WHO'S WHO IN THE RED AND THE BLACK Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey that his favorite novel was by Stendhal, and for sheer debauchery The Red and the Black outdoes anything that has happened in Washington over the last five years. Daniel Mendelsohn summarizes the novel like so: "The Red and the Black follows the career of one Julien Sorel, a French peasant boy who has a sharp mind, a cute face and a talent for worming his way into the affections of powerful men and into the boudoirs of their voluptuous female relatives." For David Frum, Sorel's chief weakness is that he lacks "the audacity to be sincere." In both of these descriptions of Sorel, isn't there more than a passing resemblance to the current occupant of the Maison Blanc? Should Al Gore now tell us WHY The Red and the Black is his favorite novel?

SCRIPTING HOLLYWOOD LIVES Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, his brother Heinrich—these were just some of the writers and artists who fled Hitler's Germany for Hollywood where they were spied upon by Hoover's FBI. Alexander Stephan's new book, Communazis, is an account of the FBI's surveillance of these German émigrés. (Click here to read more about it and here to buy it.) As Martin Kettle explains, the agency "called these exiles 'Communazis' because they believed that though they were refugees from one form of tyranny, they might also be in league with [another]. … Everything from the way the writers lived— their conversations, their friends, their private lives and loves, and even the details of the books they were writing—formed part of [a] steady stream of information."

UNEASY IN IRELAND
Colm Tóibín is a novelist, essayist, and the editor of the Penguin Book of Irish Writing. In his famous 1993 essay 'In Two Minds About Ireland,' published by the London Review (not on the Web), Tóibín wrote about the need to appreciate the ambiguities of Irish life. The nationalist interpretation of the past, he said, should be rejected in favor of a more ambivalent view of Irish history. His latest novel, The Blackwater Lightship—praised by Margaret Elizabeth Williams (click here to buy it)—is, like his earlier works, an exploration of some of these ambiguities. What is it like to live a gay life (and to have AIDS) in a country and culture that has traditionally outlawed all things homosexual? If you are gay, how "Irish" are you? To read Tóibín's essay on why gay literature is so dark, click here. Tóibín is currently a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

END OF THE AUTOMOBILE
In the Telegraph, novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson welcomes the death of the automobile—heralded, he believes, by a worldwide gas crisis. "All the things we would lose, if we simply stopped using [internal combustion] engines, would be bad things. … If a majority want more cars, more planes, more fumes, more filth, more noise, then the majority should be ignored. Oh for a strong government which taxed [gas] and its guzzlers out of existence." In Audobon magazine, both presidential candidates are asked about energy conservation—timely interviews because the United States has failed to meet international fuel emission targets. Former editor of the Financial Times Geoffrey Owen writes about the oil trade and the legacy of imperialism. A New York Times editorial argues that Amtrak should receive more government money so that it can construct high-speed rail links in the nation's most congested travel corridors.

OBJECT OR SUBJECT?"As I am supposed to be remembering myself, I am central to these memories," Gore Vidal declared in his memoir Palimpsest. "I am, however, happier to be at the edge, as one is in an essay, studying someone else or what someone else has made art of." Fred Kaplan, author of Vidal's biography, tells the readers of Lingua Franca how the essayist and novelist was forever at the edge of his life while he was writing the book, scrutinizing what he, Kaplan, had made of Vidal's life and art. Vidal's new novel, The Golden Age, is the subject of this week's Slate Book Club. Click here to read what Erik Tarloff, James Fallows, and A.O. Scott have to say about the book; click here to buy the novel.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD
In an interview with Feed's Stephen Johnson, Internet legend Brewster Kahle, head of Alexa, talks about the massive electronic library he and his company have constructed. "We now have about thirty terabytes of archival material … and that's 1.5 times the size of all of the books in the Library of Congress. … [W]e're now beyond the largest collection of information ever accumulated by humans. We've gotten somewhere!"

BREACH OF TRUST
In their pursuit of knowledge, have certain anthropologists gone too far? The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes a disturbing story about a forthcoming book by Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. (Click here to order a copy.) According to the Chronicle, Tierney "accuses certain researchers of fomenting deadly disease and violence among the Yanomami, an indigenous people of Venezuela. Some scholars are worried that the allegations will make it harder for all cultural anthropologists who do fieldwork to persuade their subjects and the public that they are responsible, objective, and trustworthy."

SHOCK JOCKS
The successor to last year's "Sensation" art show, " Apocalypse," was unveiled at London's Royal Academy   this week. The exhibition arrives in New York next year; expect nothing less than an outcry—or, as the Guardian phrases it, "much grinding of dentures." Fiachra Gibbons writes: "With conservative Roman Catholics already protesting at a sculpture of the Pope being felled by a meteorite … not to mention [a] vast gorefest, Hell—comprising tens of thousands of mutilated toy SS soldiers—there was plenty to be outraged about if you were that way inclined." Norman Rosenthal, head of the RA and curator of "Apocalypse," defended his show with characteristic British self-deprecation: "I'm not an art person. I'm a straightforward philistine."

DISFIGURING THE LANDSCAPE
"Come November," Joseph Fishkin writes in the New Republic, "the World War II Memorial will ... plop down smack in the middle of the Mall. How come? The memorial is a cautionary example of what can happen when one man—in this case J. Carter Brown, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts—wields enough power ... to ram through his own grandiose vision at the expense of common sense." The unappealing design for the monument looks about as bold as anything Mussolini might have cooked up 60 years ago. To see where the monument will be built click here. For the Washington Post's coverage, click here.

HOW SHOULD WE REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST? Many people consider Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry an inflammatory book; some say it is the work of an anti-Semite. In an extract published by the Guardian, Finkelstein writes: "I sometimes think that American Jewry 'discovering' the Nazi Holocaust was worse than its having been forgotten. True, my parents brooded in private; the suffering they endured was not publicly validated. But wasn't that better than the current crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom?" For passages such as these, the New York Times has compared the book to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous 19^th-century tract forged by Russian anti-Semites. Elie Wiesel, described as a "silly" opportunist by Finkelstein, refuses to read The Holocaust Industry. A spokeswoman tells the New York Post that "the Nobel laureate was too disgusted to read [it], adding that he considered it 'slanderous and not worth comment.' "