Hello friends, the newsletter is back from its summer vacation! It's been two months since the last update so lots to pack into this short missive.

Next month I will be in... Hastings. And London! Off on my next US tour mid-September.

Summer Life

Interrailing again (Warsaw, Kraków, Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels, London) to see various friends. I stopped over in Brussels at Beaux Arts to see Breughel's Icarus and of course it was on loan somewhere. But they have many other delicious things there, especially 15th century. Leopoldmuseum in Vienna was also alright. More importantly, Olga (hi!) taught me how to play set card game, which I will now be inflicting on my friends back home.

Hastings! I have also moved back to Hastings after the extended London/travel period. I have been trying to think about describing it's magic in a future newsletter. For now: One of the strengths of the Brits is coming together just to act silly. And Hastings just excels in that category. We just had the Old Town Carnival and it is So Silly. Sense of the place, and all that. So I am engaging in That Good Summer Life TM amidst heatwaves: swims, hanging out in my friend's pub, running into friends, reading on the beach, popping into London, going up to the allotment, and ...

Cycling! I can't run at the moment so (with Lucho's help) I've befriended a bike, I think his name is Richard II (but feedback form is open) and we plan to travel around England. Yesterday Richard & I cycled to a beer festival in Lewes where I was miserably bad at Toads and then cycled back in a glorious Sussex golden hour.

Taught at ESPR. ESPR is "immersive summer workshop for mathematically talented students from around the globe". It's also famously not very online. I thought this year (my fifth in a row) was great. I provided stats and meditation and in exchange received archery, a lot of yoga, snacks, and some great conversations.

I've also been having fun trying to teach myself bits of undergrad maths again.

Summer Work corner: better trials!

Imagine someone figures out a new type of drug (or there is a new disease). For example, PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors are amazing for all sorts of cancers. Cancer drugs are huge money makers, so once this was shown to be a viable option, you suddenly had 20 different agents from 20 companies, with over 100 large trials. LLMs tell me that 150,000+ patients were in these trials. Everyone wanted in. At the end of the day we got ~a dozen of viable drugs, but remember that a large trial can cost hundreds of millions. And which of the dozen should you get if you get cancer? Which one should the NHS pay for? Each of them is tested in a slightly different trial against different comparators!

(My mum got access to one of the new cancer therapies only a month before she died---it only got on the list of reimbursed therapies the summer when her cancer metastasised. It continues to haunt me.)

I could write 2,000 words on why this is a hard problem, but let's just say we won't be able to solve this in the commercial domain for a long while. Still, there is a hope for more coordination for treatments for neglected diseases, which are typically funded by public funders or philanthropic orgs. If you have five companies with an idea for a new antibiotic, how do we avoid five expensive, hard-to-compare trials? I'm working on some ideas .

Summer Books

With this weather it's been hard to read or watch things. I finished Javier Marias' A Heart So White, his "Macbeth novel". I've read five of his books by now and it's incredible how consistent thematically and stylistically they are. It's also incredible he never won the Nobel. His books have some of my favourite passages in all of modern literature, even though he eventually wears me down.

I've also got a lot from Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics by Jonathan Sumption, Reith Lectures on why judges making the law is a bad idea (from a Supreme Court judge!) and was awed by The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov, which I find hard to describe.

None of these are very summery, are they?

Maybe it's all that 15th cent painting, but now Braudel is calling to me!