Zeitgeist

"The Snarling Citizen," essays by Barbara Ehrenreich. 245 pages. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $20 One of the perks of getting really big in the celebrity journalist racket is that publishers start foraging around for any little scrap of stuff Ms. Write has ever written - be they laundry lists, half-finished novels, or ancient letters to the editor. This syndrome accounts for the Collection of Previously Published Material, a book format that is often disappointing because 1. the reader may have seen the material before or 2. the material was originally tailored to another medium - often a non-book medium like television or the lecture circuit.

Peter Falk had a fine career on the stage and in feature films. His crazed comic performance in "The In-Laws" alone would guarantee a major appreciation from film critics and scholars. But it is his network television work in the 1970s as a modest, sly, stub-of-a-cigar-smoking detective in a well-worn wreck of a trench coat for which he will be fondly remembered and celebrated for years to come. Falk, who died at his Beverly Hills home Thursday at age 83, gave life to a fictional detective named Lt. Columbo who was and is one of the only American crime solving characters who can rival the best in British detective fiction.

Let Billy Corgan think whatever he wants. If he wants to call teaming with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who has played with Corgan in the group Zwan and on his solo album, a Smashing Pumpkins reunion, that's fine, as long as it produces albums as potent as Zeitgeist (Reprise). On their current tour, which brings them to Pimlico to headline the Virgin Festival on Aug. 5, the Pumpkins are pairing tunes from their past and present. While Zeitgeist, which is out today, may not be as genre-defining as Siamese Dream or as ambitious as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (both on Virgin Records)

We're about to finish up a year that included a riveting and historic presidential election and the gravest economic crisis in decades. And the top search term on Yahoo for 2008: Britney Spears. Just like in 2007. And in 2006. And in 2005. If the year-end search list is a measure of our collective digital brain, what does it say that our MRI keeps reading "Britney"? During the past year, the 27-year-old tormented pop star was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation, settled child custody with her ex-husband, made a documentary about herself and released a song that quickly became the most downloaded by a female artist.

A government-sanctioned cruise company's luxury-ship tour of the Yangtze River, which is rising with the completion of the world's biggest hydroelectric project (The Three Gorges Dam), becomes a microcosm of forced social change in Up the Yangtze. This quietly compelling documentary centers on one Chinese teenager who joins the trip as a dishwasher and another who becomes a steward and a bartender. Every second of this film is personal. The writer-director, Yung Chang, a Canadian of Chinese ancestry, made his first journey to the Yangtze "a few years ago," hoping to find the world of his grandfather.

And so, Tina Brown has abandoned the editorial helm of the New Yorker, indisputably the premier vehicle of serious journalism and literary fiction in the United States for two and more generations.Should real people care? Only if the event and its consequences are perceived to affect their lives. It's difficult to see how they will.This has not stilled the cacophony. Brown jilted S.I. Newhouse - owner, with his family, of the New Yorker - to run away with Mickey Mouse. A wailing sigh emanated from earnest souls and throats:"Will the Synergy Monster swallow up the exalted journalism we'd like to believe exists?

Baltimore's annual Jewish Film Festival may seem small, but it's become quite the player over its 16-year history. Tonight through April 25, nine films - all Baltimore premieres - will be screened at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts in Owings Mills. All have Jewish themes or are the work of Jewish filmmakers. Most will likely never be shown on the big screen in these parts again. And many, made on a small budget and without big-time promotional campaigns, are counting on festivals like this to spread the good word, paving the way for a theatrical run or increasing interest in a DVD release.

BOSTON - You have to hand it to Ally McBeal. In with the zeitgeist, out with the zeitgeist - and without ever gaining an ounce. Oooh, was that mean? Well, never mind. Meanness is the point. In the final episode of the series, everybody's favorite neurotic was driven out of town by a pack of 10-year-old girls. Ally gave up her job, her friends, her apartment to rescue her daughter Maddie - product of a college egg donation - who was being tormented by classmates, otherwise known as the RMGs: the really mean girls.

Once again, 15 aspiring cooks confront a series of culinary challenges that test their skill, nerves and judgment in the kitchen as Bravo rolls out its third season of Top Chef tomorrow. Last season brought the show to the forefront of the pop-culture zeitgeist (and blogosphere) due less to the contestants' cooking chops than to the rivalry that arose between two of the youngest contestants, Marcel Vigneron, the exasperating molecular gastronomist with the winged coiffure, and Ilan Hall, the naughty hipster-traditionalist who ultimately triumphed.

PAUL McHUGH, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, believes the ages of human history can be defined, at least in part, by psychiatric pathologies: scrupulosity (obsessive fear of sinning) in the age of religion, shell-shock during times of modern war, anorexia nervosa today, which he has labeled the ''age of self-absorption.''Choosing a few snappy words to seize the zeitgeist -- as the intellectuals say -- is usually a pastime of newspaper pundits, not psychiatrists. It requires a certain catholicity of interest.

A government-sanctioned cruise company's luxury-ship tour of the Yangtze River, which is rising with the completion of the world's biggest hydroelectric project (The Three Gorges Dam), becomes a microcosm of forced social change in Up the Yangtze. This quietly compelling documentary centers on one Chinese teenager who joins the trip as a dishwasher and another who becomes a steward and a bartender. Every second of this film is personal. The writer-director, Yung Chang, a Canadian of Chinese ancestry, made his first journey to the Yangtze "a few years ago," hoping to find the world of his grandfather.

Let Billy Corgan think whatever he wants. If he wants to call teaming with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who has played with Corgan in the group Zwan and on his solo album, a Smashing Pumpkins reunion, that's fine, as long as it produces albums as potent as Zeitgeist (Reprise). On their current tour, which brings them to Pimlico to headline the Virgin Festival on Aug. 5, the Pumpkins are pairing tunes from their past and present. While Zeitgeist, which is out today, may not be as genre-defining as Siamese Dream or as ambitious as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (both on Virgin Records)

Once again, 15 aspiring cooks confront a series of culinary challenges that test their skill, nerves and judgment in the kitchen as Bravo rolls out its third season of Top Chef tomorrow. Last season brought the show to the forefront of the pop-culture zeitgeist (and blogosphere) due less to the contestants' cooking chops than to the rivalry that arose between two of the youngest contestants, Marcel Vigneron, the exasperating molecular gastronomist with the winged coiffure, and Ilan Hall, the naughty hipster-traditionalist who ultimately triumphed.

As a child, teachers often told Juan Spearman to stop scribbling drawings in his notebooks during class. His mother and uncle encouraged him to branch out into other activities. But, he said, "Cartooning has always been my passion. It's always been the No. 1 thing on my mind." This month, several of Spearman's comic strips and cartoon-style illustrations are part of the Howard Community College Invitational art exhibit. James Adkins, HCC's director for visual arts, said the annual invitational show is intended to be "a way of rewarding excellence" among students and alumni.

Morrissey's experiences in the late '90s would have made anyone miserable, let alone the musical king of the disenfranchised for nearly two decades. He lost a bitter court dispute with his former bandmates in the Smiths over royalties that not only cost him millions but also had him chastised by the judge in the case. He was dropped by his record label after his sixth solo CD, Maladjusted, was a critical and commercial flop. And his style -- a heady distillation of the world's problems into four-minute chunks filled with distinctive, often melodramatic, singing of sharp, literary lyrics -- was fading from the musical landscape, replaced by the thuggish roar of rap-metal and the flash of hip-hop.

Baltimore's annual Jewish Film Festival may seem small, but it's become quite the player over its 16-year history. Tonight through April 25, nine films - all Baltimore premieres - will be screened at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts in Owings Mills. All have Jewish themes or are the work of Jewish filmmakers. Most will likely never be shown on the big screen in these parts again. And many, made on a small budget and without big-time promotional campaigns, are counting on festivals like this to spread the good word, paving the way for a theatrical run or increasing interest in a DVD release.

Morrissey's experiences in the late '90s would have made anyone miserable, let alone the musical king of the disenfranchised for nearly two decades. He lost a bitter court dispute with his former bandmates in the Smiths over royalties that not only cost him millions but also had him chastised by the judge in the case. He was dropped by his record label after his sixth solo CD, Maladjusted, was a critical and commercial flop. And his style -- a heady distillation of the world's problems into four-minute chunks filled with distinctive, often melodramatic, singing of sharp, literary lyrics -- was fading from the musical landscape, replaced by the thuggish roar of rap-metal and the flash of hip-hop.

We're about to finish up a year that included a riveting and historic presidential election and the gravest economic crisis in decades. And the top search term on Yahoo for 2008: Britney Spears. Just like in 2007. And in 2006. And in 2005. If the year-end search list is a measure of our collective digital brain, what does it say that our MRI keeps reading "Britney"? During the past year, the 27-year-old tormented pop star was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation, settled child custody with her ex-husband, made a documentary about herself and released a song that quickly became the most downloaded by a female artist.

Heavily hyped retreads, lacking individuality, are in the box-office tank, gobbled up by the clever Finding Nemo and other inventive films. It's a pretty scary proposition, but is it possible that the average 16-year-old has better taste in movies than the rich, Ivy League-educated studio executives who've flooded us with a deluge of movie sequels this summer? Ever since the arrival of The Matrix Reloaded in mid-May, which was a box-office success but a huge disappointment to most fans and critics alike, the retread market has taken a nasty bearish turn.

BOSTON - You have to hand it to Ally McBeal. In with the zeitgeist, out with the zeitgeist - and without ever gaining an ounce. Oooh, was that mean? Well, never mind. Meanness is the point. In the final episode of the series, everybody's favorite neurotic was driven out of town by a pack of 10-year-old girls. Ally gave up her job, her friends, her apartment to rescue her daughter Maddie - product of a college egg donation - who was being tormented by classmates, otherwise known as the RMGs: the really mean girls.