The truth was nothing was that simple or savage. Apparently the horses were being treated well, with greater care than actual working racehorses. The third horse was reportedly in good health and high spirits the day it died. It was in such spirits that it reared up as horses sometimes do. This time it fell over backward, and landed on its head. Just an accident. All you can blame is the fragile frame of the thoroughbred horse, which was created for racing.

But that didn't keep the show from being canceled – or critics from speaking out. Even before the third horse death, PETA charged that “two dead horses in a handful of episodes exemplify the dark side of using animals in television, movies, and ads.” Like all filming in the U.S., "Luck" was shot under supervision of the American Humane Association's Film & TV Unit, the people who certify that “No animal was harmed in the making” of a film or TV show. (That's a statement about animal welfare, not animal rights. If you don't think animals should be filmed for entertainment at all, you're not going to like AHA. Founded in 1877, it also promotes the welfare of children.)

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But PR Daily called it a successful stunt: "This story will be dead by Sunday, and GoDaddy will have won tons of coverage." And Parsons derided critics as uncomprehending or hypocritical. He refused to take down the video, and promised to post one next year, when he plans to shoot another elephant.

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Tigers are among zoo visitors' favorite animals. They're also one reason many people hate zoos. Saddened by the picture of misery presented by the tiger who repetitively paces back and forth, back and forth, some people never go back.

"Tigers simply don't belong in the zoo," says Adam Roberts, senior vice president of the animal advocacy organization Born Free USA. "Tigers don't belong on concrete, tigers don't belong behind bars, and frankly, tigers don't belong near people."

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In the chatty, opinionated guise of Dr. Tatiana, Olivia Judson brilliantly combines the ever-popular genre of the advice column with that of Sick Nature Facts. The combination is strikingly successful. As Dear Abby never has, Dr. Tatiana confronts the etiquette issues involved in depraved cannibal incest, for example, and uses them to illuminate biological insights into the nature of life on earth.

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At this point, because the Ninth Circuit decision is under appeal, schools are free to instruct kids to recite the God-enhanced version of the pledge. Recalling my own schooldays, when those words created a painful moment every day, I hope they don't.

The ostensible cause of the pledge suit is a third-grader, the daughter of Michael Newdow and Sandra Banning. Newdow, an atheist who lives in Sacramento, Calif., filed suit arguing that his daughter should not be forced to watch and take part in a ritual including mention of God, and the majority of the court agreed.

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As an evolutionary biologist and a feminist, Zuk says that while each discipline can shed light on the other, feminism "has more to offer biology than biology has to offer feminism." Feminism, after all, can help biologists identify their biases so they can study animal behavior more objectively, whereas in evolutionary biology it seems to be all too easy to go species-shopping for a comparison that will "prove" that women are naturally good with children, or that men are naturally good with howitzers, or that we're designed for polygamy, or that someone else should do the dishes. This kind of selective comparison is particularly common when it comes to matters of sex and sexuality.

Among the subjects Zuk discusses in this spirit are homosexuality in animals, infidelity in apparently monogamous animals, the evolution of the female orgasm, why bonobos have replaced dolphins as the Cool Species We Can Learn From, the evolutionary significance of menstruation, sexual stereotyping, the "myth of the ecofeminist animal," maternal instinct, the zany things animals do with sperm, the alleged Great Chain of Being, the dogmas of dominance hierarchies, and sex differences in math ability.

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In an interview conducted in the comfort of her home, she explains the harrowing consequences of having written "Sex Tips for Girls" and comes to a dreadful realization about the sequel.

How did you come to write the first "Sex Tips" book, "Sex Tips for Girls," and what's different about "Advanced Sex Tips for Girls"?

The first one is kind of a how-to manual and the second one is kind of a why manual. Once you tell people how to give blow jobs, there's not much else to say. The first book was kind of "Don't be nervous, here's how to give a blow job."

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"I'm sorry I was rude" is good.

"I'm sorry if I was rude" is not. It weasels. It implies that maybe you weren't rude. It implies that the person being apologized to has a twisted little worldview if they think "Oh, shut up, frog-lips" is rude.

An apology should give the sense that you actually feel some form of regret. "Sorry if" is a conditional apology. Conditional apologies make things worse, not better.

"I'm sorry your frog is dead" is better than "I'm sorry if your frog's death causes you pain."

Similarly, "I'm sorry I taunted you about your frog's death" is better than "I'm sorry if my taunting you about your frog's death caused you pain."

When "I'm sorry" is an apology, it conveys remorse. "I'm sorry" can also be an expression of sympathy, a thing people occasionally forget.

"I'm sorry your frog died."

"Why are you sorry? You didn't kill my frog!"

But what if you did kill their frog? "I'm sorry I killed your frog" is better than "I'm sorry if my killing your frog caused you pain."

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HONOLULU -- A Honolulu State College official denied today that the school had nixed the football team's request to change its name from the Fighting Tigers to the Raging Drag Queens.

"It's true a vote was held, and it's true the students overwhelmingly favored Raging Drag Queens," said the official, who asked to be unnamed. "But the name was not submitted through proper nomination channels, so it doesn't count as a request, and neither do most of those others. Properly nominated choices included Tiger Team, Fighting Tigers, Tiger Gladiators, Just Plain Tigers, Savage Geckos, Tiger Tsunami and More Than One Angry Mongoose -- and of those, Fighting Tigers got the most votes."

Fighting Tigers received only four votes, the official conceded. He declined to give totals for Raging Drag Queens or other disallowed names.

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This startling breakthrough is documented in a study in the November issue of Nature Neuroscience, a spinoff of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Dr. Stephen Goldberg, one of the study's authors, is quoted in a NIDA press release explaining that "this finding suggests that marijuana has as much potential for abuse as other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin."

Sure it does, Dr. Goldberg.

But wait! Abuse isn't scary enough: Let's lurch one step further into zealotry by confusing abuse with addiction. (What's the difference? Let's clarify with an example. Have you ever abused cheesecake? I think you have. But do you go through torment on a day when you can't get cheesecake? Have you repurposed your life toward getting and consuming cheesecake? Do you ever wake up in a doorway with graham crust crumbs on your face and no idea where you've been? No? Thank God -- you're not addicted. Yet.)

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Jaworski got a not-guilty verdict, and then turned around and filed suit for malicious prosecution against the company that had accused his clients of grease theft. "I became, I guess, the hero of all the grease guys," he says, and grease cases began flooding in his door. Jaworski is known as "the grease lawyer," and has had calls on his expertise from as far away as Australia.

From Jaworski I learned of grease stings, grease vigilantes, alleged grease conspiracy and what I can only call grease embezzlement.

I first became intrigued by grease crime after reading a 1998 news story about two San Antonio, Texas, men convicted of stealing "thousands of pounds of used cooking grease." With the aid of hidden microphones, a surveillance camera and a former Texas Ranger, the two were caught in the act of buying 11,350 pounds of grease. An assistant manager for Griffin Industries, a grease company that said it was losing $10,000 a week from grease theft in Texas alone, estimated that there were 70 grease thieves operating in Texas. The grease thieves came by night to fast-food restaurants and filled their tankers with used grease from containers outside the restaurants, where the grease awaited pickup from companies like Griffin.

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Throughout the course of his illness, Damon barely saw Pythias. Occasionally he'd stick his head in and ask if Damon needed anything, but that was it. Damon recovered in the canonical week to 10 days, but it was a long time before he could forgive the callous behavior of the friend of his youth. In fact, it still rankles. "I could have died in there, and I don't think he would have noticed until I started to stink," Damon says. "Sometimes it takes a crisis to find out who your real friends are."

"Damon," I say, "you had a cold."

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"Hidden Life" was such a surprise success that you might have thought its author had dropped from the sky, but writing brilliantly about dogs was only Thomas' most recent accomplishment, and not her first 15 minutes of fame.

Much of Thomas' work is connected to a transformative experience, a series of unusual African sojourns her family undertook in the early 1950s.

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At least that's the opinion of the proponents of the hygiene hypothesis. Led by a group of British immunologists, these scientists postulate that our immune systems are not encountering the same kinds of challenges they have encountered in millennia past. We evolved to cope with dirt and germs, not soap and ethyl alcohol. As a result, our immune systems may be developing differently now and becoming overly touchy about allergens that we'd prefer they ignored.

As evidence the scientists point to a number of disturbing trends in developed countries: Allergies are booming, the asthma rate has doubled since 1988 and diseases like inflammatory bowel disease are on the rise.

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Until now, the rules of hygiene were simple. People whose standards of cleanliness were lower than yours were disgusting. People whose standards of cleanliness were higher than yours were obsessive. The clean freaks had the moral high ground, and manufacturers were really good at marketing to the fear of grime.

Nearly 700 new antibacterial products -- lotions, toys, mattresses, touch screens -- hit the market in the U.S. between 1992 and 1998, and the bandwagon shows no signs of slowing down. TV shows about the germiness of motel bedding or the germiness of raw chicken have made a vivid impact. I've noticed that increasing numbers of perfectly sane people won't leave home without a bottle of an antibacterial hand cleaner like Purell, so they can sluice down hourly.

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Soon a gaggle of writers, artists, scientists and thinkers struggled with the arcane posting software and began conversing online, developing "virtual" relationships and roughing-out guidelines for acceptable behavior
in a text-based community. After a few years, some "Wellbeings," as they called themselves, expressed consternation that the group had grown so big
and prolific that people could no longer read all the new posts in a day. But they didn't give up -- in fact, it seems they just wrote more; these days, it's not unusual to find 90,000 words of new posts to the public "conferences" or topic areas in a day.

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Can longevity extension go past combating diseases and address the very process of aging itself? If not, longevity will be less attractive. If, on the other hand, we can stay forever young, we may never want to leave the party. Should all of us be allowed to hang around as long as we want? Even creeps?

Research that may bear on the practical end of these matters is proceeding with startling speed.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, told the Washington Post that within 30 years we'll know all the genes involved in the human aging process.

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The man he had in mind was Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist who had traveled to China in the mid-'80s. Also arousing suspicion, it seems, is the fact that he is of Chinese descent. It was then discovered that Lee had downloaded large amounts of classified material, for which he was fired. He is now in jail awaiting trial, charged with mishandling classified material. He's never been charged with espionage.

Alarmed by the idea of Chinese spies gaining access to our weapons secrets, and wishing to be seen taking action, Congress ordered that security be increased at the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos; Sandia, N.M.; and Livermore, Calif.

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We weren't particularly good at lying without the machine picking up an emotional response, but we soon discovered we could make the machine give the same reading to every question, simply by panicking no matter what we were asked. If my sister asked if me if I was a Martian spy, I would envision falling off a cliff and say no. My sister would congratulate me: The machine indicated that I was a big, fat, nervous liar. And, therefore, a Martian spy.

It now occurs to me that panicking every few seconds would be exhausting in a daylong interrogation. I bet I could do it, but not everyone has my talent for hysteria. So in reading the polygraph literature at the library, I looked for tips on how to beat the lie detector. Many books on polygraphs have relevant chapters, easy to locate because some hard-working earlier scholar had gone through and marked all sections on "How to beat the lie detector" or "How to defeat the polygraph tests." For some reason.

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In recent years, serious arguments have been made that we should do just that for our fellow anthropoids. As editors of "The Great Ape Project," published in 1993, animal rights advocate Paola Cavalieri and philosopher Peter Singer argue that we should grant legal equality to orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees (presumably including pygmy chimpanzees, also known as bonobos). Now, in "Rattling the Cage," animal rights law professor and litigator Steven Wise argues for granting personhood to chimpanzees and bonobos because they are so like you. (What happened to the gorillas and orangutans? He doesn't say.)

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