A 3X dose of weekly newsletters? Lucky you.
(RA w/ Skimming)
Schmidt, Barbara, et al. "Caffeine therapy for apnea of prematurity." New England Journal of Medicine 354.20 (2006): 2112-2121.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16707748/
Imagine, if you will, an array of NICU baby pods. Each with its own little cafe inhabitant arguing over the true meaning of modern artistic movements. Writing their little manuscripts. Slowly stirring in creme as the coffee goes cold and the mind busies itself reading nonsensical screes of social demands on the corkboard.
That's not what it's like at all. But it's what I will continue to imagine Caffeine therapy for premature infants is like.
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(RE)
Matta, Joane, et al. "Association of Self-reported COVID-19 Infection and SARS-CoV-2 Serology Test Results With Persistent Physical Symptoms Among French Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic." JAMA internal medicine 182.1 (2022): 19-25.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832
I had a pediatric patient with long-covid who had a mother with long-covid and both of them had sky-high levels of anxiety. The care team I was working with wouldn't go so far as to say that all of their long-covid patients were functional or psychopathological, but they at one point directly mentioned it likely being similar to chronic Lyme and arising in the same patient populations.
This child had been completely isolated from the outside world and even this week was too petrified to take his mask off during a physical exam with a room full of entirely vaccinated and N95 masked adults for fear of contracting covid again. At this point, his condition is less the result of some post-viral syndrome and more a psychosocial delay caused by social isolation, physical inactivity, and instilled fear of the outside world from his mother. The most effective thing we could do for him would be a referral to physical therapy in addition to CBT with some type of exposure therapy included. But his family was not of the mind that his symptoms could be explained in any way that didn't directly stem from his latent viral syndrome and so they wouldn't listen to those recommendations.
When I first saw this paper, I prepared for an onslaught of discrediting statements or arguments as to why we should still greatly fear the knock-on effects of an acute covid illness, even an asymptomatic one. Instead, there was nothing. This paper only reached me due to another student and I discussing long covid and our thoughts that its constellation of symptoms was well fitting for those, “chronic mystery syndrome” patients. Sure, it got some traffic, but nowhere near as much as articles purveying fear of what long covid may do to you or someone you love.
I’m still unsure what to think of this syndrome. My brief time working with a team that focuses on long-term pediatric ICU recovery had me updating more toward the explanation provided in this study. Scott Alexander has a good post detailing this issue if you want more.
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Tremblay, S., Acker, L., Afraz, A., Albaugh, D. L., Amita, H., Andrei, A. R., ... & Platt, M. L. (2020). An open resource for non-human primate optogenetics. Neuron, 108(6), 1075-1090.
I appreciate the model of open science here, especially in a field developing so rapidly and with such diverse possible applications.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-0840-3
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(RA w/ skimming)
Hadjiabadi, D., Lovett-Barron, M., Raikov, I. G., Sparks, F. T., Liao, Z., Baraban, S. C., ... & Soltesz, I. (2021). Maximally selective single-cell target for circuit control in epilepsy models. Neuron, 109(16), 2556-2572.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627321004220
This is a great example of a model for using optogenetics to identify effective targets for therapies.
(RE)
It's the stupidity, stupid (Scott Sumner)
https://www.econlib.org/its-the-stupidity-stupid/
I think stupidity here is only a proxy for some other thing. Sure, you can list out a series of commonplace intuitions of the contemporary elite that are actually self-defeating or just flat-out wrong; but those people are not wrong because they are stupid. What I think Scott is gesturing at here is an emergent stupidity that is coursing over our society. I don't have a good explanation for this, but I have found Haidt's analysis fairly convincing. Less so his concerns surrounding social media's impacts on wellness and more so its impacts on our emergent hive-mind.
I've also found myself looking at the current world and wondering, "Is society collapsing in a self-involved black hole of stupidity?" and assumed that I must be overreacting to things. Some of the initiations have been silly things like watching Megan Thee Stallion's Coachella performance with almost zero effort at hiding her lip-syncing, terrible mid-set college hip-hop nightclub DJ during a costume change, and endless songs about pussy. Other triggers have been maneuvering my city and seeing the homelessness problem storm on unabated and terribly addressed by the city council. I've been trying to figure out why I feel like such an old cranky stooge. Troubles for another day.
(RE)
The Mystery of the Miracle Year - Dwarkesh Patel
https://dwarkeshpatel.com/annus-mirabilis/
Knowing about the miracle year in the lives of many scientists and other creative professionals created a time-bomb of anxiety within me. Sure, I don't have any plans to become the next Von Neumann or reveal any novel paradigms that will shift the nature of the world. But are the most productive and creative years of my life really around me in this current moment or lying near me in my unretrievable past? Even if I will not change the world, this is a difficult thought to carry around.
The final paragraph of this essay describes the goal of liberating smart mid-20-something people from otherwise time-demanding responsibilities of life to generate the maximum number of 'annus-mirabilis' possible. This is certainly not the structure of many PhD programs as Dwarkesh observes and it is certainly not the nature of current medical programs as I could attest. But how else am I, or any other young professional, then supposed to acquire the necessary training to explore and expand these cognitive landscapes? I cant' simply think of new psychiatric medications or therapies and then institute them without the resources and certifications provided by passing through these corridors of education. Nor do I think I would want to. Maybe this is just an argument for specialized training earlier in life and a more liberalized primary education; both of which I would fully support. But really what I would like is to get my current training completed and then have a wide-open explorative space to innovate.
Oddly, I do feel like undergraduate education is not far from what Dwarkesh is describing here. I'd say that my most externally productive years were when I was an active participant in several internationally focused and locally active service groups and social organizations. I was able to fill my time pursuing my personal interests, join research labs, open new clubs, and host meetings for young and generally free minds on whatever topics I felt compelled to. So perhaps the question should really be why more undergraduate students are not manifesting 'annus mirabilis' for themselves within these environments? Maybe it's more of a cultural function that students are not leveraging these opportunities to their fullest extents. That their role at the university is that of a consumer rather than a co-creative partner. This seems like an easier parameter to modify than fully reshaping how we currently envisage young adulthood.
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(RE)
I'm fully on track with Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans Argument, but this figure mapping out various 4,000km circles and attempting to maximize the population living within each one caught me quite off guard. With a central point of Mexico City, the 4,000km circle that contains basically the entire populated region of North and Central America only adds up to 0.73 billion humans. I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's Gun's Germ's & Steel and find its arguments relating the population density of a region as centrally important to its global competitiveness well-fitting with similar arguments from Edward Glaeser & Paul Romer's work on endogenous growth theory being exponentially driven by population density. Sure, 1 Billion Americans. But first, let's get ourselves comfortably above 1 billion North Americans.