I’m a populist about many things, but I truly believe that unrepentant snobbery is the only way forward now in the arts.

Inflation is completely out of control, you can’t even take 3 kids to a Detroit Tigers game anymore without spending an arm and a leg! Crazy!

My home city, New York, is likely to elect a socialist Mayor Tuesday. I don’t usually report on local politics, but I make an exception for Zohran Mamdani… because people believe his socialist dreams. Yet what he is promising to do is so STUPID. Here's why:

They should at least use Touchdown for a commercial!!! Get me some dough to fix my leaky roof!!

John Maus admits there’s something indescribable about his Perfect 10

R.I.P. Charlie Kirk I didn't know Charlie personally. But he did send me a kind message last year. "I love all people" is what he said. If that is any indication of who the man was, then this country has lost someone special today. Partisan politics did not stand in the way of him paying me a compliment, and it should not stand in the way of mourning him either. We cannot become a society where expressing political views, even controversial ones, leads to violence. Whatever you think of his politics, Charlie was a decent man, a patriot, and a brave defender of his values. My heart goes out to his wife and his kids.

AI will do a lot of good things. But it won't cure cancer. Here are a few reasons why 1. AI is trained on the best available published literature. If you have AI read all of the papers in cancer, you have just had AI read 50% or more of literature that cannot be reproduced or may even be fraudulent. If you have AI restrict itself to reading nature science cell JBO, AI has still trained on 50% of material that will not replicate, and is not true. How can AI solve the problem when you pump it full of false information? 2. There is no way to separate the false information from the true information unless you replicate the experiments. That requires beakers pipettes dishes and hands. Now Maybe if AI has a robot form and starts replicating things now you're talking. 3. The limit with cancer cures is is not that we are not reading and synthesizing all the available materials. There are a lot of very smart people working in this space, and they do read widely and think about always all possible ways to combine different strategies. Instead, the limit is biology itself. Understanding what is happening in the cell that has not been seen or detected in current experiments. AI has no way to do this unless it again picks up a pipette. 4. Some of the things people celebrate today to like AI can find more lesions on mammograms. It just reveals the ignorance of the technology people. What is a lesion on a mammogram? It's something that when you stick a needle in it according to a pathologist it has basement invasion. So it looks like cancer under the microscope. this is what AI is being trained on. But it has nothing to do with whether or not the lesion you see is going to progress in your natural life, and kill you, whether or not it's going to stay dormant, whether or not it's spread already. You want to find lesions that are going to kill you. But you can cut out today. We don't know which lesions those are! AI is being trained on a faulty data set yet again. I described this at length in a recent plenary session lecture. 5. 20 years ago they said Judah folkman was going to cure cancer. Then they said immunotherapy was going to cure all cancer. I guess the difference between folkman and immunotherapy is at least immunotherapy has cured some people but folkman cured about zero people. 10 years ago the hype was all about personalized sequencing. Now the hype is AI. There's always going to be some hype. You're better off not smoking, keeping your weight down, exercising and then just accepting that immortality is not going to be happening. Side note: it's probably a good thing that people are not immortal. People need to die so that their terrible ideas can be replaced with slightly less terrible ideas. Certainly there are backslides, but such is the nature of progress. Reducing untimely death is a much better goal than making people live to 120.

NEW PODCAST EPISODE Sam Harris discusses the result of the 2024 presidential election, the lessons that the Democratic Party should draw from it, and the implications of a second Trump term. bit.ly/3AEB9NE

The fact that so many Americans of all ethnicities, geographies and colors wanted to see Democrats pay a resounding price not just for policy decisions but for a larger circa-2020 indulgence paid to so many deeply unpopular activist perspectives simply has to be taken seriously.

The Ref intercepted the pass and then got TACKLED 😂😂😂

Biden's mental health Is it Parkinsonism or a stutter? Normal aging or lewy body dementia? Cold medication AEs or vascular dementia? Politics vs. Medicine youtu.be/l5hoMxumj_8

This is Francesco Queirolo's "Disinganno", a marble statue carved 264 years ago. It's very impressive when an artist can make marble look like real rope, but that doesn't make it a good sculpture. Here's why "realism" in art is overrated...

All wars end with negotiation, but it's hard to negotiate when the other side's bargaining position is "you all die and disappear."

The fact the sub implosion was kept secret for days while it was the top news story in the world is a testament to both the power of information control, and the failure of reporting. James Cameron knew Monday & emailed people. How many others knew?

Health care colleague tells me she could not be with spouse in waiting room during a procedure, and afterward, while still under effect of sedation, doctor spoke to him, but he can't remember what was said. Why? COVID policy... in 2023 This is how stupid we are.

Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish children escape the Nazis. His efforts went unrecognized for 50 years. Then in 1988, while sitting as a member of a TV audience, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the kids he’d rescued, now adults. I like to remember this every Jan 27th.

The Van Gogh stunt makes me want to buy a dozen Buick Electras and leave their engines running round the clock. If there’s such a thing as anti-activism, that’s it.

One of my all-time favorite illusions: The spinning dancer If you look at the dancer on the left and the one in the middle, the one in the middle spins clockwise. If you look at the dancer on the *right* and the one in the middle, the one in the middle spins counterclockwise.

The science doesn't support LA mandate. Here we show why. LA isn't actually in the CDC "High" tier high-quality data shows mask mandates are ineffective. Using data everyone knows are inaccurate to justify a useless mandate is terrible public health.🧵 dailynews.com/2022/07/22/bri…