Many of us, of course, have spent hours at the movies relishing violence and explosions as entertainment. In the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” we see explosions in which real people die, and the sequence comes as a kick in the gut.

The Cult of the Suicide Bomber | The New Yorker

The single most important thing about The Moral Imagination is the challenge it poses to its readers. To make sense of this book, you must have your brain turned on every step of the way. Your first problem is to figure out what the title means. (Burke introduced the phrase "moral imagination.") The author isn't so much interested in novel or imaginative ethical systems as in thinkers who present moral realities in original ways.

The Art of Thinking

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston's Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters' personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science. (Feb. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking, too-good-to-be-true discovery of a virus that fights cancer. Cliff, the rakish, headstrong post-doc responsible for the discovery, is on the verge of dismissal when his tumor-ridden mice exhibit stunning rates of remission; meanwhile, Cliff’s co-worker and former girlfriend, spurred by personal and professional jealousy, begins to harbor suspicions about his lab work. The somewhat transparent plot is made compelling by the aesthetic delicacy of Goodman’s writing—furless lab mice are "like quivering pink agar"—and by the care with which she sketches the social world of the lab. The omniscient narrative nimbly shifts perspective among a small number of complex characters, to produce a Rashomon-like inquiry into truth and motive.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Intuition, by Allegra Goodman

Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster than the ones on "The Incredibles," each frame of "Cars" took an average of 17 hours to render.

This is a misleading quote. It implies that the whole network was working on a single frame. If that were the case, then they were producing less than two seconds of film per month. That would work out to more than 3900 months to produce the 116 minute film.

With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself

Vanessa Redgrave will star in a play of "The Year of Magical Thinking."

Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion in 'The Year of Magical Thinking'

Reminiscent of a John Cheever story like "The Swimmer," it is a surreal reflection on perception, reality and memory, whose focus shifts as the film burrows ever more deeply into subterranean territory. No matter how serious it becomes, however, "La Moustache" never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

La Moustache - Review

"Cavite" is a textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.

This unblinking tour of Asian misery offers an unsettling contemplation of life at the bottom of the human food chain. It touches on all the questions about nationality, faith, immigration, assimilation, globalization, poverty and the roots of terrorism that people are asking themselves, questions that aren't about to be answered either tomorrow or the day after.

Cavite - Review

Cannes reveals just how much interesting, ambitious and surprising work is being done, both in established centers of film production and in countries whose film industries have lain fallow or barely existed.

Mr. Linklater's other festival film, the Certain Regard Selection "A Scanner Darkly," based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, sends tendrils of anxiety in all directions. Is the war on drugs worse than the drug epidemic? Can you tell the difference? Is the government spying on us, or does our own paranoia make such a program redundant?

Cannes Again Offers a Year of Political Films, This Time From America

These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume. In a market dominated by the big chain stores, if a novel doesn't sell a healthy number of copies in the first two weeks after its publication, its chances of gaining longer-term momentum are slim.

"The whole system is set up for impatience."

In 2005, almost half of all sales in the literary fiction category came from the top 20 best-selling books.

... the single most powerful person in American literary publishing. No, not Oprah, but a woman you've probably never heard of: Sessalee Hensley, the one literary fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble.

Promotional Intelligence

Al Gore's presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days.

An Inconvenient Truth