Sarah A Smith in The Guardian:
Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92.
Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never embraced that genre.
Her one attempt, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is more accurately described as a collection of interlinking tales. Throughout her career, she developed this method of cross-referencing stories and continuing themes and characters across a collection, most notably in The Beggar Maid (published in Canada as Who Do You Think You Are?), which was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, and in the Juliet stories of the epiphanic collection Runaway (2004).
For Munro, short stories were the result of practical considerations, rather than choice.
More here.
Western societies notice an increasing interest in plant-based eating patterns such as vegetarian and vegan, yet potential effects on the body and brain are a matter of debate. Therefore, we systematically reviewed existing human interventional studies on putative effects of a plant-based diet on the metabolism and cognition, and what is known about the underlying mechanisms. Using the search terms “plant-based OR vegan OR vegetarian AND diet AND intervention” in PubMed filtered for clinical trials in humans retrieved 205 studies out of which 27, plus an additional search extending the selection to another five studies, were eligible for inclusion based on three independent ratings.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and cancer currently represent the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Studies performed on large cohorts worldwide have identified several modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors. Among them, robust evidence supports 
A few years ago, when my daughter was a freshman at Columbia University, one of only a few from Arkansas, I had the audacity to propose to then-president Lee Bollinger that the university add a hands-on component to its core curriculum. The core curriculum is intended to build a common framework of understanding as a baseline for academic life and what proceeds from it. Even though my academic credentials might not have caught Bollinger’s attention, I believed that I had something to offer as a craftsman and woodworker, and a father.
Dr. Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin. He is known for his work as a computer scientist and research into complexity theory and quantum computing, and more recently for his work at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, on AI alignment. I sat down with Dr. Aaronson to talk about the nature of quantum computing, why we should care, and his thoughts on the recent developments in artificial intelligence.
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“I’m a writer; I tell stories,” reads the first line of Claire Messud’s 
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I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?
Proteins are biological workhorses. They build our bodies and orchestrate the molecular processes in cells that keep them healthy. They also present a wealth of targets for new medications. From everyday pain relievers to sophisticated cancer immunotherapies, most current drugs interact with a protein. Deciphering protein architectures could lead to new treatments. That was the promise of AlphaFold 2, an AI model from Google DeepMind that predicted how proteins gain their distinctive shapes based on the sequences of their constituent molecules alone. Released in 2020, the tool was a breakthrough half a decade in the making. But proteins don’t work alone. They inhabit an entire cellular universe and often collaborate with other molecular inhabitants like, for example, DNA, the body’s genetic blueprint.
As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself. The Hebrew Bible and Torah recognized years during which debts should be cancelled, slaves set free and property redistributed from rich to poor. In classical Greece, Aristotle praised cities that kept wealth inequality in check to enhance political stability. And in 1942, then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that annual incomes should be capped at the current equivalent of US$480,000.
Mr. Simons equipped his colleagues with advanced computers to process torrents of data filtered through mathematical models, and turned the four investment funds in his new firm, 