A decade ago, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I was too busy sanitizing baby bottles and washing reusable diapers to read a short story, let alone an entire novel. Now I have a pair of night-owl elementary schoolers, and although bedtime can still be draining, I at least have the energy to enjoy a few chapters once they're asleep. So when I learned last year about two well-reviewed novels featuring stay-at-home-dad protagonists'Something Rotten, by Andrew Lipstein, and The River Is Waiting, by Wally Lamb'I was curious to pick them up. Within the first few pages, however, I was disappointed to find that these characters were essentially a collection of the same old incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, in the case of Lamb's book, tragically negligent. I never used to be a reader who needed to see himself in a novel. But as a dad who takes pride in bringing fun and, if I may say so, some skill to the role, I've grown tired of cultural stereotypes that reduce stay-at-home fathers to undignified buffoons. So I decided to go hunting, to see where else these dads show up in literature, in the hope of finding a character whose experience might reflect my own....

When Philip Roth published his novel Zuckerman Unbound 45 years ago, The New York Times called it an 'act of contrition.' The literary critic George Stade read it as an autobiographical account of Roth's experiences as the author of Portnoy's Complaint, the virtuosically neurotic tale of a nice Jewish boy trying to either shake or embrace his sex obsession, which made Roth famous when it came out, in 1969. Portnoy is a tremendous novel: I'm on record in this magazine arguing that it's a great American one. Upon its release, though, it got decidedly mixed reactions. Readers, rabbis, and reviewers accused Roth of anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual excess, deviance, and creative gimmickry. In Commentary, Irving Howe wittily if wrongly claimed that the 'cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.' In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth's recurring stand-in, Nathan Zuckerman, seems to regret having written his version of Portnoy's Complaint at all. He accuses himself of betraying every woman who has ever been 'bound to him by trust, by sex, by love.' His agent urges him to quit 'trying to show them up in heaven and over at Commentary''just in case readers weren't sure this was about Roth and Portnoy'that he's a good guy, but he can't. He's so busy self-flagellating, in fact, that he hardly even has sex, which is highly unusual in a Roth novel. Stade considered it not only an apology but also a concession to the reactionary 'custodians of our high literary culture.' His review reads as if it were common knowledge, in 1981, that critics and readers were so prudish that Roth had to write a whole other novel wringing his hands over his sex book....

Researchers have published the recipe for an artificial-intelligence model that reviews the scientific literature better than some major large language models (LLMs) are able to, and gets the citations correct as often as human experts do. OpenScholar ' which combines a language modelwith a database of 45 million open-access articles ' links the information it sources directly back to the literature, to stop the system from making up or 'hallucinating' citations. Several commercial AI-based literature-review tools already exist that use similar techniques, but few have been released as open source, says Akari Asai, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a co-author of the work, published in Nature on 4 February1. Being open source means that researchers can not only try OpenScholar for free in an online demonstration, but also deploy it on their own machine and use the method in the paper to boost the literature-review skills of any LLM, says Asai....

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors'including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker'anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon. These biographies tend to illuminate not only the editors' work, but their lives, challenging the stereotype that they were mere pencil pushers. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the trend came for Margaret C. Anderson, whose avant-garde, Chicago-based literary magazine, The Little Review, introduced American readers to such modernist heavyweights as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Adam Morgan's impassioned, finely researched new book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, isn't the first account of Anderson's life and work'that would be Making No Compromise, Holly A. Baggett's dual biography of Anderson and her co-editor and romantic partner, Jane Heap. But this is the first to focus entirely on Anderson, who founded The Little Review in 1914. Morgan, also the founding editor of a Chicago-based literary magazine, convincingly argues that Anderson more or less single-handedly transformed the Review 'from a Chicago curio' into a transatlantic journal of note by publishing a coterie of experimental European and American expat writers....