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Reading Blind

Uncovered.ink — Judge a Book by Its Writing ↗

Try this out. It gives you a single page of a real book. No cover, no title, no author, no genre label, no star average, no "readers also enjoyed." Just the prose. You read the opening, decide whether you'd keep going, and swipe up for the next one. The pages that catch you go on a shelf. There's no account to make and nothing to buy.

It's worth noticing how much apparatus we've bolted onto the simple act of choosing a book. The cover art, the jacket blurb from a more famous writer, the fifteen-second BookTok clip, the four-and-a-half stars from ninety thousand strangers, the store table it was stacked on, the algorithm that surfaced it. Every one of those was added to help answer "is this any good?" without reading a sentence of the actual book.

That's the part of book discovery Uncovered tries to fix. It removes all the marketing, and everything you are told how to feel about the book before you even crack it open. After enough years inside the recommendation economy, I'm not fully sure I could tell the difference between a book I love and a book I was effectively sold. Uncovered is a low-stakes way to find out, which is probably why it's a little addictive.

Three Years Into Yosemite

Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name ↗ — TechCrunch

Good catch-up piece on Reed Jobs and Yosemite, his oncology-focused venture firm. Three years in: the firm now has a team of 17, and AI has helped accelerate part of what Yosemite does. A few things worth highlighting:

  • Yosemite’s model is unusual — they only work in oncology and prefer building companies themselves rather than just writing checks, using no-strings philanthropy to de-risk early academic ideas.
  • On AI’s actual near-term impact, Jobs is clear-eyed: it’s not necessarily doing science better, but doing grunt work incredibly fast and reproducibly — with the biggest opportunity being synthetic control arms that could cut clinical trial patient recruitment in half.
  • The p53 section is the most striking part of the interview — a tumor suppressor gene implicated in nearly every human cancer, long considered untouchable, that Yosemite is attacking with three different companies.

Cancer is horrible. Lord knows Reed Jobs knows. Wishing him and the whole Yosemite team great success — this is exactly the kind of work worth rooting for.

Interstellar Sweet Tooth

First ‘true sugar’ molecule found in space — offering hints to life’s origins ↗ — Nature

Astronomers just detected erythrulose — a four-carbon sugar also found in raspberries and self-tanner — drifting in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. It’s the first true sugar ever found in interstellar space, formed with no star, planet, or life anywhere nearby.

The implication: some of the raw chemistry for life may have been floating around long before Earth existed, waiting for a comet to deliver it.