The CIA, the FBI and other federal agencies are using polygraph machines more than ever to screen applicants and hunt for lawbreakers, even as scientists have become more certain that the equipment is ineffective in accurately detecting when people are lying.

Instead, many experts say, the real utility of the polygraph machine, or "lie detector," is that many of the tens of thousands of people who are subjected to it each year believe that it works -- and thus will frequently admit to things they might not otherwise acknowledge during an interview or interrogation.

Polygraph Results Often in Question

"We're looking for quality, and substance," he said. "We want to see our name associated with the kind of music, literature and movies that people will say, 'I'm glad Starbucks brought this to the marketplace.' "

Hollywood can only hope for this kind of success at a time when new technology is encroaching on traditional film distribution models. While this year's box-office total has so far pulled ahead of last year's disastrous statistics, industry experts are still puzzling over how to adapt to changing consumer habits in a world of Internet, cellphone and iPod entertainment.

In this environment, Starbucks provides a potentially important new point of sale, and could have the kind of impact on movies — narrow, but profound — that Oprah Winfrey has had on publishing with her book club.

A Small Step at Starbucks From Mocha to Movies - New York Times

Ms. Zelez bristles at the cliché that women only go to scary movies as an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends. "I have girlfriends that love gratuitous violence, blood and gore and people getting carved to pieces," she said.

She is right about one thing: The number of young women buying tickets to the bloody new wave of horror films is striking, and even Hollywood executives say they are surprised. "Saw II," in which a sadist imprisons victims in a house and poisons them with gas, drew more women than men under 25 — the target age group for horror movies.

Up to Her Eyes in Gore, and Loving It - New York Times

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment he often needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died Saturday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society - New York Times

Physics in America is at a crossroads and in crisis, just as humanity stands on the verge of great discoveries about the nature of matter and the universe, a panel from the National Academy of Sciences concludes in a new report.

Science Panel Report Says Physics in U.S. Faces Crisis - New York Times

AN Iranian-American director, influenced by the Italian neo-realist movement, the American New Wave of the 1970's and current Iranian cinema, makes a movie, in English and Urdu, about a Pakistani pushcart vendor's daily life in post-9/11 New York.

American Indie Filmmakers: Thinking Globally and Acting Globally, Too - New York Times

"When I was kid," he said, "you didn't dare walk on an Irish or Italian block, and they didn't dare walk on our block, which was Jewish. But that is gone. It's getting very chic down there."

It's gotten very chic almost everywhere in Manhattan.

New York City as Film Set: From Mean Streets to Clean Streets - New York Times

To be fair, of course, rhyming road-safety signs are common along India's expressways, so Mr. Rushdie was himself borrowing on a theme. But like everything else, even this minute similarity — homage? remix? rip-off? — became part of the ceaseless compare-and-contrast debate.

Indeed, whatever Ms. Viswanathan's culpability (she maintained, by week's end, that all similarities to Ms. McCafferty's books were unintentional), one might hope the episode would be the final object lesson for would-be plagiarists who still think that their indiscretions can escape scrutiny.

In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time.

Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.

In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice - New York Times

Dizzy doesn't necessarily mean dopey. It means rejecting a caricatured version of feminism, studiousness or ambition in favor of even more caricatured womanly wiles. And it cuts a wide swath, from housewives to high school girls, from Bergdorf's all the way to Botswana.

Dizzy or Smart? What's a Girl to Be? - New York Times

he relationship between the detective and the studio chief holds a lesson about doing business in Hollywood, where loyalty holds an exalted value, and where an executive who expects to survive at the top must be able to understand the industry's seamy underworld for what it is, without tumbling into it.

A Studio Chief's Jailhouse Visits to a Detective Raise Questions - New York Times