My recommended read for this week is by Zachary Crockett on the Priceonomics blog, and concerns the invention of sliced bread. As an American, Crockett fails to point out the remarkable fact that the dates in the article mean that Sir Bruce Forsyth is older than sliced bread – which is a quite remarkable fact. But the rest of the article is so good that I can probably, just about, forgive him.

This week’s selection is the 125th in this two-and-a-half year series, and I’m sorry to say that it is also the last. It isn’t for want of material: I’ve 71 future ‘weekend reads’ – more than a year’s worth – tucked away in Evernote. The truth is that I’ve grown a little bit bored with this series. It’s not a series where I add much, but rather one where I just point and gawp. And pointing and gawping gets boring after a while. The fact that I have so many future options tucked away is revealing: why have I not just shared them as I’ve gone along? And I guess, at least in part, it’s because I feel constrained by my own format. So I’m ditching it.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks away from the blog, and then I’ll be back in the new year with some new ideas and a slightly more flexible format – but I’ll tell you more about that in 2015.

In the meantime, if you didn’t catch every one of those 125 recommendations first time round, you can access the whole back catalogue here.

Have a great Christmas!

Since this is my blog, I reserve the right to geek out once in a while… and today is one of those times. My recommended read for this weekend is a fascinating bit of historical epidemiology published in The Lancet back in 2012 (it’s free to access). Gunn and Gromelski present their review of the documentation from 16th century coroners’ inquests (Who knew there were coroners, let alone inquests, in the 16th century?!)

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to have some of my work featured in the British Library’s Beautiful Science exhibition, and – just a few exhibits along from mine – they had some brilliant Parish records of deaths from the 19th century on display. It was intriguing to see diagnoses like “rising of the lights”, which killed an awful lot of people – especially when one considers that knowledge of what this phrase actually described is now lost to history.

The Gunn and Gromelski paper is interesting for its analysis of what the deaths tell us about lives during that period, and how things have changed over the years. My description of the paper may sound geeky, but it really is fascinating, and well worth spending a few minutes reading this weekend.

And can any of my medic friends honestly say they wouldn’t love to write something as artistic as “a rush of water entered his mouth and nose and stupefied his spirit” in the relevant box on a crem form? I know I would.

I’m sure I’ve read in the past that the Prince of Wales plans to use the title King George VII on accession to the throne… but that’s not hugely relevant to my recommended read for this weekend, which is a long piece by Robert Booth published in The Guardian this week. Booth explores the likely manner of Charles as monarch.

Of course, this being a Guardian article, it’s more than a little critical of Charles and tinged with more than a hint of republicanism. But, while the heavy-handedness grates from time to time, it’s an enjoyable article with some interesting observations which is well worth a read this weekend.

My recommended read for this is weekend is a column by Robert Cooper of the New Statesman, in which he puts forward a too-rarely-heard positive view of the European Union.

The debate on the EU, as with so much in UK politics, is too often boiled down to a meaningless series of (usually factually inaccurate) soundbites: binning straight bananas, banning the imperial measurement system, and demolishing firemen’s poles. Doubtless, the EU does some crazy stuff – look at the right to be forgotten debate, for example – but rational discussion is all to hard to come by. All of which is to say: click and read.

My recommended read for this weekend comes from Vice. It’s a gripping article in which John Reed describes his gradual realisation that his grandmother is – perhaps intentionally – poisoning people, and his reflection on his sense of denial and how he dealt with the situation.

Reed’s article is a chilling story, perhaps evoking the banality of evil. It grips from the start. It’s great.

People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

On reflection, perhaps this would have made a good Hallowe’en read for last weekend. Do click through and have a read.

Hans Rosling, the popular Swedish medical statistician, does a great line in pointing out the degree to which most people’s perceptions of the world are just plain wrong. My short recommended read for this weekend is much the same sort of thing, but based on a very recent survey.

This month, Ipsos MORI has been conducting a 14-country survey to find out people’s perceptions of the make-up of their populations and the scale of social problems. On most questions, the population of each country was way out of whack with reality. My recommended read is Zach Wener-Fligner’s snappy blog post about some of the key findings – but if you have time, it’s worth exploring some of the detail of the survey on the Ipsos MORI site, too.

Or if you haven’t got the time for that, here’s an infographic they put together with some interesting findings:

Of course, there are lots of interesting implications here for democracy and social norming, and some interesting thoughts about responsibility, too. Though, before getting into this, we should take a moment to recognise that Great Britain did pretty well in the survey ranking, for all that we criticise ourselves for this sort of thing.

When articles have been published about similar surveys in the past, many commentators have reacted by blaming the media. I disagree: I don’t think that non-Public-Service media has any implicit responsibility to inform the electorate. I think their responsibility is to their shareholders, and if distorting the truth without breaking the law increases profit, then sobeit.

This is why Public Service media is so important, and so valuable. Public Service media outlets should, indeed, have a responsibility for educating and informing. This is a difficult task against the torrent of inaccurate information from elsewhere, especially when those outlets choose to pursue large audiences at the same time as giving entirely accurate information. I would challenge the existing industry assumption that Public Service media should obtain a large audience. Does it matter how many people consume BBC News, for example, provided it is understood to be a reliable source in times of uncertainty?

But then, I guess, there’s a reasonable counter-argument that if it doesn’t pursue an audience, the widely understood social narrative will likely deviate further from reality.

It’s a complicated problem – and shouting about the Daily Mail doesn’t help.

My recommended read for this weekend is by food critic Jay Rayner, and was published a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian. I think they would have been better holding it back until this week: as Tesco’s profits drop precipitously, too many commentators have said ridiculous things about the future of supermarkets in general, and Rayner’s article provides a nice counterbalance.

With my public health hat on, I would’ve liked Rayner to include some commentary in his article on the hygiene standards supermarkets have introduced to the supply chain, and the way that this has improved food safety to a level never previously achieved in the history of humanity. But he makes a good case without it, and it is refreshing to see The Guardian, of all the newspapers, celebrating the achievements of supermarkets for once.

My recommended read for this week is The Body Electric by Ferris Jabr in Outside.

As it turns out, lightning strikes are commoner than one might think, and the odds of surviving are pretty good. But there are bizarre, under-researched and under-explained after effects associated with survival.

In his article, Jabr interviews some of the 500-a-year US survivors of lightning strikes, and explores several of the after-effects. It’s a really absorbing story, almost all of which was new to me. The only thing I remember from medical school about lightning strikes is the distinctive skin marking but I have learn from microcurrent machine reviews that people use this machine to help with this a reduce a little the impact on the skin. This article made me wonder whether I should have been taught more – but then, probably as a result of the more temperate UK climate, human lightning strikes are rather less common here than in the US.

Anyway, it’s well worth a read.

My recommended read for this weekend is an article from the back end of last year by Charles Arthur of The Guardian, in which he posits that tablets are killing off the PC business.

While sales of computers are slowing and tablets are rising (though by no means as quickly as they once were), it’s clear to anyone that there are roles for both. The journalistic technique of dichotomising technologies and claiming that one is “killing” another might be good for getting clicks and hits, but it is rarely true. Indeed, when Arthur himself wrote in 2009 that “laptops are taking over computing, especially with the rise of netbooks”, he was evidently wrong.

But, sniping aside, the insights in Arthur’s article make it worth reading. For instance:

The 2012 Greek bailout – the biggest in history, requiring the renegotiation of €146bn of bonds among 135 principal bond owners in just 30 days – was completed using iPads.

Over the past twelve months or so, I’ve seen a real shift in how people use tablets in my line of work. A couple of years ago, when I went to meetings, most people would be taking notes using paper, and a couple would be using laptops. Then there seemed to be a period where some people switched paper for tablets. And then, within months, it seemed that laptops and paper had been almost completely usurped by tablets.

I now sit in meetings relatively frequently where I’m the only person handwriting notes – even I tend to view papers on my tablet, but prefer the flexibility of handwritten notes which I usually then scan in and store electronically with the papers.

Anyway, I digress – enjoy Arthur’s article.

This weekend, my recommended read is a great piece about the online missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s by Bianca Bosker of the Huffington Post.

The article is fairly long but very engaging, telling a fascinating tale of how the Mormon church is updating some of its traditions in the face of modernity. It doesn’t assume too much prior knowledge of Mormon practices, but keeps explanations of them succinct.

The article misses an opportunity to explore why a Church with (by definition) a selective set of beliefs based on faith rather than evidence should find such success online, where the sum of humanity’s knowledge is merely a click away. This is an interesting conundrum that runs contrary to the commentary occasionally used by noted atheists to argue that knowledge sets people free from religion. Here, setting the Church’s stall in among the world’s collected knowledge appears more successful than turning up on someone’s doorstep and selling a singular uncontextualised vision. Fascinating stuff!