The whole world was watching

From Wired, an interview with Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (and new pics from Abu Ghraib). The Whole World Was Watching: A new film takes an almost hallucinatory look at the protests in Chicago in 1968. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences — beware of plans to fix the "problem". A review of Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu looks back on the passions inflamed by the comics scare. Just because the Democratic candidates are a woman and black man does not mean this is the first election to hinge on identities; identity isn't the problem — pretending it doesn't matter is. A special issue of New York is out, on Best of New York 2008. We all seem convinced we're right about politics, religion or science these days; what makes us so sure of ourselves? From Time, an article on the complex task of simplicity and a look at the science of experience. From Scientific American, an accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins — is this the end of cosmology? From Utne, under the glue gun: Hip crafters can run but not hide from Martha Stewart. Samantha Power is an idealist and self-proclaimed "humanitarian hawk"; now, the 37-year-old Harvard professor is one of Barack Obama's closest advisers.