Chris Power in The Guardian:
In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State terrorists who, the following night, rampaged through the French capital. Three attacked the Stade de France, where a football friendly between France and Germany was being played. Arriving late, they were denied entry to the stadium and blew themselves up outside.
At the same time, another group opened fire on cafes and bars in the city centre. Two members fled, while another walked into a restaurant and detonated his suicide vest. Meanwhile, the remaining trio entered the Bataclan theatre, where a crowd of 1,500 were attending a gig by the US rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The attack and subsequent siege lasted two and a half hours and ended with all three terrorists dead. Across the city, 130 people had been murdered and hundreds more injured.
Five years later, in the autumn of 2020, on the eve of publishing his new book, Yoga, and reeling from a difficult few years – mental illness, divorce, legal battles – Emmanuel Carrère was hunting for a subject.
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The Monty Python sketch of Thomas Hardy writing “The Return of the Native” takes place inside a packed soccer stadium with an announcer providing play-by-play analysis of the author’s glacial writing process. In hushed tones, the announcer says that Hardy has started to write, but wait, “oh no, it’s a doodle … a piece of meaningless scribble.” At last, Hardy writes “the,” but then crosses it out. In the time it takes to play an entire soccer match, he barely produces a sentence. In fact, Hardy was a speedy writer. He created “The Mayor of Casterbridge” so quickly that if he were outside, he “would scribble on large dead leaves or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand,” Paula Byrne writes in a new biography, “
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McNeal, the new play by Ayad Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, focuses on an egocentric, self-destructive white male novelist, played by Robert Downey, Jr. The fictional Jacob McNeal—think Mailer or Roth at their worst—wins the Nobel Prize early in the play, but he’s guarding a secret: his latest novel was composed with an uncredited coauthor, an AI chatbot. The production, which considers the controversial notion that artificial intelligence might be a useful creative tool, closes on November 24 after a nearly sold-out run at Lincoln Center. Despite a largely negative critical reception, the show has touched a nerve, which in my view is one of the jobs of a serious writer.
Decades of agonisingly difficult negotiations built up a dense structure of treaties, agreements and even a few unilateral moves dealing with offensive and defensive nuclear weapons of short, medium and long range, with provisions for testing, inspections and an overflight regime for mutual observation. Often the two sides would only give up systems they no longer wanted. Frequently the language of the agreements was the basis of future friction. On the US side, the political price of securing Senate ratification of treaties could be extremely high.
Dick’s use of the name New Israel in Martian Time-Slip is pretty stock. Dick traveled beyond North America only once, to a conference in Metz, France, where he delivered a legendary speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”—baffling his French fans by opening an early window into the mystical, visionary search that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life. Then he went home to Orange County, California. His impression of Israel may essentially be derived from Leon Uris’s Exodus, or from some other heroic fifties representation; he principally employs the Israelis in Martian Time-Slip as an anonymous and implacable counterpoint to the abject ineptitude of the U.S. colonists—to highlight the haplessness of their attempts to farm and irrigate the harsh Martian desertscape. As in the excerpt above, the Israelis present a mirror for shame. This matches, of course, a typical midcentury U.S. liberal’s reaction formation, after the discovery of the German and Polish death camps: the Jew as shame trigger, with the survivors idealized for their resilience and strength.
The year is 1617. His name is Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571–November 15, 1630) — perhaps the unluckiest man in the world, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. He inhabits a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity. All around him, people believe that the sun revolves around the Earth every twenty-four hours, set into perfect circular motion by an omnipotent creator; the few who dare support the tendentious idea that the Earth rotates around its axis while revolving around the sun believe that it moves along a perfectly circular orbit. Kepler would disprove both beliefs, coin the word orbit, and quarry the marble out of which classical physics would be sculpted. He would be the first astronomer to develop a scientific method of predicting eclipses and the first to link mathematical astronomy to material reality — the first astrophysicist — by demonstrating that physical forces move the heavenly bodies in calculable ellipses. All of this he would accomplish while drawing horoscopes, espousing the spontaneous creation of new animal species rising from bogs and oozing from tree bark, and believing the Earth itself to be an ensouled body that has digestion, that suffers illness, that inhales and exhales like a living organism.
The vampire as it’s developed over the past century of popular culture, from Dracula onward, is different from the folkloric eastern European creature—a gloaming animal of the night, subaltern to humanity—though elements have obviously been preserved. Stoker’s titular count is arguably as super-human as he is monstrous. “I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome,” the Transylvanian count tells Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor organizing the sale of London real estate to the undead aristocrat. “Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.” Where the skeletons in that Bulgarian basement were of people understood (fairly or not) by their neighbors as feral, rabid, and wild, Dracula is urbane and sophisticated, cosmopolitan and sexy.
The Sun rises every day. Water boils at 100°C. Apples fall to the ground. We live in a world in which objects behave the same given the same circumstances. We can imagine living in a different world: a world that constantly changes, a world in which the Sun does not rise every day, a world in which water one day boils at 50°C, and at 120°C another day, a world in which apples sometimes fall from trees and sometimes rise into the sky. Only because we live in a world that displays stable regularities are we able to reliably shape our environment and plan our lives.
Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses.
Poems written by AI are preferred to those written by humans, according to a new study. The non-expert poetry readers who participated were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as being written by humans than those actually written by humans. The 
Even after drastic weight loss, the body’s fat cells carry the ‘memory’ of obesity, research
On June 14 of this year, Delhi Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena authorized the prosecution of author Arundhati Roy and Kashmir-based academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain for speeches they made in 2010 about the disputed territory of Kashmir. Put otherwise, the Indian government charged a world-famous author and activist under a stringent antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of