Human Behavior

French director François Ozon can usually be counted on for dark irony of the juiciest sort - his 2003 "Swimming Pool" of sexual provocations comes to mind. But the filmmaker has an especially deft touch when a dash of comedy is mixed in. He uses this to delicious effect in his latest, "In the House. " Adapted by Ozon from Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga's "The Boy in the Last Row," the literary conceit upon which this "House" stands required some maneuvering to open up the world of Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer)

French director François Ozon can usually be counted on for dark irony of the juiciest sort - his 2003 "Swimming Pool" of sexual provocations comes to mind. But the filmmaker has an especially deft touch when a dash of comedy is mixed in. He uses this to delicious effect in his latest, "In the House. " Adapted by Ozon from Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga's "The Boy in the Last Row," the literary conceit upon which this "House" stands required some maneuvering to open up the world of Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer)

What annoys you? Traffic jams, car alarms, flight delays, phone trees, junk mail? People who cut in line? People who talk loudly on cellphones? People who eat noisily and clip their nails in public? You're not alone. These are just some of the irksome things we confront daily. Since annoyances are ubiquitous, and so many people are annoyed so much of the time, you might think that science could offer some insights about why we find certain things so annoying and what we can do about them.

"The Master" takes some getting used to. This is a superbly crafted film that's at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn't want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness. It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing. PHOTOS: Celebrity photos by the Times Its writer-director, of course, is the all-out visionary Paul Thomas Anderson, an all-in filmmaker whose previous work like "Boogie Nights" and "There Will Be Blood" explored strong and compelling personal conflicts.

During my years working in chemistry and invention-processing, I used to think that technical progress in the physical sciences was both the blessing and hope of humankind. Just look at all the marvelous labor-saving and entertainment devices that research and engineering have given us! They may soon offer us round-trip service to the moon! No longer. I now believe that progress in the field of human behavior is much more important. Researching human behavior is far more difficult than learning to manipulate the more predictable electrons.

What makes one soldier stay and fight on a battlefield and another desert and flee? That question intrigued Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, a wife-and-husband research team of UCLA economists who dug into the details of 41,000 Civil War soldiers' lives for an unusual look at the social forces shaping human behavior during conflict. The result is their book "Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War."

When UC Irvine advertised four years ago for a mathematical political scientist, Sung-Chull Lee was one of few in the country who could claim such an esoteric title. Lee, 36, uses numbers and mathematical equations, instead of words, to predict and discuss human behavior. At UC Irvine, he belongs to an elite team of researchers under the direction of Duncan Luce, a renown professor in the cognitive sciences.

Anytime a VIP gets caught with his (or her) pants down — Arnold Schwarzenegger or Anthony Weiner, for example — you can almost hear the collective "huh?" around the nation's water coolers, on its Twitter feeds and shared over its backyard fences. What in the heck were those guys thinking? Where were they when John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton and so many others crashed and burned? Why wasn't the very real risk of shame and humiliation enough to stop them cold? More than 2,000 years ago Socrates asserted in Plato's "Phaedrus" that two horses contend for our souls — one, unruly, passionate and constantly pulling in the direction of pleasure, and the other restrained, dutiful, obedient and governed by a sense of shame.

Imagine Botticelli's and Veronese's nude Venuses rolled into one and transformed into a voluptuous African fertility goddess. Picture Rodin's "The Thinker" as a black lumberjack, sitting on a stump and dreaming of a buxom woman in a bright pink bikini. Fancy Shirley Temple as a black girl wearing a lei and a grass skirt, dancing the hula on the beach while Bill Robinson, her dancing partner in movies, grins on the horizon.

Gay and AIDS activists, even at the risk of providing fodder for homophobes, need to examine how AIDS developed, and the reason is soberingly simple. Researchers are virtually unanimous in believing that if AIDS were cured tomorrow and we returned to the ways of the 1970s, the whole nightmare could easily happen again. Scientists are confident that what can be amplified by one form of human behavior can be prevented by another.

R. Duncan Luce, a UC Irvine mathematical psychologist who received the National Medal of Science in 2005 for his pioneering scholarship in behavioral sciences, died Aug. 11 at his home in Irvine after a brief illness, the university announced. He was 87. In 1988, Luce founded and became director of UC Irvine's Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. He was later named distinguished research professor in cognitive sciences and economics. His work, according to the university, combined formal math models with psychological experiments to try to understand and predict human behavior, including how individuals and groups make decisions.

Independence is a crucial part of the legend of John Cassavetes, the original Method actor turned DIY filmmaker. For that reason his early forays into studio directing - he made 1961's "Too Late Blues" for Paramount and 1963's Stanley Kramer-produced "A Child Is Waiting" for United Artists - are usually thought of as footnotes at best, or compromised failures at worst (a view that has been ascribed to Cassavetes himself). But even in these minor works, the Cassavetes touch - the delicate way of handling emotional messiness, the tough but ultimately generous view of human behavior - is unmistakable.

Tolstoy A Russian Life Rosamund Bartlett Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 544 pp., $35 Count Lev Tolstoy is one of those writers who was as fascinating and complex as his novels and stories. A man so awful and quarrelsome to those around him, especially his long-suffering wife, was nonetheless able to produce masterpieces of serene introspection and humane insights. How could Tolstoy, a loner, a quintessential outsider all his life, understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons?

Anytime a VIP gets caught with his (or her) pants down — Arnold Schwarzenegger or Anthony Weiner, for example — you can almost hear the collective "huh?" around the nation's water coolers, on its Twitter feeds and shared over its backyard fences. What in the heck were those guys thinking? Where were they when John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton and so many others crashed and burned? Why wasn't the very real risk of shame and humiliation enough to stop them cold? More than 2,000 years ago Socrates asserted in Plato's "Phaedrus" that two horses contend for our souls — one, unruly, passionate and constantly pulling in the direction of pleasure, and the other restrained, dutiful, obedient and governed by a sense of shame.

Thanks to modern technology, peering into private lives all around the world has never been easier. When Su Lin, the San Diego-born daughter of Chinese parents Bai Yun and Gao Gao, had her first medical exam, eager viewers proclaimed that she was the cutest baby ever. When a mother of three died in an airplane accident, leaving the father to care for the family alone, thousands of people across the country mourned online. As a youngster at New York University got close to takeoff, his family's Facebook wall was crammed with notes from well-wishers.

What annoys you? Traffic jams, car alarms, flight delays, phone trees, junk mail? People who cut in line? People who talk loudly on cellphones? People who eat noisily and clip their nails in public? You're not alone. These are just some of the irksome things we confront daily. Since annoyances are ubiquitous, and so many people are annoyed so much of the time, you might think that science could offer some insights about why we find certain things so annoying and what we can do about them.

"The Master" takes some getting used to. This is a superbly crafted film that's at times intentionally opaque, as if its creator didn't want us to see all the way into its heart of darkness. It's a film bristling with vivid moments and unbeatable acting, but its interest is not in tidy narrative satisfactions but rather the excesses and extremes of human behavior, the interplay of troubled souls desperate to find their footing. PHOTOS: Celebrity photos by the Times Its writer-director, of course, is the all-out visionary Paul Thomas Anderson, an all-in filmmaker whose previous work like "Boogie Nights" and "There Will Be Blood" explored strong and compelling personal conflicts.

In their drive to strip away the secrets of sex, scientists have eavesdropped on the conversations of college students, waved T-shirts soaked with men's sweat under the noses of women, measured chimpanzees' genitals and manipulated the genes of rodents and flies. Sex and choosing a mate are so important that our entire cultural repertoire--from art and poetry to David Letterman jokes--may have evolved primarily to help us attract better mates, according to one recently published book.

Outspoken comic Chelsea Handler is opening up about her abortion at 16 -- and taking aim at reality shows that star pregnant teens. Handler got the profile treatment in the New York Times recently, where she touched on her repeated attempts at a mainstream career. Chelsea decides she's too obnoxious to be a "media darling" like Tina Fey. "People are too P.C.... We need to be focusing on other things. We're seeking out such grossness in human behavior ... '16 and Pregnant.' Getting rewarded for being pregnant when you're a teenager?

Humanity may be in the process of being transformed by a virtual revolution, but as Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson tell it in their exhilarating book "Infinite Reality," virtual worlds are as old as human experience, whether one is thinking of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, the Ayahuasca trips of the Amazonian Urarina people or Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds. " To a large extent, then, the virtual revolution underway is not merely a technological sleight of hand in which digital immersive tools trick the mind into accepting artificial environments as real, but something more profound — the fulfillment of an ancient human impulse.