Chris Simms in Nature:
The visible effects of ageing on our body are in part linked to invisible changes in gene activity. The epigenetic process of DNA methylation — the addition or removal of tags called methyl groups — becomes less precise as we age. The result is changes to gene expression that are linked to reduced organ function and increased susceptibility to disease as people age. Now, a meta-analysis of epigenetic changes in 17 types of human tissue throughout the entire adult lifespan provides the most comprehensive picture to date of how ageing modifies our genes.
The study assessed DNA methylation patterns in human tissue samples and revealed that some tissues seem to age faster than others. The retina and stomach, for example, accumulate more ageing-related DNA methylation changes than do the cervix or skin. The analysis also found universal epigenetic markers of ageing across different organs. This ‘epigenetic atlas’ might help researchers to study the link between DNA methylation and ageing and could aid the identification of molecular targets for anti-ageing treatments.
More here.
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Few American authors of the past century churned out as many words. Even peers who matched or exceeded Updike’s productivity when it came to novels, such as Philip Roth, could not keep pace when factoring in the numerous other modes in which he regularly put pen to paper: short stories, poems, book reviews, essays, a play, a memoir, and even five books for children. Multiple books appeared after his death, including a final volume of short stories, My Father’s Tears.
In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 
A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump administration, modeled on President Donald Trump’s vow to “take over” the enclave, would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.
Rosalind Fox Solomon has almost never worked on assignment. When she first started taking photographs with an idea of making art, no one would have expected her to turn that into a career; she was heading into her 40s with two children, a woman learning to communicate as she hadn’t been able to before. She started out shooting close to her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Even after she started gaining recognition and traveling farther afield, she didn’t exactly have a long-term plan: She would, she says, just decide to go somewhere — occasionally because of a disruptive event, like an earthquake or a flood, but usually just because, hiring a guide and a translator if she needed one. In India, Guatemala, Brazil, or Missouri, she’d move around and look at people, engaging them but not saying much, and come back with pictures. That’s it.
Christopher Marlowe is having a moment. In London’s West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Born with Teeth, a new play by Liz Duffy Adams that imagines the erotic tension crackling between Marlowe and Shakespeare as they collaborate on Henry VI. And right on cue comes the first major biography of Marlowe in two decades, written by the unquestioned eminence of Shakespearean new historicism. This is in some ways a counterpoint to Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt’s gloriously rich evocation of the early modern culture that nourished Shakespeare’s creative genius. It was Greenblatt more than anyone else who taught us to understand the writer by examining the society in which he or she lived, but in Dark Renaissance the Greenblattian method is turned on its head. He shows us an Elizabethan England altogether too small, bigoted and fearful to account for the emergence of a shooting star like Marlowe.
There’s a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help best-seller list. These books have titles like “The Courage to Be Disliked” and “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain.
Arundhati Roy identifies as a vagrant. There was a moment in 1997, right after the Delhi-based writer became the first Indian citizen to win the Booker Prize, for her best-selling debut, The God of Small Things, when the president and the prime minister claimed the whole country was proud of her. She was 36 and suddenly rich; she could have coasted on the money and praise. Instead, she changed direction. Furiously and at length, she started writing essays for Indian magazines about everything her country’s elites were doing wrong. As nationalists celebrated Indian nuclear tests, she wrote, “The air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze.” In another essay: “On the whole, in India, the prognosis is — to put it mildly — Not Good.” She wrote about Hindu-nationalist violence, military occupation in Kashmir, poverty, displacement, Islamophobia, and corporate crimes. Her anti-patriotic turn got her dragged in the press and then to court on charges that ranged from obscenity (for a cross-caste sex scene in The God of Small Things) to, most recently, terrorism. She began to define herself against the conflict. As Roy writes in Mother Mary Comes to Me, her new memoir, “The more I was hounded as an antinational, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-hooligans I so admired?”
In 2023 — just as ChatGPT was hitting 100 million monthly users, with a large minority of them freaking out about living inside the movie “Her” — the artificial intelligence researcher Katja Grace published an intuitively disturbing industry survey that