1. Exercise Plasma Boosts Memory and Dampens Brain Inflammation via Clusterin by De Miguel et al. (2021). Researchers took blood plasma from mice that were exercising and placed it in mice that were not exercising, which lead to positive improvements in the brains of the passive mice. Analysis showed an increase in the protein clusterin, which is also more available in people who exercise. This study adds to the increasing pile of evidence how beneficial exercise is to brain health.
  2. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. During summer vacation my sister had her nose buried deep in this book. Now after reading, I can fully understand — it’s been a long time since I read a story so eerie, mysterious, and entrancing. In the words of one goodreads reviewer: “The best books are those that keep their secrets to themselves. Those, that don’t tell you everything, that make you desperate for information that you will not receive.”
  3. Can We Have a Meaningful Life in a Virtual World? Interview with David Chalmers by David Marchese for The New York Times. When first delving into the topic of consciousness, I quickly came across Chalmers and his discussions of qualia and the origins of consciousness. So it’s nice to find a familiar face in the newly surging debates about meaning in a virtual world.
  4. Three Steps to the Future by Benedict Evans. Unsurprisingly, Evans’ annual presentation covers the classic hype topics of the year:  Crypto, web3, and the metaverse. But much unlike other tech analysts, he also takes time to investigate older ideas that needed their time to develop and are just now starting to make an impact.
  5. How Berlin’s Club Scene is Weathering the Pandemic by Arikia Millikan for National Geographic. One of the few positives of the past years is the recognition of the Berlin club scene as a cultural institution, with corresponding protections. The pandemic has been a test in resilience for the ecosystem, and as we move into another “Tanzverbot” (dancing prohibition), this read is a great appreciation of all the the innovation and adaption the clubs pulled off.
  6. The Meme Stock by Matt Levine for Bloomberg Business Week. Levine’s MoneyStuff newsletter is my favourite late night read about the financial world. This article is a a great take on the memefication of stock and the clumsy advance of NFTs as tokens for social belonging. “You bought GameStop as a token of membership in an online community that was intense and messianic and fun and also getting pretty rich.”
  7. Patterns of Pre-Treatment Reward Task Brain Activation Predict Individual Antidepressant Response: Key Results from the EMBARC Randomized Clinical Trial by Nguyen BS et al. (2021). A deep learning model was used to predict how people with depression would respond to one of two different antidepressant drugs, depending on the various patterns of depressed brain activity in brain scans. Depression is estimated to affect more than 300 million people worldwide and at present, effective treatment can still imply many rounds of trial error. The reduction of human suffering that we can still achieve makes this a vitally important field of exploration.
  8. Icebreakers With…Bloomberg Columnist Matt Levine at MorningBrew for Bloomberg. Matt Levine’s MoneyStuff is a constant among my reads, so it’s probably adequate that he shows up twice this month. Here with an interview about his work style, thoughts about crypto, and why he would pick Tesla if there was only one company he could write about.
  9. How TikTok Reads Your Mind by Ben Smith for The New York Times. One final TikTok story and then I (won’t) promise I’ll shut up. Throughout 2021 the app has been my primary source to learn about the latest scientific findings, random animal facts, and weightlifting tips. A newly leaked document shows that TikTok is currently optimising for DAU (daily active users) and time spent in app — as if nothing has been learned from lessons past.
  10. Top AI Stories of 2021: Transformers Take Over, Models Balloon, Multimodal AI Takes Off, Governments Crack Down by Deeplearning.ai. Andrew Ng’s december newsletter sums up the big machine learning news of 2021 and where we are headed as we start the new year.