That kind of pocket change can buy you a newspaper. And not just any newspaper, but a world-class paper with a wall full of Pulitzers (I remember emerging from the elevator and marveling at it as a summer intern) and decades of experience holding power to account. That newspaper employs hundreds of journalists. These journalists work very hard to find out what is actually happening and then to tell people. This involves a lot of late nights eating pizza in the office and long days calling people who will not answer and showing up in inconvenient places at inconvenient times to get people on the record and to get the story right. Is newspaper work glamorous' Put it this way: Spotlight was a Hollywood movie made exclusively to show off how heroic newspaper journalism is, and The New York Times ran an interview with the costume designer to find out how she managed to make the cast look so authentically unfashionable and rumpled. ('The hardest thing is making bad clothes work on really famous people, who look gorgeous in everything they wear,' the costumer explained.)...

For more than seven months, Walton Goggins watched a Western every day. John Ford's films, Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, episodes of Gunsmoke'the actor saw them all as he shot Fallout, the postapocalyptic TV series in which he stars. Half the time, he binged for research; Goggins thought of his character, the fictional 1950s-style movie star Cooper Howard, as a peer of cowboy-playing performers such as Alan Ladd. 'I didn't look at them as Walton. I really looked at them as Cooper Howard,' he told me last spring on the set of Fallout's second season. 'It was like '' He slipped into character, making a dejected expression as if envious of Ladd's career. 'Okay, yeah, Alan got that role, and he was great in Shane,' Goggins, as Cooper, drawled. 'I should have taken that, and I should have taken that television pilot.' He laughed. 'I should have done Gunsmoke. Why didn't I do that'!' But the other half of the time, Goggins explained, he just needed something to stay sane. He also plays 'the Ghoul,' a mutated form of Cooper who became a deadly bounty hunter after surviving the end of the world. In many episodes, Goggins switches between playing the Ghoul (in the present) and Cooper (in flashbacks). When he had to sink into the Ghoul's ruthless mindset'and spend hours getting prosthetics applied'the actor immersed himself in tales of gunslingers, he said, so 'I don't lose my mind.'...

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....

Both maxims are about the stories people tell themselves. The first acknowledges that someone's read of a situation will shape the outcome'even if they're reading things wrong. The second declares that all of life is a story and you need to provide the drama. The desire to treat life as a narrative'and then control that narrative'is the subject of Stephen Fishbach's debut novel, Escape!, a literary thriller that follows a single season of a fictional reality survival show from casting to airtime. Fishbach writes from experience: He was a two-time contestant on Survivor and co-hosts a Survivor podcast. To inform his book, he interviewed many other reality contestants and crew members. The result marries the plot twists of a competition show with compassionate portraits of the people involved who are searching for identity and meaning. It's both an examination of how the reality-TV sausage gets made and a reminder that people can sacrifice their humanity if they focus too much on making the plot'of a television program, of life itself'exciting....