Why turning 40 sucks.

Celebrate the Holocaust!! "A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend."

What Social Science can tell you about flirting and how to do it

Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. 'It's a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father's genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?'

The next victim of climate change: our minds? "Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem... But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being."

Does smart = liberal? Discuss.

What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC. By John Hockenberry, who was the first host of NPR's Talk of the Nation and is now a Distinguished Fellow at the MIT Media Lab.

What Kucinich Saw: Witnesses Describe Close Encounter. In a Democratic presidential debate in late October, Mr. Kucinich acknowledged seeing something airborne that he couldn't identify and then defused the issue with a joke about opening a campaign office in Roswell, N.M., the capital of unexplained sightings. Since then, the long-shot candidate has refused to elaborate on the experience.

"Child raising in non-violent cultures." There are perhaps many reasons for the varying expressions of violence in different cultures, from historic patterns to genetic propensities to economic influences. But whatever the predisposing factors are, there seem to also be some characteristic child rearing practices common to most of the known non-violent cultures.

Questioning the banality of evil. "Until recently, there has been a clear consensus amongst social psychologists, historians and philosophers that everyone succumbs to the power of the group and hence no one can resist evil once in its midst. But now, suddenly, things don’t seem quite so certain." (Via.)

Mitt Romney, chronic exaggerator. ('Tis the season to be euphemistic.)

Color of the year: No. 18-3943.

Tattoo Santa.

The making of Saturday Night Fever. In 1976, producer Robert Stigwood placed a million-dollar bet on a young TV star, signing John Travolta to a three-movie deal. First up, a low-budget production based on a New York magazine article about disco-crazy Italian-American kids in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: Saturday Night Fever. From Travolta's famous "Stayin' Alive" strut to the mid-filming death of his girlfriend, to three harrowing nights on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, SAM KASHNER has the story of a culture-bending hit, whose music–by a revitalized 60s band called the Bee Gees–became the best-selling soundtrack of its time.

The California Golden Overtones. UC-Berkeley all-female a capella group. (YouTube links, or pages with embedded YouTube vids, follow.) Take It to the Limit. In the Still of the Night. Big Yellow Taxi. I Can See Clearly Now.

John Zorn's Masada. John Zorn is a musician and "genius" who's long been part of New York's "downtown music" scene, which is associated with venues like the Knitting Factory. Among his focuses in recent years is Masada, a jazz project whose CDs are released by Zorn's label Tzadik as part of its Radical Jewish Culture series. YouTube links: Gevurah. Karaim. Paran.

Kucinich booted from Iowa debate. The Des Moines Register informed the campaign that Kucinich is not invited because the newspaper determined “that a person working out of his home did not meet our criteria for a campaign office and full-time paid staff in Iowa.” Once again, credit to the H Dogg.

On U.S. presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. From a link posted by the ever-vigilant thread updater H Dawg in the Giuliani thread.

Listening to film. "If the first rule of film criticism is to watch the movie, the second is to listen to it." Special bonuses: one list of the top soundtracks ever, plus another, and then some more.

C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations -- and CIA chief faces credibility test as a result. More, on the CIA's "legacy of mistrust." At least the Democrats aren't letting this one slide (at least so far). U.S. NewsFilter.