing—-something GTD doesn’t trully account for. I had been doing a variant of weekly planning since high school, until internship destroyed any hope of having a daily, let alone weekly plan. It’s time to start again.

And if you are not following Cal Newport’s blog already, you should. The man is a machine.

After skimming through the fifth long-form article about the increase in bite-sized consumable writing made for the short-attention-span—-dare I say “millennial”—-crowd, I became scared for my own tenacity. Would the 15-year-old me, the one who had read the LotR cover to cover, be horrified by this balding humunculus with twice the age and—-if you’d believe the articles—-half the attention span?

No, he would not. I can write that with confidence of a man who has just burned through the first two Dark Tower books exclusively while riding the subway. Get in at Union Station, actually sit down to read at Gallery Place, blink and I’m done with a chapter or two and arriving at Bethesda.

Stephen King is a hell of a writer, you see, and most of what you can find online—-this blog post included—-is derivative crap at worst, well-written nonsense at best. My brain jumping from text to text was its way of saying Dude, why are you punishing me with this drivel? Just get us a good book. So I did, and the percieved length of my metro commute has decreased by two orders of magnitude. Which is a convoluted way of saying that time flies when you’re having fun¹.

But if you’ve never read a book in your life and are now devouring Buzzfeed like a horsefly in a manure factory—-sorry, there is no help. It is you.