When Sam Rodriques was a neurobiology graduate student, he was struck by a fundamental limitation of science. Even if researchers had already produced all the information needed to understand a human cell or a brain, 'I'm not sure we would know it', he says, 'because no human has the ability to understand or read all the literature and get a comprehensive view.' Five years later, Rodriques says he is closer to solving that problem using artificial intelligence (AI). In September, he and his team at the US start-up FutureHouse announced that an AI-based system they had built could, within minutes, produce syntheses of scientific knowledge that were more accurate than Wikipedia pages1. The team promptly generated Wikipedia-style entries on around 17,000 human genes, most of which previously lacked a detailed page. Rodriques is not the only one turning to AI to help synthesize science. For decades, scholars have been trying to accelerate the onerous task of compiling bodies of research into reviews. 'They're too long, they're incredibly intensive and they're often out of date by the time they're written,' says Iain Marshall, who studies research synthesis at King's College London. The explosion of interest in large language models (LLMs), the generative-AI programs that underlie tools such as ChatGPT, is prompting fresh excitement about automating the task....

It's often the case that when poets write novels, they deliver arrestingly vivid and nimble prose. Han Kang's The Vegetarian (2007) is a case in point, and it is no doubt the work that was most influential in the Swedish Academy's decision to award her the Nobel prize in literature 2024. The committee stated that Kang was awarded the prestigious prize because her 'poetic and experimental style' has made her 'an innovator in contemporary prose'. Han Kang is the first South Korean writer to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature, and in its history of 121 winners over 117 years, only the 18th woman to be awarded the prize. She was born in 1970 in Gwangju and has also been awarded the International Booker Prize (in 2016), as well as several other high profile national and international awards, including the Prix Medicis Etranger in 2023 for her novel Impossible Goodbyes. The Vegetarian is Han Kang's best-read work. Published in 2007, and translated into English for publication in the UK in 2015 and the US in 2016, its title was apt, as it coincided with a sudden upsurge in people turning to vegetarianism and veganism, particularly in the UK....

Surely it was only natural for books such as Casey McQuiston's 'Red, White & Royal Blue,' Lana Harper's 'Payback's a Witch' and Cat Sebastian's sparkling same-sex historical romance novels to eventually find their way onto bestseller lists. Our recent paper, based on interviews with romance editors and authors, shows that America's biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market, tweaking their approach only after witnessing the huge success of independently published LGBTQ+ e-books. Book publishing, like most of the entertainment industry, has traditionally operated under what Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse calls the blockbuster strategy: Publishers invest huge sums into acquiring and promoting surefire bestsellers, such as Prince Harry's 'Spare,' which earned a US$20 million advance. It's simply more efficient for publishers to pursue a 'one-to-many' business model ' that is, to sell one book to a mass audience ' than a 'many-to-many' business model, selling a wider variety of books to many more small markets....

While there is a long history of doctor-poets ' one giant of mid-20th-century poetry, William Carlos Williams, was famously also a pediatrician ' few people seem to know this or understand the power of combining the humanities and medicine. As a published poet and scholar of the health humanities and ethics, I have a foot squarely planted in each field ' or perhaps more accurately, I stand in what I perceive as the overlapping field of healing and poetic practices. Literature has had a large role in helping me define the kind of physician I strive to be ' one who is not only empathetic and a good listener but also a fierce advocate for changing the sociopolitical forces that affect my patients' lives. I think literature can do this for other health care providers, too. Despite having physicians for parents ' or perhaps because of it ' initially I had no interest in medicine. It seemed too clinical, too sterile. The work stories my parents shared over the dinner table were intentionally devoid of the personal details that would have interested me....