Let us catch with some updates. 

• Susskind has a good paper on de-Sitter space here. He has been pretty active in de-Sitter lately. One should first start with his and colleagues' paper on the causal patch and then follow up on his recent writings. (I recently saw a video of Susskind highly appraising Juan Maldacena here.)
• I wrote a fine and short piece of introduction (and basically mixed up) article on field theory and beyond, which can be found here and here.
• Subir Sachdev, TIFR, and IAS have organized a course on Quantum phases of matter. The lectures can be viewed at http://qpt.physics.harvard.edu/qpm/.
• Breakthrough Prizes have been awarded https://breakthroughprize.org/News/65.