16
Aug
2026
The Narrative Machine: What AI Really Adds to Personal Health Data
For years, the Quantified Self movement had a stubborn problem: our devices became increasingly good at generating data but remained remarkably poor at telling us what any of it meant. Generative AI now dangles a tantalizing possibility: that it can tease genuinely useful personal insights from all those measurements and hand them back to us in a form we can... Read More
15
Aug
2026
The Other Side of Bayes: Rethinking False Positives in Health Screening
Imagine screening 10,000 apparently healthy people for a disease that affects one person in a thousand. Let’s further assume the test is fairly good: 99% sensitive and 99% specific. (In case it’s been a while, this means the test detects 99% of true cases and correctly exonerates 99% of people without disease.) Ten of those 10,000 people will actually have... Read More
14
Aug
2026
AI in Drug R&D: At Last, the End of the Beginning
With the emergence of AI as an increasingly dominant force in industry (and society), much of the early discussion around AI in biopharma has tended to treat it largely as an abstraction. Advocates and investors insist AI is a transformative superhuman technology poised to domesticate R&D, while cynics, including many grizzled drug hunters, tend to assume it’s just the latest... Read More
11
Jul
2026
Useful Fictions or Distorting Frames? How Models Shape Drug R&D
We rely on models — deliberate simplifications — to navigate, make sense of, and engage productively with an ever-more complicated world. Patients understand their illnesses through what Dr. Arthur Kleinman called “explanatory models.” Physicians use models such as the pathophysiologic model or the biopsychosocial model to integrate their patients’ symptoms and fashion treatments. Biopharma R&D would be impossible without models... Read More
6
Jun
2026
Wellness Tech: Don’t Use as Directed
The Great Technology Plan for Wellness, to simplify only slightly, envisions a path to health that runs through data: collect more (through wearables and blood tests), analyze with AI, and deliver personalized coaching that improves as the data grow and the models sharpen. It sounds sensible, and one day it may even deliver — I’m long-term optimistic. But today it... Read More
24
May
2026
Summer Content Recommendations
Back by popular demand – my highly curated list of summer content recommendations for TR readers. Books Inside the Box – David Epstein By now, you’ve read, or should have read Range, David Epstein’s previous book and his paean to generalists (my reflections here). Now, he introduces us to an intriguing paradox – the unexpected power of constraints to inspire... Read More
16
May
2026
Can AI-Powered Consumer Health Break Medicine’s Destructive Spiral?
This week’s Duke-Margolis Health Policy Conference (video here) left me feeling there’s a remarkable opportunity to leverage technology to dramatically improve healthcare — and there’s almost no chance of it happening within the current healthcare system. A number of speakers (including UCSF’s Bob Wachter, my WSJ review of his recent book here) were genuinely enthusiastic about the transformative possibility of... Read More
9
May
2026
AI in Practice
AI is here – everywhere it seems. How are we doing on translating this extraordinary promise into palpable value? Organizations As utopian AI “Accelerationists” have battled catastrophizing “Doomers” over competing visions of which eschaton is likely to be immanentized, a less visible but perhaps more consequential constituency has quietly focused on applying the still-evolving technology to the intractable problems of... Read More
4
Apr
2026
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Lifestyle
It wasn’t quite like the dream where you’re standing in front of an audience and suddenly realize you’re not wearing pants, but at a recent Harvard Business School function, I felt a flush of affinity. The occasion was an annual event for students in the Harvard life sciences MS/MBA program, designed to recognize the hard work of students and faculty,... Read More
27
Feb
2026
Agency: The Motivational Currency of Health
Last night I offered some remarks at February’s Boston Health Innovation Night, a monthly gathering of innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors in Boston’s extraordinary biomedical ecosystem, organized by digital health advisor and investor Steven Wardell. Several people asked whether I’d written the ideas up, which I took as encouragement to share them here (along with a few photos from the event).... Read More
8
Feb
2026
Can We Ride the GenAI Wave Without Getting Subsumed by It?
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” said Lenin, probably never. It’s also a remarkably apt characterization of the last year in generative AI (genAI) — the last week in particular — which has seen the AI landscape shift so dramatically that even skeptics are now updating their priors in a more bullish direction.... Read More
10
Dec
2025
To Improve Health, Design for Agency
Agency — the conviction I can shape my future — is a vital driver of human health and human potential. It is also the factor overlooked by most digital health platforms. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who has spent decades studying this, says agency boils down to the belief “I can make a positive difference in the world.” People... Read More
28
Nov
2025
A New Book on GLP-1’s Contested Scientific Roots and Complex Cultural Impact — Plus Further Reading
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review Off the Scales, a fascinating new book by Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan about the discovery and development of GLP-1 agonists and their impact on medicine, culture, and society. The review, aimed at a generalist audience, focuses mostly on the societal and cultural implications, but TR readers may be especially interested in the... Read More
24
Nov
2025
Recommended Podcasts (and A Few Books), 2025 Year-End Edition
It’s time for my annual feature: recommended podcasts (and a few books) for TR readers to consider. As usual, these suggestions generally steer clear of politics; they also aren’t the only podcasts I listen to, but they’re the ones I’m least likely to skip. Biotech and Health Care Of course, everyone in biotech should listen to Luke’s interview series, The... Read More
22
Nov
2025
Why Patients – And Many Innovative Doctors – Are Pursuing Health Outside the System
Our current system of delivering care is awful from the perspective of seemingly every stakeholder. It frustrates, enrages, saddens, and depletes patients and physicians alike. No one designed it this way. It evolved through a series of choices and contingencies that perhaps made sense at the time but now seem to have led us down an evolutionary dead end. While... Read More
30
Oct
2025
The Outsized Significance of A New Study of AI in Diabetes Prevention
A lifestyle intervention delivered by AI was found to be as effective as validated traditional interventions delivered by trained experts in a carefully conducted implementation study conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers and just published in JAMA. These results have broad significance and speak to the promise of AI to deliver promising behavior-change interventions at unprecedented scale. Context: The DPP The... Read More
24
Oct
2025
The Biology of Belonging: Social Connection Meets Geroscience
Digital health, fitness, and longevity platforms have focused on the constant measurement and relentless optimization of biometric parameters, an often-valuable effort but one that has systematically left behind vital components of health and flourishing – such as social connection — that are more difficult to measure. The Health Value of Social Connection Robust longitudinal studies, including the Harvard Study of... Read More
6
Oct
2025
Silicon Valley: Yes, AI Does Enhances Productivity — In The Right Hands & Context
Outside the glare of hyperbolic headlines, organizations of all sizes – including most in healthcare – are urgently trying to figure out how AI will fit into their workflows and business plans. Perhaps the most interesting recent discussion I’ve heard on this subject involved a trio of Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) partners — Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, and Steven Sinofsky — who were... Read More
6
Oct
2025
“Food Intelligence”: Make Healthy the Default — In Public Spaces and Private Kitchens
While “nutrition science” often seems to cry out for air quotes around “science,” we are fortunate now to have a new book on the topic written by one of the most thoughtful and deliberate nutrition researchers of the modern age: Kevin Hall. Hall has consistently steered a course of thoughtful rigor, leading a succession of highly impactful studies at the... Read More
5
Oct
2025
Consumer Health’s Digital Convergence – And What’s Still Missing
Consumers are taking increased ownership of their health. As Laura Landro recently described in the Wall Street Journal, this trend is driven in part by necessity — specifically by “a shortage of doctors, long wait times for appointments and an increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes earlier in adulthood.” But our push to manage our own health is also motivated... Read More