Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to Laszlo Krasznahorkai today, the Swedish Academy commended the author's 'compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art'. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry. Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man. The Melancholy of Resistance (2019) features a mysterious, charismatic figure, the Prince, who brings a rebellious carnival to a small community and tears it apart. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2016) tells of an eccentric aristocrat returning to Hungary after exile in Argentina. Krasznahorkai's work began to be read more widely in the 2000s, following English translations of The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War (1999). More global fame came when he was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 and the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 (for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming)....
An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that scans manuscript titles and abstracts has flagged more than 250,000 cancer studies that bear textual similarities to articles that are known to have been produced by paper mills. These businesses produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships. Articles produced by paper mills often include fabricated data, duplicated images and weird phrases, which are strange wording choices used to evade plagiarism detectors. Integrity specialists and sleuths can spot these flaws, but the process is time-consuming and, in many cases, the involvement of paper mills cannot be proven so quantifying the scale of the problem is difficult. But, paper mills probably rely on boilerplate templates to mass produce papers, says Adrian Barnett, a statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, which could be detected by large language models (LLMs) that analyse patterns in texts. Barnett and his colleagues developed a model and posted their analysis1 on the preprint server bioRxiv last month. It has not yet been peer reviewed. They emphasize that their findings should be checked by human specialists and are not confirmed cases of research fraud....
As university leaders work to make deals with the Trump administration, many college presidents are at an ethical crossroads. On the one hand, they must do all they can to restore funding for vital research. On the other, they risk ceding to the demands of a president with views that don't align with their missions. As the fall semester begins, academic administrators could look to literature for guidance. Latin America's rich archive of fiction over the past century features this dilemma in numerous stories about living under dictatorships. Among many others, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela have mined the region's turbulent political history to explore how authoritarian rulers bend institutional leaders to their will by cultivating fear. Vargas Llosa's 'The Feast of the Goat' details how Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo reportedly fed insubordinate underlings to voracious crocodiles, an image that, for me, has echoes in Florida's Alligator Alcatraz. In Garcia Marquez's 'The Autumn of the Patriarch,' an illiterate strongman takes over all institutions to such an extreme that 'el solo era el gobierno' ' he alone was the government....
Something is rotten in the village of Little Nettlebed. There isn't enough rain. A sturgeon of ungodly proportions has been beached on the bank of the Thames. Worse, five sisters have tried to save its life, defying both the mysterious beneficence that brought the fish to shore and local norms dictating that it must be killed for food. In the glow of the late-afternoon sun, the world is no longer beautiful. Instead, it is sickly, the light 'jaundicing the saucers of white flowers' on an elder tree. It is the early 18th century in Oxfordshire, England, and readers likely know how this story goes: A 'season of strangeness' begins, and the witch, or witches, who are responsible must be found. Except it goes weirder, and wilder, in Xenobe Purvis's debut novel, The Hounding. The suspected witches in question'those five sisters'stand accused of transgressing nature by transforming not the world around them but their own bodies. The local ferryman, a perpetually inebriated and aggrieved man called Pete Darling, is convinced that he has seen them turn into dogs'and soon, almost everyone else in the drought-stricken village will come to believe him....
