Earlier this summer, CNN published this article by their chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, about why he changed his mind on marijuana, and particularly medical uses of it. It’s always interesting to read about why people changed their mind on a topic, yet I think people are so afraid that they will be accused of flip-flopping or some such that these articles don’t appear nearly enough. So this weekend, enjoy this one!

The Quarry is Iain Banks’s final novel, finished off after he received the news that he was dying of a rare metastatic gall bladder cancer. That background, combined with the fact that I’ve loved many of Banks’s previous novels, makes it hard to write a fair review. But I will try.

The plot is straightforward: Guy, father to teenage Kit, is dying of cancer. Guy invites his old friends to stay with Kit and him, for something resembling a pre-death wake. The relationships between the friends are explored, and their shared past is raked over. The plot, however, is almost irrelevant. It is the detailed characterisation, perfect dialogue and evocative description which do all the work in this novel. The plot is almost beside the point.

The first Banks novel I read was the first he wrote: The Wasp Factory. The Quarry shares much with The Wasp Factory: both are Bildungsromans exploring the nature of the relationship between a strange father and a strange son. This is the sort of thing Banks excels at, as I mentioned in my review of Stonemouth earlier this year. The Quarry is much less extreme than The Wasp Factory: the father is a dying misanthropic bastard rather than a lifelong pathological sadist, and the son appears to have a mild form of autism rather than being a psychopathic murderer. Both The Wasp Factory and The Quarry explore themes of ritual and religion in some depth, as well as the fine line between life and death.

But this is not The Wasp Factory. It isn’t a Gothic powerhouse of a novel featuring graphic murder and torture at every turn. Like Stonemouth, it’s a quiet, subtle novel that explores the absurd horror of everyday life without resorting to comically dark metaphor. The mirror it holds to the absurd swords of Damocles of our pasts and the cruelty of death is plain, rather than comically warped. What this approach loses in shock-factor power, it gains in poignancy.

As always with Banks, the characterisation and dialogue are just outstanding, and the black humour is second-to-none. As always, his prose flows like nobody else’s. His talent as a writer was so obviously superlative that discussing it seems superfluous.

The Quarry is a brilliant novel, and one that I know I’ll turn back to and read again, and – like all of Banks’s work – probably find a whole other level to enjoy on a second reading. Banks was a literary genius. That this is his last novel is a tragedy. I will miss him.

The Quarry is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

This weekend, I recommend spending some time reading this article, which Tim Harford originally wrote for the Financial Times. Almost all of Tim’s FT articles are brilliant, but this one particularly stuck in my mind for the clarity of its argument on a complex subject.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

A payday loan can do real good, as a cash injection that helps avoid far more serious financial consequences, such as the loss of a job because the car broke down or penalty charges for failing to pay a bill on time. A randomised trial conducted in South Africa showed that this was not just a theoretical possibility. The experiment randomly approved or rejected applications for loans at an annual percentage rate of 200 per cent. Those who received one ended up better off than those rejected.

This is an aspect of this particular debate that’s all-too-often overlooked.

Published a fortnight ago, my last 2D post offered two articles about technology giant Apple. With an originality rarely surpassed by this blog, today’s 2D post is about… Apple.

Having come across two more brilliant articles about the company in the last couple of weeks, I didn’t want to deny you the pleasure of reading them simply because I’ve done something similar recently.

My first selection today is this recent Guardian article by their technology editor Charles Arthur. He makes the point that while the Apple Maps app is often a source of ridicule, within the US at least it appears to be winning the long-game, with Google Maps losing millions of users to Apple’s version. It’s one of those interesting articles that explains why the cultural narrative around a certain story borders on counter-factual.

My second selection is this article from The New York Times published last month, and written by Fred Vogelstein. It’s been pretty widely shared, but I only got round to reading it last week. It’s a remarkable account of the development of the iPhone, and – perhaps most interestingly – the development of the iPhone’s launch announcement, and how buggy the iPhone was at the point it was announced. It’s a remarkable tale.

Next time round, I promise you something that’s not Apple…!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

My recommended read for this weekend is an article from a couple of years ago, written by Robin McKie for The Guardian. It describes Michael Collins’s experience as the Command Module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission – and, in particular, his fears over whether his colleagues Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would make it back from the moon’s surface to the Command Module.

I thought it gave a fascinating insight into the emotional impact of a unique human experience.

Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking wasn’t a book I expected to like. It’s part self-help, part autobiography, part popular science, and part personality guide, and for a long while I resisted reading it on the basis that it would likely be unscientific nonsense that would make me angry. Yet the positive reviews kept coming, and I eventually felt that I had to read it to see what all the fuss was about.

I opened the book, still expecting to be angered, and started reading about how the world is made up of introverts and extroverts. I started to feel a little twitched: there are few things that irritate me more than self-help books that segment (often dichotomising) the population on their own spurious terms, and then offer “solutions” for existing as or dealing with a member of a particular segment. The commonest example is the entire industry that has grown up around the nonsense that is Myers-Briggs personality typing. Reading Quiet, though, I was quickly disarmed by Cain’s own discussion of how life isn’t that simple: all people have introvert and extrovert traits, and the population cannot be simply segmented. Behaviours, even, cannot be dichotomised. How refreshing!

And yet, Cain’s obvious enthusiasm for her subject sometimes spills over into long passages which appear to negate her statements about the lack of dichotomy. It also fairly quickly settles into a repeated cycle of discussing individuals who exhibit particular traits, assigning the important traits to introversion, and then discussing some of the (sometimes spurious) science about why introverts exhibit this trait. Occasionally – and especially towards the end – a good measure of “self-help” guidance is thrown in too.

Quiet is also very heavily focused on the USA, both in terms of the individuals discussed, and the cultural context in which the book is set. The central thesis of the book is that quiet people make large contributions to society, and are sometimes less recognised in popular culture because they fight less to be heard. I’m not sure that this is quite the surprising revelation that Cain sets it up to be.

I’m certain that many people find reading this book to be validating: as much is clear from the many millions of words written in praise of the book, with headlines like “Finally” and “Vindication at last”. I waver between thinking that this is a fantastic and helpful to many people, and thinking that there’s a danger of over-validation of preconceived ideas (“I’m brilliant, it’s just that the world doesn’t appreciate my brilliance because I’m an introvert”).

Now that I’ve spent four paragraphs picking fault, I feel that I should emphasise that this is a cut above most similar books, and I largely enjoyed the experience of reading it. There were parts where I metaphorically nodded my head in agreement, which is unusual for this type of book – I’m usually too incensed by the roughshod way in which authors ride over science and evidence. Cain is much more light-footed, and makes arguments that were, at the very least, superficially persuasive enough to sweep me along as a reader, even if they didn’t convince me that the society and the world needed to change.

Quiet is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

You could only walk two months of the year, the rest of the time the weather is too terrible.

According to the Standard, this was the response of Laura Ritchie, a digital project manager, to TfL’s suggestion that she should consider walking instead of taking the tube.

Another commuter, Laura Belcher, added

Waiting for three tubes means I’m not in the cold and rain

There are many reasons why some might view getting the tube as easier than walkng, but these two exemplify an odd delusion which many Londoners appear to share: that the weather in London is terrible.

I spend a few days each week in London, and have done since February. I always take a 45 minute-ish walk into work from London Bridge to Westminster along the South Bank, except when I’m towing a suitcase. I have attempted to walk on 83 mornings this year so far, and have managed perfectly well (without needing even to take my umbrella out of my bag) 82 times. This morning marked the first occasion that rain convinced me to take the tube.

I have absolutely no earthly idea why people think it constantly rains in London. Either I’ve been preternaturally lucky and tried to walk in on the only 82 mornings when it hasn’t rained, or people have a distorted view of London’s weather. In fact, London has less rainfall each year than Rome, New York, Brisbane, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo.

Perhaps if people had a reality check on what the weather is actually like most of the time, then they’d feel happier with walking – which would probably benefit their health even more than it would reduce TfL’s congestion problem.

A fair amount of my professional time is being spent on antimicrobial resistance at the moment. It is a frightening but fascinating topic, which is getting increasing coverage in the mainstream press.

One particularly good article on the subject appeared in The Scotsman last month: Lori Anderson’s “Don’t let germs be your gift” summarises some of the interesting parts of the topic.

If that article whets your appetite, then you could do far worse than to read Prof Dame Sally Davies’s book on the subject, The Drugs Don’t Work: A Global Threat. I admit a degree of bias, having played a very small part in putting the book together, but I found it an absolutely riveting read.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced the iPad Air. You probably noticed some of the extensive media coverage which always follows Apple’s carefully choreographed product announcements these days.

One thread that’s often spun after the announcement of a new Apple product is “Apple isn’t what is used to be under Steve Jobs”. I could’ve chosen any number of articles following any of Apple’s recent product launches to illustrate this point, but Hartmut Esslinger’s piece for Time magazine is a particularly fine example:

The company already has fallen back toward a marketing-driven strategy, not an innovation-driven one. What we’ve seen from Apple since Steve Jobs passed away implies that Apple largely may be done innovating in any groundbreaking fashion. It’s all been refinement since then.

But are these claims true? Amusingly, Harry McCracken in a different edition of the very same magazine says not:

The golden age of Apple never existed. Steve Jobs didn’t change the world every two years like clockwork, and he was incrementalism’s grand master. For every great leap forward Apple ever made, it accomplished at least as much through small steps that made its products easier, faster, thinner, lighter, more polished and/or more useful. Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple for only a little over two years, so there’s nothing deeply troubling about the fact that he hasn’t boiled any oceans yet.

I personally find Harry’s argument the more convincing of the two, but perhaps you will disagree. If you get chance, it’s also worth watching Doug Aamoth’s video at the bottom of Harmut Esslinger’s article – it’s a rare example of a self-consciously amusing technology video that actually made me laugh.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

My recommended read this weekend comes from the website of the excellent Full Fact organisation. Full Fact usually publishes articles which check the veracity of claims made by politicians or companies, which always make for enlightening reading. But earlier this week, in this post, Owen Spottiswoode looked at the veracity of the claims made in a particularly unpleasant letter to a newspaper, which had been spread widely online.

It’s a brilliant example of the simple truth making prejudice look foolish. It’s like the research behind a Aaron-Sorkin-esque rant. I love it. Bravo.