Week 1 · 2024-12-30 → 2025-01-05 · 3 newsletters

A Quiet Turn of the Year

health-and-policy-resolutions · ai-tooling-from-the-margins · social-and-marketing-housekeeping

The week that straddled New Year's was the quietest stretch the inbox saw all winter. Three emails across seven days, two of them filed on January 2, none of them trying to break news. Two days of 2024 leaning into two days of holiday calm, with the first real Friday of 2025 closing the week out. There is no through-line to pretend at here. What landed instead were three writers using the holiday lull to clear their throats for the year: a health-policy manifesto, a developer's monthly AI roundup, and a social-marketing housekeeping list. Short week, honest read.

Health and Policy: A Resolution-Year Manifesto

The most opinionated piece of the week was Justin Mares at The Next issue #60, "A new approach to toxin regulation." Mares used the first business day of the year to plant a flag: he had "never been so bullish that we are going to make America healthy again," with the incoming RFK Jr.-led HHS team and the FDA, NIH, and CMS nominees the first cohort in his lifetime "even mentioning the chronic disease crisis." His hope for 2025 was a federal-and-state coalition pushing the MAHA agenda forward, anchored by Sarah Huckabee Sanders's December post on the topic as evidence that the governors were starting to move with the federal team.

The framing was unapologetically political and unapologetically optimistic, which is the rare register for a January 2 post. Most year-opening newsletters were still in best-of mode or out on vacation. Mares used the empty news cycle to argue that the genie was out of the bottle, that "Americans are aware of the chronic disease crisis and activated to do something about it," and that the work of 2025 would be confirmations plus grassroots pressure. The piece is operator writing, not analyst writing: he was telling his readers what he was personally going to spend the year fighting for through Truemed and the broader CPG coalition.

The take: this is the kind of post worth bookmarking precisely because it sets a calendar. By year's end, the test is not whether the rhetoric held, it is whether confirmations happened, whether state legislatures actually moved, and whether the chronic disease numbers moved in any measurable way. Mares is putting himself on the line in writing. The rest of the year's coverage on MAHA will be measured against this post whether the other newsletters know it or not.

AI Tooling: A Developer's Roundup from the Quiet Weeks

Sahar Mor at AI Tidbits used the first week of the year to publish his December LinkedIn highlights, a monthly format that doubles as a survey of what builders actually shipped over the holidays. The five posts he flagged are useful as a snapshot of where open-source AI tooling sat at the end of 2024.

The standout was MindSearch, an open-source search framework that pairs a WebPlanner agent (decomposes complex queries into sub-tasks and builds a dynamic graph) with a WebSearcher agent (does the fine-grained retrieval and summarization). Sahar's framing was that it rivals Perplexity Pro and ChatGPT web search on the queries that overload context windows, because it routes around the three classic failure modes: poor query decomposition, noisy results, and iterative-search context overflow. For a December project, it punches above its weight.

The companion shipments were his own Gemini Multimodal Playground, a holiday coding project for voice-and-video agents built on Gemini 2.0; Apollo, a video-understanding LMM release; an Anthropic cookbook recipe for PDF upload summarization; and LLaMA-Factory, the fine-tuning framework that quietly became one of the most-used open-source training stacks of 2024.

The take: the December release calendar is the developer equivalent of the year-end best-of, and the picks confirm a pattern. The action at the end of 2024 was not at the frontier-model layer, it was at the orchestration and multimodal-tooling layer. MindSearch and Gemini 2.0 multimodal are the two to actually try. Both will look obvious in retrospect six months from now.

Social and Marketing: Housekeeping for a New Year

The week closed with grace at The Friday Brief running her standing Friday format: five social moves to know, the SEO update, and a long campaign-spotting list. The social headlines were the regulatory-and-platform churn that had been building through Q4: X pushing forward with its Money launch despite the 50-state approval gap, Bluesky crossing 25 million users and shipping a trending Topics feature, Trump filing to save TikTok, X testing a video tab, and Meta aligning with the incoming Trump administration through new appointments. Each is a small story on its own, but together they were the first signal that 2025 was going to be a year of platform companies actively repositioning around the political transition.

The SEO note was the one to bookmark: Google Ads telegraphing a major AI push for 2025 plus the December Google updates roundup. Search marketers reading Friday Brief in January were getting the early warning that the Gemini-everywhere strategy was about to land in the ads stack too.

The cool-campaigns list ran long and was mostly the seasonal moves you would expect: RXBAR launching a "New Year New You" BS Ad Blocker, Prudential and McCann's $150 Generation Beta study tied to the firm's 150th anniversary, the Derrick Rose pop-up flower shop in Chicago, Domino's upping TV spend for the Emergency Pizza campaign, and Kia taking over the Times Square ball drop with David & Goliath. The pattern across the list was that the strongest January campaigns leaned hard into resolution culture rather than running away from it. RXBAR and Dove (the body-confidence resolution series, no link) were the two that punched through.

The take: the Friday Brief format is at its best in weeks like this one, when the rest of the marketing press is still on vacation and the platform companies are using the quiet to make moves. The five social headlines were the most useful thing in the week's inbox, because they previewed a year of platform repositioning that the larger trade press did not pick up on until late January.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The week was honestly sparse and the writers who shipped knew it. Three emails in seven days, two of them on a single Thursday, the third on a Friday. The right move when reading a week like this is not to pretend the signal is dense. It is to notice which writers used the empty calendar to stake out positions and which used it to do their normal housekeeping. Mares staked out a position. Sahar did the developer's monthly survey. Grace did Friday Brief on a Friday. All three formats earned their slot.

The through-line, if there is one, is that the first writers back from holiday in January are the ones with the strongest internal calendars. Mares had a manifesto to publish on day one of the working year. Sahar had a monthly cadence to honor. Grace had a Friday to fill. The newsletters that went silent through New Year's were not making a mistake, but the three that did publish were the three you would want in your subscription list precisely because they showed up.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Justin Mares's "A new approach to toxin regulation" for the cleanest early-2025 health-policy frame, Sahar Mor's LinkedIn Highlights for December 2024 for the operator-level survey of what shipped at the end of last year, and grace's Friday Brief for the platform-and-campaign housekeeping list that previewed the year's first real story. Three pieces, three formats, three honest uses of a quiet week.