That evening, a dossier lay on my desk. No wax seal. No melodrama. Just one sentence: “A small lesion in the white matter and suddenly the grey matter catches fire.” I raised an eyebrow. Ah. The classic case: the culprit lives in the cable shaft, but the guests in the salon start panicking.

This evening, a fresh paper from The Lancet lay on my desk. No wax seal, no dramatic message. Just pure, unadulterated data. The title: “Once-weekly semaglutide versus placebo in patients with alcohol use disorder and comorbid obesity”. The central finding, in layman's terms: a medication used for weight loss and diabetes significantly reduces alco...

This evening, a new file lay on my desk, a paper from Nature Health. The title: “Reduced symptom reporting quality during human-chatbot versus human-physician interactions”. The core finding, as simple as it was brilliant, struck me with the force of an unexpected revelation. In plain English: people who believe they are communicating with a machin...

This evening, there was no sealed letter on my table, but a digital dossier, straight from The Lancet. A paper titled, “Who's really in the loop?”. The authors posed a question so elegant it could have been my own. The core sentence, a line that struck like a poison dart: “Human-in-the-loop oversight is widely invoked as a safeguard... yet it funct...

This is about antibiotics. Marvellous inventions, life-saving, civilisationally on roughly the same level as hot water and functioning door handles. So I am by no means against antibiotics. That would be as foolish as being against the fire brigade because water ruins carpets. 🚒

The case itself was disagreeably modern. No poison in the tea, no dagger in the drawing room, no nocturnal visitor with improper intentions. No, the culprit was polite, softly upholstered, and fully accepted in millions of households: the armchair. More precisely, what it symbolises. Sitting. Too much sitting. Moving through the day like a royal ho...