You know so much more about yourself and your desires when you’re older that dating apps — even with all their frustrations — can bring unanticipated pleasure.
The bioengineered immune players called CAR T cells last longer and work better if pumped up with a large dose of a protein that makes them resemble stem cells.
Times Literary Supplement (April 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘A Heavy Reckoning’ – Shakespeare and War’; Judgment at Tokyo; Iranian women in revolt; Memoirs of a sociopath and A Chilean masterpiece…
How long will the world’s forests impound carbon below ground?
by Jonathan Shaw
MARYVILLE, Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national park, a family friend was raising—together with a menagerie of other mammals—a pair of bears orphaned as cubs. Taylor dreamed of studying these apex denizens of the forest, who forage at the top of the food chain. But as his education and understanding grew, his curiosity shifted to seed-dispersing animals, plants, and the soil and nutrients that sustain them: a trip down the trophic pyramid, driven by an appreciation of forests as ecological systems in which plants are primary producers. “Now I’ve half moved into the basement,” jokes the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, whose research encompasses the strategies plants use to obtain essential nutrients such as nitrogen, and how that, in turn, affects their ability to store another vital element with a global climate impact: carbon.
DIVERSIFYING one’s assets is useful not only in finance but also in diet, according to an October study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Though not many people have heard of the “portfolio diet”—consisting of plant-based foods proven to lower unhealthy cholesterol, such as nuts, oats, berries, and avocados—it is one of the easiest ways to improve long-term cardiovascular health. “The idea was that each of these foods lowers cholesterol quite minimally, but if you make a whole diet based on these different foods, you will see large reductions in [unhealthy] cholesterol,” said Andrea Glenn, an HSPH postdoctoral research fellow in nutrition and the lead author of the study. The more of these foods one eats, the higher the protection—but one need not include them all to reap the diet’s benefits, she said. “Like a business portfolio, you can choose the ones you want.”
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film.
Smith was looking for a job in television. She had an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and had lived and worked as a playwright in New York City for years—two of her productions garnered positive reviews in the Times. But playwriting had begun to feel like a vanity project: to pay rent, she’d worked as a nanny, a transcriptionist, an administrative assistant, and more. There seemed to be no viable financial future in theater, nor in academia, the other world where she supposed she could make inroads.
On the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, the super PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis staged a “drop by” for the candidate at its headquarters in West Des Moines. Outside the modernist office park, much of the Upper Midwest was under a deep freeze brought on by a low-pressure system that had deposited more than a foot of snow in advance of a surge of arctic air that brought the wind chill into the negative thirties. Despite the atrocious road conditions, DeSantis was keeping his schedule as a “special guest” of the Never Back Down PAC, beginning the day at the far western end of Iowa, in Council Bluffs, and concluding it three hundred miles east, in Davenport.
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