MONKEY BUSINESS
In Slate's "Today's Papers," Scott Shuger writes about the successful genetic alteration of a monkey by a team of scientists at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. For further reports, turn to the Times of India, Guardian, Telegraph, and Le Monde. Opponents of genetic modification of anything—crops or mammals—have seized on the announcement as further evidence that science is playing with fire. Scientists, too, have reacted cautiously to the news. In the New Scientist Dave Kerr of Birmingham University's Institute of Cancer Studies, says: "You'd think that in evolutionary terms, because monkeys are so many steps closer to man than mice, they'd be ideal. But mice are surprisingly good for testing new drugs, for example. Also, you can do things such as transplant human tumors into mice, which I couldn't really envisage doing in monkeys. Ethically nobody would like the idea of increasing primate research and the costs would be prohibitively expensive."

MONKEY AT WORK
Monkeys have lives well beyond the laboratory, of course, as today's Australian reminds us. City officials in Delhi have hired a monkey named Raju (whose nickname is "Rambo") to rid the city's government building of his wild and marauding comrades. As Rahul Bedi writes, wild monkeys "were … terrorizing and even biting people, smashing windows, tearing up files and stealing lunch boxes. Shooting them was ruled out as Hindu religious sentiment associates monkeys with Hanuman, the mythical monkey god who helped Lord Rama defeat Ravana, the evil king. India is dotted with tens of thousands of Hanuman temples and every Tuesday is reserved for his worship. Anyone trying to catch monkeys is frequently beaten up or chased away."

SNUBBING CELEBRITIES
The Naga sadhus, an ascetically-minded Hindu sect, have denied Madonna, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, and various other famous people special privileges at the Hindu religious festival of repentance, Kumbh Mela, in Allahabad. As the Telegraph reports, the Nagu "began a protest against the 'unholy' presence of luxury tents reserved for Hollywood stars and other foreign celebrities on the banks of the Ganges, where millions of pilgrims are gathering for a sin-cleansing dip." On Wednesday, Luke Harding wrote about what has become the largest worship service in human history. "To cope with the millions expected to arrive daily in Allahabad, the authorities have constructed a giant tent city. It is on a truly epic scale-stretching across 50 square miles of sandy floodplain. Some 8,000 'turd-pickers' have been employed to maintain hygiene, 6,000 public lavatories have been erected, and 12 pontoon bridges built. There are 35 police stations, 12 hospitals, and half a million tents."

COMMUNICATING WITH GATES
Ken Auletta has written so many books and magazine articles about the media and telecommunications that you'd think he might give us all a break and abbreviate his name to Ken AT&T. This week's New Yorker (not online) has an extract from AT&T's new book about Bill Gates and Microsoft. So, too, does the online Guardian. To read all about just how Machiavellian and arrogant and frightfully grouchy the CEO of Microsoft can be, click here, and here.

PARADISE LOST
The latest "reality" TV show to irk columnists and editorial writers alike is Fox's Temptation Island, a program that would probably have been better filmed in a brothel. Four couples are marooned on island with only single men and women for company. In short—and if you still don't get it—the idea is to see who, if anyone, will be tempted to fall into the tropical undergrowth with someone other than their partner? In the New York Times' view, "The most ethically troubling aspect of 'Temptation Island' and its ilk is not the shows themselves. It is the evasions of television executives who try to make these shows sound like the latest installment in an ongoing discussion of modern commitment." In the San Francisco Chronicle, Sandy Grushow, chairman of the Fox Television Entertainment Group, defends Temptation Island. "This is not a show, as you will see, that is about sex. This is a show that is exploring the dynamics of serious relationships." "If this is reality, where are all the ugly people?" asks Julie Salamon. (On The McLaughlin Group, Julie, where else?) "The couples and the predators are in their 20's and they all look great, regardless of occupation. (A female physician has been a Playboy model.) The hardship, if there will be any, is all emotional. No rat-eating, no latrine-building, no contests of physical endurance (unless sex counts, and there wasn't any in the first episode, though there was much giggling about it). … It looks like an ad for a Marriott resort."

MORE TEMPTING THAN YOU WOULD THINK
Eighteenth-century Australia was no Temptation Island; it was a vast British penal colony. Nor was the journey from London to Sydney particularly tempting. Sian Rees' interesting new book, The Floating Brothel, charts the history of the ship Lady Julian's 1790 voyage to Australia, a journey all the more remarkable because her cargo consisted entirely of female convicts. Reviewing the book in the Telegraph, Hilary Spurling explains: "[The women's] official function was to service the ship's officers and crew. This was each girl's duty and each man's right according to a plan drawn up by civil servants, and outlined in The Times down to the smallest practical detail: 'Government has ordered them baby-clothes for 60.' " Grotesque? Yes. But Spurling says: "In fact, after 11 months at sea, the girls reached Sydney cleaner, healthier, better fed and frequently facing brighter prospects than anything they could have hoped for in the slums they came from, let alone in their filthy, fetid, typhoid-ridden native gaols." To read extracts from Rees' book, click here.

WHEN JAZZ WAS KING
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is fond of nostalgia. He's made multipart series on the Civil War and on baseball. Now comes a vast program on jazz. (To view PBS's page about Burns career, click here; for Columbia Records' Burns page, click here, though you'll need a Flash plug-in. The page also takes some time to load.) In the Village Voice, Larry Blumenfeld writes: "For some, Burns's attitude is supported by simple music-industry math: Some 60 years ago, jazz accounted for nearly 70 percent of the American market, whereas today it's more like 2 or 3 percent. The ironic flip side to the notion that jazz is 'America's indigenous music' is the fact that most Americans don't listen to it. All of which has made Burns downright evangelical. His documentary is meant as a curative of sorts. But it also points to curious truths about the relationship between jazz and contemporary American culture, between the music as it's heard today and its underlying, timeless ideals."

TRAFFIC AS PORNOGRAPHY
One way to waste an entire morning is to watch the traffic in Atlanta. If you dare, click here to view 66 simultaneous traffic cams positioned on the two main highways that pass through Georgia's capital. Such sites are proliferating. So, too, are the number of TV stations broadcasting programs about high-speed auto chases. According to Phil Patton, we're witnessing the birth of traffic porn. "I know this attraction to traffic is a little perverse. But there seem to be many traffic buffs. A few years ago the term 'weather porn' was applied to videos of tornadoes and other natural disasters. Today traffic porn is with us, born the afternoon O. J. Simpson took to the freeway in his Bronco and the nation watched for hours as helicopters fed raw footage to TV sets across the country. There are now TV shows devoted to high-speed police chases shot from helicopters. Think of it as traffic's extreme sport." To view Atlanta's Highway Emergency Response Operators Web site, click here.

PORNOGRAPHY AS TRAFFIC
Lusting after a little highway action is unlikely to meet Annabel Chong's definition of pornography. If you remember, she is the woman who had sex with 251 men in 10 hours. The event was made into a porn video as well as a documentary film Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which Robin Askew of Spike magazine describes as "a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film, whose subject comes across as a complicated young woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful, damaged and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one of the least erotic things you'll ever see."

STAGE RADICAL
There's no stage actor quite like Steven Berkoff, as Charles Spencer says. "Without [his] insistence on high-definition energy, and his hijacking of mime from poncy, posturing Frenchmen, I doubt whether Theatre de Complicité and a host of other imaginative companies would have flowered so productively over the past 20 years. … But there is a downside to Berkoff—the monstrous ego, the self-indulgence, the childish obscenity, and the gaping hole where his heart ought to be."