Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point. As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown'fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom'but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn't know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer's impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But 'fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,' Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what's happening in the world, life is always unpredictable'and good literature understands this....
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating ' possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up. Even when the bogus papers are spotted ' usually by amateur sleuths on their own time ' academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews other research and discusses findings....
Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States' Or bosom peril' Kidney disappointment' Fake neural organizations' Lactose bigotry' These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of 'tortured phrases' that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals. They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else's text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. We are a pair of computer scientists at Universite de Toulouse and Universite Grenoble Alpes, both in France, who specialize in detecting bogus publications. One of us, Guillaume Cabanac, has built an automated tool that combs through 130 million scientific publications every week and flags those containing tortured phrases. Several publishers use our paper screener, which has been instrumental in more than 1,000 retractions. Some have integrated the technology into the editorial workflow to spot suspect papers upfront. Analytics companies have used the screener for things like picking out suspect authors from lists of highly cited researchers. It was named one of 10 key developments in science by the journal Nature in 2021....
His comments ring all the more true in 2025, as residents of the Los Angeles area grapple with the horror and despair of the deadly wildfires that have razed thousands of homes and businesses and have left at least 25 people dead. From coast to coast, from hemisphere to hemisphere, once-in-a-lifetime environmental catastrophes are now regular occurrences. Large-scale burning occurs out of season, and fires burn hotter and spread farther than ever before. Latour has called it 'living in the end times'; he points to a need to find different ways to live, as extreme events that were once just the subject of dystopian films simply become a part of everyday life. Works about fire often emphasize recovery and resolution, while also offering a space to work through complex emotions. If these are, as Latour fears, 'end times,' literature can help readers learn how to survive, cope and keep hope alive. Stewart's biographer, Donald M. Scott, described 'Fire' as 'the first novel about fire ecology,' and the environmental impact of fires is certainly an important part of the work. But 'Fire' is also a novel that is deeply interested in how people come together in the face of disaster....
