The Apple Macintosh recently celebrated its 20th birthday. In one of the better articles marking the occasion, Time‘s fantastic tech writer Harry McCracken listed 20 ways in which Apple’s Mac changed the computer industry and the world – and makes a pretty convincing case for each of his points. It has a headline that makes it sound like a clickbait listicle, but it’s actually a great reflective retrospective.

My recommended read for this weekend is this Wired article by Kyle Vanhemert on what Netflix can learn from the user interface of linear TV. It makes some great points, and it’s great to read someone celebrating older user interfaces instead of another article praising social integration and flat design!

The picture at the top of this post was taken from here, and is used under its Creative Commons licence.

Over the 3,783 days I’ve known Wendy, we’ve rarely argued. Yet, I vividly remember that the merging of our respective book collections caused some disagreement.

Fiction and general reference book were fine – we had few duplicates, and only really disagreed on whether it was necessary to have several different dictionaries. The Oxford, Penguin and Collins watching me write this remind me that I acquiesced.

When it came to medical books, however, our approaches differed more wildly. I was all for ridding ourselves of duplicates; Wendy was not. Indeed, Wendy was not only reluctant to rid herself of duplicates in our combined collection, but even had duplicates within her own collection: she felt rather strongly that old editions of books should be retained alongside their newer counterparts.

In the end, as with most things in life, we compromised… though made the mistake of compromising on a set that filled our shelves, which means we have to regularly re-compromise as we acquire new volumes.

I was, therefore, amused to read Anne Fadiman’s article on the Book Keeping blog, in which she describes the intimate yet painful process of marrying her own (non-medical) library with that of her husband. This passage in particular made me laugh out loud:

A particularly bad moment occurred while he was in the process of transferring my Shakespeare collection from one bookcase to another and I called out, “Be sure to keep the plays in chronological order!”

“You mean we’re going to be chronological within each author?” he gasped. “But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!”

“Well,” I blustered, “we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I’d like to see that reflected in our shelves.”

George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

It is an absolutely brilliant read, and well worth a few minutes of your time this weekend.

The picture at the top of this post was posted on Flickr by Alexandre Duret-Lutz, and was used under its Creative Commons licence.

So convinced was he of customers’ vitriol for subscription services, the late Steve Jobs famously told Rolling Stone “I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful”. Yet, a decade later, there has been an explosion in the popularity of subscription services. My pick for this weekend’s read is this article by Manu Rekhi on PandoDaily, where he discusses the ceaseless rise of the subscription service, and explains how $1.99/month can net a company millions.

Adrian Marston is a former President of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain who has suffered from cancer twice – though the two experiences were really very different.

The gulf between the disease (and hence the experience of suffering from) these two very different maladies, both given the title “cancer”, has lead him to write an insightful article in the New Statesman in which he argues that the term “cancer” should no longer be used. He makes a strong argument, and I’d very much like it to catch on. Unfortunately, I fear the reality of the billion pound “cancer industry” will count for more than the potential to avoid distress in patients.

I hope I’m wrong.

2014 is the year that Jeff Randall has chosen to make his exit from financial journalism, after three remarkable decades. I have enjoyed his Telegraph column, work for the Financial Times, and, latterly, his Sky News programme for a number of years now, and will miss his insights.

Randall has written a farewell column in the Telegraph, in which he reflects on the changes affecting business and journalism over thirty years. It was particularly fascinating for me, as someone who isn’t even thirty years old.

On my first day in 1986, if you had told me that Britain’s pioneering successes in the coming quarter of a century would include a mobile telephone company (Vodafone) and a satellite television broadcaster (BSkyB), I would not have understood the proposition.

It’s well worth reading this weekend.

Monocle‘s Monocolumn is always worth a read – it’s a daily delve into a world of ludicrous wealth that really does vary from the sublime to the utterly ludicrous. My recommended read this week is a particularly fine example of the former: Andrew Tuck’s argument against the trend for locally-sourced food.

The rage underpinning Tuck’s argument is evident in his opening line, and never really lessens:

What’s wrong with a banana? Well judging by the menus of nearly every new fancy-pants restaurant these days, quite a lot.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.

The photo at the top was posted on Flickr by Glory Foods, and is used here under it’s Creative Commons sharealike licence. The irony that the ‘turnip greens’ in the picture are ‘produce of USA’ isn’t lost on me.

Regular readers will know that I love a contrarian column, and Laurie Penny’s piece for the New Statesman is a corker of an example. In it, she argues that marriage is an archaic minority interest, and asks

Why should I subsidise other people’s weird lifestyle choices?

I suspect that Penny’s intention may have been to generate heat at least as much as light, but it’s an interesting (and somewhat convincing) argument nevertheless. It’s well worth reading this weekend.

Photo posted on Flickr by Lee J Haywood and used here under Creative Commons sharealike licence.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Sir Simon Wessely – a renowned British psychiatrist. He’s exactly as lovely as he seems in his writing!

On the same day that I met Sir Simon, I had been discussing the challenges of publishing ‘lost’ clinical trials with someone else. I wish I’d discussed it with him, because then I could claim some sort of tangential influence on his decision to write my recommended read for this weekend: a blog post in which he describes a ‘lost’ trial involving him.

It is easy to claim that non-publication of trials may be result of deliberate decisions, such as a wish not to publicise negative results, and we know this does indeed happen. But probably more common is a more understandable and human sequence of events. A first attempt at publication fails. Teams break up. Some leave academic life and start families. Others move into busy clinical posts, or take on new demanding projects. And time marches on.

As you see, it adds a neat anecdotal riposte to the growing clamour of voices which seem to claim – intentionally or otherwise – that non-publication of trials is always a function of ‘evil’ people working for ‘big pharma’. It’s well worth a read.

So much my 2013 has been taken up by antibiotic resistance that it seems only appropriate for the final Weekend Read of the year to be on that topic. And it’s a particularly good example, too!

The wonderful Maryn McKenna has written this brilliant long-form article on Medium which personalises the concept at the same time as giving plenty of scientific background. It’s well worth a read this weekend!