A virtual cell built from protein data, not full genomic simulation, is now predicting how triple-negative breast cancer patients will respond to specific drugs. The Chinese-built AI model beat existing treatment-matching methods and flagged untested drug combinations that may work better.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza
A surgeon learns of his mother's brain metastases mid-shift, then walks back into theatre. The piece traces how tumours, stressed brains and collapsing systems all hide the same thing: years of strain behind a facade of normal function, until the threshold breaks.
— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Sasi S Senga
A Times columnist's new book warns the smartphone could end literate civilization itself, with knowledge retreating to an elite few and democracy's foundations crumbling. One critic finds the argument oddly timed, given AI has flooded the internet with more text than ever.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Morgan Meis
A Harvard professor who's spent decades studying fairy tales explains why they still work on adults, not just kids: that uneasy blend of "beauty and horror." She traces her own path from Denison and Munich to Princeton and a 1971 Harvard appointment that's lasted a lifetime.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
A Cincinnati librarian's poems ran in The Paris Review in the seventies and never found a wide readership since. Decades later, he's still writing: home movies of erotic seventies footage, a nude Beckettian performance, and his late wife's ashes sitting in a bag by his feet during the interview.
— via The Paris Review, Joseph Grantham
A murder opens the book, then the story rewinds twenty-five years to show how a proud Punjabi family curdled into corruption, betrayal and shame. Karan Mahajan's third novel spans Delhi, the American midwest and London, and a review calls it excellent.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
Three men were told to parachute into Nazi Hungary, let themselves get caught, and lie convincingly enough under Gestapo interrogation to change where Hitler put his tanks on D-Day. A storm nearly grounded the mission on its last usable night of moonlight.
— via Literary Hub, Jason Bell
Before Trump's Greenland plan hit headlines, the "PayPal mafia" had already tried to buy it, backing a project to build a deregulated tech city there. Two authors trace the ideology behind Silicon Valley's push to replace democracy with corporate-run fiefdoms.
— via Literary Hub, Amy Westervelt
Gary Indiana's entire personal library, shipped to a planned California archive after his 2024 death, was destroyed when the Eaton Fire hit before it could be shelved. His unlocked Art of Fiction interview survives instead, tracing how a Village Voice critic screaming on camera in avant-garde films became a novelist who turned obsession into fiction.
— via The Paris Review, Natalie Shapero
Thom Gunn praised Wyatt's Tudor elegies for the plain diction that makes beheading sound routine, then wrote his own AIDS-era laments the same way. Seventeen of twenty words in his title poem's opening stanza have one syllable, and the sweat-soaked sheet isn't a metaphor.
— via Literary Hub, Colm Tóibín
Three days before their scheduled talk, two children's book authors had their Los Angeles Public Library event cancelled without explanation. Now they're suing the city, arguing the move exposes anti-Palestinian censorship inside the institutions meant to fight it.
— via Literary Hub, Jenan A. Matari and Nora Lester Murad
The DEI argument has quietly flipped: critics increasingly say the problem isn't hostility to white people but the way it demeans the minorities it claims to help. A Black professor's Atlantic essay on his own tenure-track job lays out why, with no scandal required.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
Moral disgust isn't just an insult, philosophers argue, but a distinct psychological response tied to social exclusion rather than physical avoidance. One influential theory calls it an unreliable evolutionary hangover; another says it's a warning worth heeding.
— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Brandon Yip
