Alexis C. Madrigal

It's been a few days since the Curiosity rover sent back a stunning image of the Martian landscape. We were getting impatient, actually. But no longer! Check out this view of the lower reaches of Mt. Sharp, which the rover uploaded late to JPL.

This is our best view yet of the layered formations to which the Rover is headed. John Grotzinger, project scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory, called it a "thrilling image" in a teleconference with reporters this afternoon. 

"If the surface of the crater looks like the Mojave," Grotzinger said, "This looks more like the Four Corners area of the Western US, or Sedona Arizona, buttes and mesas."

Grotzinger followed up on the photo later in the call. "These are the foothills of Mt. Sharp," he said. "There are hills there that are the size of 2, 3, 4 story buildings with canyons running through them."

Here's some context for the image above. It's taken roughly in the area of the red box, based on Grotzinger's direction.

The new image is a much better view of the area than we previously had, as you can see from the decidedly lower-resolution (and grayscale!) panorama that was released earlier this week below.

The top image is probably taken from near where you see the red box in the panorama below.

And, this is roughly the direction that the Rover is looking, towards its target area.

A new app, Picle, offers a new form of mobile story production that feels just right.

Walking through my neighborhood, I passed a local school: The sound of children playing popped out its open windows and into my ears. For a split second, I could remember being that age, laughing that way, running with that cadence. 

"This is a good feeling," I thought. "I'd like to share this nostalgic moment." But no photo, no matter how well Instagrammed, could capture the sound of the kids, and @altissima aside, Twitter poetry doesn't normally work. 

What I needed was sound! Not video, but sound. 

So, I tweeted, "An iPhone app that captures a photo and 10 seconds of either A) ambient sound or B) what's in your headphones. Exists?"

Several people (thanks @joecorcoran, @brownpau, @gilfer) responded that such an app did exist, at least for Part A of my question. 

It's called Picle ("pickle").

I've been playing with the Picle app for the last day now, and I'm convinced that this is a fantastic idea that may be the unexpected winner in this contest to find the "Instagram of video." At the very least, it's a great tool for exploring the frontiers of mobile storytelling. 

At the core, Picle -- the work of the London creative agency Made by Many -- is exactly what I asked for: you take a photo and either simultaneously or serially record up to 10 seconds of audio to accompany it. These are then presented in a (hot) visual interface. This video should give you a pretty good idea of the different ways you could use it:

Weddings, birthdays, hikes, talking to yourself about inequality, concerts, street performances, sporting events, kids stuff, etc. The stuff of Instagram, but also a whole new category of things. Cute kids + cute kids saying cute stuff. Busker + busker's music. Etc. 

Looking at "picles" is initially disconcerting. When you hit the play button and start to hear sound, it's almost as if the image is broken because it is not moving in time with the soundtrack. 

But, then the experience started to change. The unsyncing of the sound and image helped me concentrate on the photograph. You can't just flip past the image with another thumb flick. You have to really look at it while the sound finishes playing. (Look at your fish image!)

These objects are, in a sense, the inverse of the animated GIF. Weird thought, let me explain. Both GIFs and picles take the idea of video (pictures + sound) and slice its components in different ways. GIFs take away the sound and focus your attention on a few frames of visual motion. Picles take away the motion and add the sound. 

What does that do? I think these objects focus your attention on the narrative that led to the creation of the photo. And it's this psychological trick that I think makes Picle like Instagram. Filters are a way to infuse your subject with a feeling that suggests a story. Here, the audio channel -- rather than the visual effect -- delivers the emotional message. 

In that, as Made by Many's Will Roissetter pointed out, Picle approximates the way your memories actually work.

"Like your memories, they are snapshots: sea crashing against the rocks and that beautiful sunset," Roissetter said. "Memories are made up of moments. They don't flow like a seamless video."

Picle soft launched at SXSW and it turns out they are on the verge of a major revamp as its makers get ready to turn it into an actual product. They entered SXSW with 15 users and left with 30,000. Now, they're up to about 60,000. 

But the thing about Picle as it is currently constituted is that it is not primarily a social network. It could have two users and still be interesting as a way of producing a new kind of digital object. In fact, the networking features only exist on the website and are only sort of functional (e.g. you can "follow" users but only if you type the URL of their profiles into your browser; there's no search functionality). 

A deep dive into one of the enduring mysteries of life: how dogs can spray so much water from their fur after you give them a bath.

It turns out that we didn't really know how such shakes worked until Andrew Dickerson, Zachary Mills, and David Hu of Georgia Tech began to figure it out with the help of ultra high-speed footage of animals drying themselves.

"Engineers are interested in new kinds of ideas and any type of animal that is a champion of something," Hu told me. "Dogs are good at getting dry. Any time an animal is really good at something, there is an idea there that can be used."

First presented at a conference in 2010, their work on how mammals shake was just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and it is fascinating. 

Let me give you the dog-park conversation-making factlet up top: A dog can shake roughly 70 percent of the water from its fur in four seconds. Nearly three quarters of the moisture in the time it took you to read that last paragraph. Pretty amazing stuff. 

But that champion efficacy raises more questions than it answers.

First, why does it work so well? How long does it take your socks to dry a comparable amount if you get them wet? How are they generating all that force? Second, many mammals are capable of the shake. Is how your dog does the same way that a mouse or a lion does? Third, why do animals do the shake at all? What's the evolutionary advantage that it confers? 

Let's look at the actual mechanism. A dog's backbone can't really whip all the way around. In fact, Hu told me, it can can only move around 30 degrees in either direction. If you imagine a clock face with the backbone at 12 o'clock, the backbone is making it to the 11 and 1 marks. 

But think about a dog's skin. You know how loose it is? I had previously thought the main purpose of loose dog skin was so that they would look funny on UpsideDownDogs.com. But it turns out there is another more important reason. Because the skin is loose, it can whip around farther and faster than the backbone can. The skin, to which the fur is attached, travels at three times the speed of the backbone, which, according to the math, generates nine times as much force on the water droplets, helping fling them off. That's the magic of the mammal shake. 

The chart below shows the backbone with the black dotted line. It's moving back and forth but not a huge amount. The skin, on the other hand, denoted here by the blue line, is moving a huge amount. It's going 90 degrees in either direction, or to keep with the clock-face visual, it's swinging from 3 o'clock to 9 o'clock. 

The blue line shows the measured skin position of three dogs, the bars show the standard deviation of measurement, and the red line shows the best fit among the tested animals (David Hu).

So, get this, the process that dogs use is common to many mammals, even if some, like kangaroos and elephants, don't really need to use it for a variety of reasons. And the researchers found something astounding: the animals tuned how quickly they shook to their size. That is to say, the bigger animals shook slower while the smaller ones shook really quickly. That's because they need to exert a certain amount of force on the water droplets to shake them off. For the little guys, that means moving really quickly: a mouse has to shake 30 times per second, a rat 18 times per second, and a cat nine times per second. (Remember the labrador retriever was at about 4 times per second.)

"The largest animal is 10,000 times heavier than the smallest animal," Hu told me, "but the forces on the drops are basically constant across all these mammals."

Given the prevalence of this shaking mechanism across so many different kinds of mammals, we have to ask, what's the big advantage this little trick confers? 

Here's Hu's hypothesis. Imagine you are an ancestor of a modern dog or lion or goat. It's winter and you fall into a cold stream. It is imperative that you dry off because water destroys the insulation of your fur. Assuming there isn't a warm sun to do some of the evaporating, you've got to do it yourself. If you couldn't shake, you'd have to use body heat to warm the air and do the evaporation. Hu's team calculated how much energy that would take and it is substantial.

"A wet 60-pound dog, with one pound of water in its fur, would use 20 percent of its daily caloric intake simply to air-dry," the team wrote in their most recent paper. "It is thus a matter of life or death that terrestrial animals remain dry in cold weather."

The shake, by contrast, is a highly energy-efficient way of getting mostly dry. "My biologist hat," said Hu, who has dual appointments in biology and engineering, "says as soon as you evolved hair because it traps warm air between the hairs, you have to evolve a way to keep the hair dry."

But he attempted to prove that hypothesis with his engineering hat on. That's the promise of biomechanics, Hu's field. It lets you run experiments that test the physics that underpin living creatures. "We mostly use [engineering's] analytical tools to look at synthetic things," he said. "But lately, part of the grand challenge of engineering is to understand biology and make our robots and vehicles not more living, but more like living things."

No humanmade robot is designed with the loose skin of a labrador. But why not? "Take this idea of self-drying and self-cleaning [machines]. There is a lot of literature like that because autonomous robots are going to have to deal with this on their own." Perhaps the Mars rovers of the future should shake the dust off themselves.

"If we relook at these ancient mechanisms," Hu concluded, "we can build robots better."

And while we're at it, we can explore the enduring mysteries of life, too. Like why that damn ungrateful dog soaked you better than a hose after you gave it a bath. Now if only they could figure out that wet dog smell.

Even the most casual fan of space travel would notice something funny about the latest image from the Mars Curiosity rover, as seen below. I mean, they call Mars the "Red Planet" for a reason, and here we are looking at blue rocks.

There is an explanation for this unexpected photographic turn, but first, take a look at a similar image from the Curiosity mission: 

Big difference, right? The bottom image shows just how the plain would look if you brought your Canon G11 and started snapping photos. It is what Mars actually looks like.* The light from the sun as filtered through the dusty Martian atmosphere makes everything look red to your eye.

"If you were to take a picture without white blanacing, everything would look reddish. When we take our images and have uncorrected images, there's a little less contrast in the ground. The shadows aren't dark. There is a lot of diffuse light... in the air," Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist at JPL, told a teleconference of reporters today.. "When we correct for Earth sunlight, you get a lot more contrast."

Why would NASA scientists want to Photoshop their own images of Mars? Well, there's a problem with having a bunch of geologists look at these types of all-red images: though Mars has many of the same types of rocks that we have on Earth, they don't look the same there. The change in the light actually makes it harder for our scientists to figure out what they are looking at. So, you drop in the "Earth sunlight" filter and bang, everything is a little bit easier to see, precisely because it looks less Martian.

Is this 100-percent necessary for planetary geologists to do their work? No, but it probably helps to be able to bring decades of experience and intuition from working in earthly lighting to your work on Mars. And don't worry: the images from the Curiosity mission are going to be released in both Marsy and Earthy varieties.

* How we make images of space and other planets always reminds me of the contingency of our own visual systems. We see these wavelengths but not those. We see this much light, but not that much. And we see, almost always, in the light on Earth. These things seem like constants built into the fabric of reality, but that is only because we are humans on Earth. Animals don't see precisely like us and neither do our robots. So when we see images from Hubble that are obviously false-colored, should we complain because "that's not how a human would see it?" Or should be just give in to the glorious subjectivity of visual experience?

A dose of web journalism could give Zakaria a more rigorous sourcing ethos.

Zakaria's new beat, learning the rules of citation through aggregation (Reuters).

Aggregation. It's the bane of old-school journalists who hate that some web kids out there take their hard-won reporting and wise analysis and throw it into content-management systems with a new byline on top. (They particularly hate the word "content," and love to scarequote it.) 

And I understand that. If you put in a lot of work, you want people to see it. To the victor, go the spoils, etc. 

We do a mix of original reporting and aggregation here, so I'm sympathetic to both sides. And yes, aggregating is a different game from reporting. Those who do the latter see all the ways that the former is not what they are doing, but may (in some circumstances) be more profitable, and it scares them (rightly). They can see that the routes to journalism's upper echelon may not run through the cop beat or covering those mythic schoolboard meetings but Gawker or our own Atlantic Wire. Being fast, knowing to how to find the good stuff in other people's work, and knowing how to sell a story may be success factors on par with talking up city councilors, chatting up local residents, or calling scientists. 

It's easy to see the downsides in such a skill set. If you're going fast, you make mistakes (which commenters graciously point out with vim and vigor). You do not independently verify everything you write about. You do not develop the same basic skillset as a reporter. Scoops are not your holy grail. Plus, because you are fundamentally in the distribution game, you get to know the icky quantified insides of web ecology and psychology a bit too well.

But what about the good stuff? Surely, the best of the aggregators out there are learning some fascinating things about how to be good online and all of them are training themselves into certain habits of thought. Our own Rebecca Greenfield mentioned this to me this morning when she read about Fareed Zakaria's liberal take on sourcing quotes in his book. As told to the Washington Post:

"As I write explicitly [in the book], this is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted," his said. The book contains "hundreds" of comments and quotes that aren't attributed because doing so, in context, would "interrupt the flow for the reader," he said.

He compared his technique to other popular non-fiction authors. "Please look at other books in this genre and you will notice that I'm following standard practice," he said.

Let's put aside the assertion that people do not attribute quotes they did not hear with their own ears in any way in popular non-fiction books as a matter of debate (and annoyance to those of us who did labor at putting in hundreds of end notes).

"On the web, we're a lot of things, but you would never lift a quote and not provide a link or a source. It's just bizarre," Greenfield said to me. "Maybe it has to do with the idea that you would so obviously be caught, but it's also just how the job works."

An unsourced quote might pop up on Tumblr, but it would not happen with pro aggregators. Why? First, there are the ethical norms. Second, you'd get caught, by your commenters if no one else. But third -- and I'd argue most importantly, half the value the aggregator is providing is the quote and the other half is where it came from; a bunch of unsourced quotes would just not generate much interest or traffic. You think I'm kidding? Look at Gawker's top stories today. Every one of them (I clicked on a dozen) contains a source link and attribution. Same goes for The Wire.

Counterintuitively, we're training our aggregators to recognize the value in other people's work (and brands). We're telling them, "You're as good as the people you link to." 

And that's the opposite of how print editors have traditionally thought. It's an enduringly great attribute of print magazines that they rigorously fact-check their writing. But references to other publications are regularly stripped out of text headed to publication whenever possible at every magazine I know of. And man, how many bloggers out there have written a great story only to see the Wall Street Journal (or the Times or Newsweek, etc) rip off the idea and execution without so much as a hat tip?* If that's your journalistic upbringing, of course you wouldn't worry about using an uncited quote here or there.

So, perhaps, instead of suspending Fareed Zakaria for a month, Time and CNN should put him on aggregation duty. Every day, he comes into the office and he's got nine hours (probably skipping lunch) to get up six to eight beautifully sourced aggregation posts. I'm happy to front the cost of Mountain Dew. His first beat will be political fashion accessories, and after that, he can move on to gaffes and goats. 

The daily deals site has verifiably tanked on Wall Street.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, perhaps on his way to the bank (Reuters).

Even the President knows Mohawk Guy!

Reuters.

Bobak Ferdowsi's rocket-and-mohawk propelled trip to stardom continues. Today, President Barack Obama called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to offer his  congratulations to the team for landing the Curiosity rover on Mars.

After the standard platitudes about inspiring children to become scientists and before the standard platitudes about protecting research funding, Obama had some fun with the team. (This is my own transcription from the live call.)  

Here's how @darth visualized that hypothetical Obamahawk:

Obama continued, "It does seem NASA has come a long way from the white shirts, dark-rimmed glasses, and pocket protectors. You guys are a little cooler than you used to be."

Well... maybe.

In any case, Curiosity's been in software update mode for the past few days, but here's the video update from Friday, so you can get prepped for the week ahead.

And as a special treat, I will note that I, like Barack Obama, once wanted a mohawk. The difference between us, though, is that I actually shaved one. Here's me in Madrid some years back:

Another amputee beat Oscar Pistorius to the Olympics... by 108 years.

Meet George Eyser. He's the one in the center there, wearing khakis as he holds himself upside down on the parallel bars. Eyser won six medals in the 1904 Olympics, including three gold medals. He had one flesh-and-blood leg. The other was amputated below the knee and terminated in a wooden prosthetic.

He is quite obviously the forebear of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter, who competed in this year's London Olympics.

The totally understandable tendency when we hear about Eyser or a Pistorius is to go straight to the Great Man theory: "Wow! That guy is a a hero!" And Eyser is obviously tremendously talented. Let's even go with heroic. But I couldn't help but wonder: how does a guy with a wooden leg get all the training to be an Olympic champion, even in the decidedly more amateur and amateurish games of those days? What were the structures and circumstances that helped him fulfill his astounding potential? Who helped him "build that" body and skill set?

And to tell that story, we have to start with Napoleon.

No, seriously, Napoleon, the military genius and notoriously short man from France. Turns out that in the early 19th century, when the French army was running roughshod over all its European neighbors, a guy named Frederick Ludwig Jahn, aka "Father Jahn," whipped up a frenzy among the Germans to train their youth in the gymnastic arts. His story gets complicated quickly as many later thinkers and writers implicated him as one of the influences that came together to form Nazi thought. But the organizational infrastructure that he created -- the Turnverein, or gymnastics club -- moved out of his control and became very strongly associated with the radical political movements that attempted revolutions in 1848. Yes, gymnastics clubs as revolutionary machinery. Believe it.

"The aftermath of the 1848 revolutions devastated the German gymnastic movement. Clubs were disbanded, property confiscated and leaders lost to jail or exile," one academic Encyclopedia of the revolution summarized. "The various attempts to form a union of gymnastic clubs likewise fell victim to the Reaction. In these circumstances, the Turnverein turned away from politics to concentrate on its gymnastic program."

But Germany's loss was America's gain. When emigrants arrived in the new world -- say, in St. Louis -- from the German states, they brought the tradition of the Turnverein with them. They were, as one local St. Louis historian put it, the "centers of all that is best in German life. They foster not only physical culture, but race patriotism and love of the old mother tongue."

And not just the gymnastics part. They pushed for an eight-hour work day week and an end to child labor, and they just so happened to be strong supporters of the Union and the abolition of slavery. When war came, they signed up in droves, emptying out their gyms to fight the Confederacy. Here's how an online exhibit at the Missouri History Museum described their contribution:

As the impending war approached, St. Louis's German community comprised a strong core of Union support within the city. Members of the Turnverein, or Turners as they were called, met at Turner Hall, their meeting place on Tenth Street, and resolved to "stand fast by the Union, endorse the present administration in its attitude against secession and...defend the flag with their life's blood." They used Turner Hall to store arms and recruit members into Home Guard units.

So far, most of the excitement about the Curiosity rover has sprung from its precise landing and its first surroundings, the floor of the Gale Crater. But the rover is meant to rove, and rove it will. 

Today, in a press briefing, Dawn Sumner, a UC Davis geologist on the Curiosity science team, gave the first firm indication of where they might be driving next. They're headed to the base of Mt. Sharp, the large geological feature rising in the middle of Gale Crater. The video above zooms in on the spot in the most recent Panorama that Curiosity has phoned home. 

(Imagine standing there with Curiosity looking out over that plain towards Mt. Sharp and thinking, "Man, here we go," as you start walking. This is why westerns always remind me of space.)

Below, the target region is outlined in red on a map. The pink X marks the Rover's current location. Each square in the map is roughly 0.9 miles on a side, so the rover has at least four miles to go. 

They're headed to this specific location because, as Sumner put it, "These beautiful knolls of layered rocks and those layers are what's recording the history of Gale Crater." 

Right now, the team is assessing the precise path that they want to take. It's going to be quite a climb. Let's zoom out a little and recall that the rover is positioned here within the depression but facing up the mountain:

I've marked the direction in which the science team wants to go in the elevation map below. This is roughly the direction that we zoomed in on in the panorama video.

Now that you know where we're looking, here's that panorama again -- this time as a still -- with a red box where we're headed. Make sure to click the photograph, it's way better to explore this thing big.

The first high-res image we've seen of the Curiosity rover's descent. Just look at it.

What can you really say about this image from Mars? Nothing.

But I'll try. The best images are when human artifacts are presented against the Martian landscape. What's fascinating is that it's *our* technology that looks alien, not the empty world to which we've sent it. 

Here's the image's context: as the Rover descended to Mars, it jettisoned its heat shield, which fell to the Martian surface. As it went, the Rover took images with the Mars Descent Imager, known as MARDI. A few of these photographs have been released by NASA, but the bandwidth to Mars is rather limited, so we hadn't seen a single full-resolution frame from that camera. Until now. Because that's what you're looking at. Click on the photo to enlarge it and just pan around a little.

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has a few more details and cleaned up the image above a tiny bit.

Update, 1:56pm: NASA's put out a full-resolution close-up of the heat shield. Behold!

A visual explanation of where our robotic explorer is sitting on the red planet.

But after staring at tes view for a couple of reverential minutes, I started to realize that I had nagging questions. Where was the context? What was I looking at? And most fundamentally, where on Mars was our rover actually sitting, aside from somewhere near "The Gale Crater." This is a visual explainer that I put together for myself and you.

First, let's get clear on where the Mars Rover is. NASA pinpointed its location today and was even able to see the various debris from the entry scattered within a few thousand feet of its current location.

The area you're seeing here on Mars is actually very small. It doesn't give us context for where the Rover is. Let's zoom out a bit.

The map above was created for the mission. It divvied up the prospective landing area into roughly 0.9 mile by 0.9 mile boxes. (Technically, we're talking about a sphere, so they were 0.025 degrees in latitude by 0.025 degrees in longitude.) The lander was expected to touchdown in box 50; it hit in 51. Let's zoom out again, so you can see the whole landing area (remember: click to enbiggen).



All right, we're almost to the level of context we need to understand the first color photo. Just two more hops til you can really get it. I'm going to do them back to back.

All right! Now we've got what we need. The rover is sitting inside a crater, which dips down a couple of miles from the surrounding Martian topology, but it's backed right up against Mt. Sharp, the mountain to its southeast. What we're really seeing in that first photograph, which was shot looking north, is the rim of the crater, which would head back out to "sea level," or an elevation of close to zero. The elevation map makes it even more clear:

Our elevation map helps explain other photographs from the rover site, too. Like this one of a mountain that appears to be pretty close to the rover. Why, the elevation map happens to show a mountain to the southeast of the rover. That's Mt. Sharp and we can know roughly what direction the camera was aimed.



Now that we've got you oriented, let's zoom out a little bit from the Gale Crater, so you can see the wider context.

And again.

Last one. Our rover now just a speck on our neighboring planet's surface.

This is a map of a roughly equivalent area of the Earth on the same scale.

NASA's robots have gotten bigger, better, more productive, and more powerful.

Breaking down what the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter saw of our rover's descent.

As the Mars Curiosity Rover descended through the atmosphere of Mars, humans on their couches weren't the only ones watching. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA's Martian satellite, was also looking -- and taking pictures. Today, the MRO released an image of the rover descending, still attached to its parachute and before the heartstopping Sky Crane maneuvers. You can see it up there on the upper left, labeled (1).

What you're looking at is a large parachute -- 16 stories tall, 50 feet in diameter, the largest ever flown outside the Earth-Moon system -- and beneath it, the one-ton rover with its "backshell" on. The parachute is on the upper right, labeled (2).

Finally, in the last panel (3), we see the full entry, landing, and descent sequence rendering. The MRO image is from about the middle of the overall maneuver, though it's difficult to tell if it was taken before or after the heatshield on the Mars-side of the rover package was jettisoned. The full frame from the HiRISE camera is shown below. (Click to enbiggen!)

Details aside, I find the coordination of our robots on Mars to be more mindblowing than even the amazing descent of the rover. This is a nascent exploration ecosystem. And the metaness of it all -- humans tweeting about watching a humanmade satellite watch a humanmade rover descend on Mars -- feels profound, not forced. The layers of effort and decades of organization necessary to make this feat possible provide the grit and structure for the easy triumphal narrative. 10 years of stale sweat, bad coffee, and thankless work for seven minutes of glory in the long story of knowing where we live.

The Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars in a picture-perfect landing sequence. But really, the proof is in the pudding, and by pudding, I mean pictures. The pictures aren't just something to look at, but represent clear evidence that the rover's imaging and communication systems are in good shape. The ability to send the data that contains a photograph is step one of the Martian phase of this complex and fascinating mission.

So, it's probably fitting that the first image we got from the surface of Mars is our rover looking at its own shadow. We're there on the surface of the next planet out from the sun, staring at ourselves, marveling at the achievement.

Two legends meet in the pages of The Atlantic.

Reuters

How beautiful they look in their wedding pictures. Staid Arthur Miller has been a scandal to his friends ... for he and Marilyn sit in entwinement for hours. Like Hindu sculpture, their hands go over one another's torsos, limbs, and outright privates in next to full view of company ...

But ... like everything else in Marilyn's life, she lived in the continuing condition of a half-lie, which she imposed upon everyone as an absolute truth--it was that Miller adored her out of measure. Like a goddess. Since Miller was also a man with such separate needs as the imperative to write well ... this half-lie or half-truth that he adored her without limit had to collapse ... Now there was an absolute denial, equally ill-founded. He did not love her at all. He wished only to use her ...

She, with her profound distrust of everyone about her, begins to suspect him. Has he married her because he can't write anymore? Is his secret ambition to become a Hollywood producer? ...

She has lived with the beautiful idea that some day she and Arthur would make a film that would bestow upon her public identity a soul. Her existence as a sex queen will be reincarnated in a woman. It is not that her sex will disappear so much as that the sex queen will become an angel of sex ...

It was as if she wanted to become the angel of American life; as if, beneath every remaining timidity and infirmity, she felt that she deserved it. Perhaps she did. Are there ten women's lives so Napoleonic as her own?