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Monthly Favourites #1 - Ali Abdaal

2018-02-14 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 12:26 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books and reading (also: Medicine and his doctor years, Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Review and recommendation

In his first Monthly Favourites video, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, recommends four discoveries of January 2018: the Journal of Medical Ethics blog, Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd's podcast Reasons to be Cheerful, Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series and hand lettering.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A new monthly series on his favourite things, and the four picks for January 2018

  • ★★ Ali starts a monthly series in which he shares the favourite things he discovered that month: books, blog posts, articles, podcasts and products. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali tries a channel intro for the first time because lots of professional YouTubers use one. — 00:00:29

00:01:08 — Favourite blog: the Journal of Medical Ethics blog and its posts on Toby Young, eugenics and IQ

  • ★★★ Ali's new favourite blog is the blog of the Journal of Medical Ethics, a journal published as part of the BMJ, with very accessible articles on current medical-ethics topics. — 00:01:08 · Medical ethics
  • ★★ Ali found the Journal of Medical Ethics blog while preparing his video on the Charlie Gard case, and has spent the last few weeks reading through its backlog. — 00:01:08 · Charlie Gard case, Medical ethics
  • ★★ Ali finds the arguments on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog fair and well written, and loves the style of argument of Iain Brassington. — 00:01:38 · Medical ethics
  • ★★ Ali says many studies show that IQ correlates with socioeconomic status, and a couple show that a child with a high IQ born into a lower class has a better chance of moving up. — 00:02:07
  • ★★ Ali summarises Toby Young's article The Fall of the Meritocracy: letting poorer people select embryos with a higher propensity for IQ could improve social mobility. — 00:03:01
  • ★★ Two Journal of Medical Ethics blog posts answer Toby Young's article: the link between IQ and social class probably has confounders, such as parasitic diseases of poorer classes that stunt cognitive development. — 00:03:30 · Medical ethics

00:03:59 — Feedly for following blogs

  • ★★ Ali suggests reading Toby Young's original article as well as the two follow-up posts on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog, which he will now follow every week. — 00:03:59 · Medical ethics
  • ★★★ Ali recommends Feedly, an RSS feed aggregator, for reading all the blogs you follow: instead of visiting each blog, you browse the new articles each day on your phone or iPad. — 00:03:59 · iPad Pro
  • ★★★ Ali recommends the podcast Reasons to be Cheerful, hosted by Ed Miliband, former head of the Labour Party, and radio presenter Geoff Lloyd, whose banter makes it interesting listening. — 00:04:29
  • ★★ Ali was introduced to Reasons to be Cheerful when his friend Sahil, a medic at Oxford, invited him to a live recording of the podcast. — 00:04:29 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ The live Reasons to be Cheerful episode Ali attended was on mental health, with the comedian Ruby Wax, who has written a book about mindfulness. — 00:04:29 · Mental health

00:04:41 — Favourite podcast: Reasons to be Cheerful, and the Overcast app

  • ★ A few years earlier, through the Cambridge Medical Society, Ali and the society's president had dinner with Simon Wessely at a steakhouse in Cambridge. — 00:05:12 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Each week Reasons to be Cheerful covers a current-affairs issue; the episode Ali heard last week (week of 5 February 2018) was on prison reform. — 00:05:12
  • ★★ Ali does not keep up with day-to-day news but likes a balanced distillation of issues such as the health service and prisons, so he will listen to Reasons to be Cheerful every week. — 00:06:11
  • ★★ For listening to podcasts Ali prefers Overcast, an iOS app with a nice user interface. — 00:06:11

00:06:40 — Favourite book series: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

  • ★★★ Ali recommends Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, which he discovered at the end of 2017 and devoured; a friend recommended it to about ten of his friends, who all loved it. — 00:06:40
  • ★★ In The Final Empire, the first Mistborn book, the peasant girl Vin learns she is Mistborn and joins Kelsier, a peasant who leads a crew of thieves stealing from the nobility, in a plot to overthrow the Final Empire and its Lord Ruler. — 00:07:11
  • ★★ In the magic system of the Mistborn series, Mistborn can burn all eight metals, each granting a different power. — 00:07:11
  • ★★★ Ali thought the Mistborn trilogy might replace Harry Potter as the best series he has read; Harry Potter stays on top for its childhood place in his heart, with Mistborn a very close second. — 00:08:10 · Harry Potter
  • ★★★ Ali says that even if you read only 20 minutes a day before bed, you will love the Mistborn trilogy. — 00:08:10
  • ★★ Ali finds the later Mistborn books, with guns instead of swords, quite good though not as good as the original trilogy. — 00:08:52
  • ★★ Ali says another Mistborn instalment comes next year (2019) and apparently ties a lot of things together. (hedged) — 00:08:52
  • ★★ Ali plans to read all of Brandon Sanderson's other books, because he has heard that their universes often touch one another. — 00:08:52
  • ★★ A few weeks earlier Ali discovered hand lettering on Instagram and YouTube, a whole subculture of people doing it really well. — 00:09:21

00:09:27 — Interesting discovery: hand lettering

  • ★★★ From the next week Ali will start a beginner's course in hand lettering for fun, on the iPad and on paper, perhaps for birthday and thank-you cards and Instagram. — 00:09:58 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali thinks hand lettering might help his web design skills, since he had long wanted to create custom typography for titles. (hedged) — 00:09:58
  • ★★ Ali suggests that viewers new to hand lettering explore it by browsing Instagram pages. — 00:10:28

00:10:45 — Recap, why he makes a monthly favourites video, and a request for feedback

  • ★★ Ali makes the monthly favourites video because he consumes a lot of content without thinking about it; asking whether something makes the month's cut will make him more reflective about what he reads and hears. — 00:11:19
  • ★ Ali asks viewers whether he should continue the monthly favourites series and whether it should be shorter or longer, wanting to know what resonates with them. — 00:11:48

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Mentioned

Brandon Sanderson · Cambridge · Charlie Gard case · Harry Potter · iPad Pro · Medical ethics · Mental health · University of Oxford

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