This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:
- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors
This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.
this is out of control.
The Knicks offense is statistically the greatest offense of all time in the last 10 games.
2nd highest FG% in a 10 game span in NBA History (87 Lakers). And single greatest effective FG % in a 10 game span in NBA History
@agar_john - what a lovely post! I did not realize that you lived in GR. My son is moving there this summer for his first job after graduation - he is in a wheelchair and his move is both exciting & a little scary. Learning you are in GR is a wonderful surprise - made my day!
I love my Mom and Grand Rapids too!
I am so grateful for Mom especially because I am the oldest sibling in my family and Mom didn’t have a lot of practice preparing to bring someone into this world with so many challenges to overcome. It’s kinda like being thrown into a fire and having to learn how to put it out, and then a new one comes along and you have to do it all over again. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to see mom’s courage, grace, love, kindness and most importantly her faith on display with each new day.
When it would be very easy for everyone to see the challenges that her son faces, she leads the charge to help me and everyone around me to see the person that she helps me every single day to become.
Always when I want to talk about my Mom, I find it one of the most challenging things because there are simply not the right words to describe how much I love her. As her son though, it’s my responsibility to try. I always pray to have an ounce of her strength because if all I had was that, then I would be alright. Shout out to all the Mom’s in the world and those who show a mother’s love, you are all amazing and deserve to be spoiled properly. Happy Mother’s Day, @AgarBecki
The sharpest thing in the Roberts memos isn't the outcome. It's the distance between the public performance and the private reasoning.
Roberts spent years cultivating a reputation as a careful institutionalist. The memos show that in February 2016 he wrote, in his own hand, that the Obama climate plan was "highly unlikely to survive" before lower courts had touched it. Before full briefing. Before oral argument.
He wasn't assessing the pitch. He had already decided where it was going to land and was building the procedural route to get it there.
Kagan called the move "unprecedented." Breyer noted compliance wasn't required for years and asked why speed was necessary. Roberts responded the next day, the memos show, "irritated and blunt." The answer was cost to industry. Not constitutional law. Not procedural principle. Cost.
Kennedy wrote three sentences. We'll get there anyway. Five votes.
The shadow docket since that night has become the court's primary tool for consequential decisions issued without explanation. That's not drift. It's a feature that was built in that February exchange by a chief justice whose public face and private memos read like two separate documents.
In 1953, George and Barbara Bush lost their daughter Robin to leukemia. She was three years old. Barbara's hair turned white that year — she was 28. By anyone's expectation, mine included, their grief should have defined the rest of their lives.
Instead they made a decision: they would wake up every morning and be happy. It's an almost astounding level of mental discipline. The ability not to ignore your horrible loss but to say life is not over. I can choose how I feel.
It's not a coincidence that he became president and she raised one. More importantly, they stayed married 73 years. "You have two choices," she said decades later. "You can be happy or you can be unhappy. Just choose to be happy." This is what's key: that mindset wasn't influencing the outcome. The mindset was the outcome.
We tend to think of resilience as a trait people have, but it looks more like a series of small decisions, made unglamorously, that become habitual. Eventually, you'll even forget you're making them. The Bushes figured this out 70 years before the placebo sleep researchers did. Worth taking seriously.
In thinking about the right historical analogy for AI, I've become very interested in the early history of electricity in the early 1900s.
With early 20th century electricity, you had:
- famously feuding private inventors creating/scaling the early technology (Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse)
- a set of de facto monopolies who insisted that their technology was different in kind from other products and required special levels of corporate concentration
- a period of sluggish growth, followed by a surge in commercial demand that prevented the boom from falling into the classic definition of an infrastructure "bubble"
- a financial mania around electricity—e.g., the holding companies of the early 1900s, many of which did blow up after the 1929 crash
- an inevitable showdown with the federal government about regulation in the 1930s, which ultimately resulted in a lot of regulated monopolies
If you think that the AI buildout might result in some companies crashing and burning, without the entire thing becoming a classic Carlota Perez-style capital bubble, and furthermore believe that we are on an inevitable path toward a new regulatory regime that treats the frontier labs as regulated monopolies, I think you should definitely get curious about the 100-year-old history of electricity.
https://t.co/l6aVTw7nKq
I figured out why the Artemis stream felt so different
It's because for the first time in decades, we collectively witnessed something that was untouched by politics, celebrities and influencers
Can we all agree that in a world of influencers, Z-listers, TikToks, badly acted ads, brand collabs, people filming themselves crying…the Artemis livestream of 4 middle-aged scientists doing their jobs is genuinely the best most authentic content of the century? Thanks @NASA🌚
These are the Twitter/X accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026. I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.