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From the Chicago Tribune:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak will never forget the moment he first caught sight of the grubby little street girl who would go on to star in his Golden Globe-winning movie "Osama." … As he scoured the dusty sidewalk for suitable faces, he felt a tug at his sleeve, looked down, and found himself staring into the biggest, saddest eyes he had ever seen. He knew instantly that this was the girl he had been looking for. … "Her eyes told the stories of pain that are the stories of Afghanistan," he said. … Marina Golbahari, then 12 … won worldwide acclaim for her performance as the girl who dresses as a boy to circumvent the Taliban's ban on female employment. "Osama" was Afghanistan's first feature film since the Taliban regime was toppled, and in January it became the first Afghan film to win a Golden Globe, for best foreign film. … For Marina, who had spent most of her life scratching a living on the streets of Kabul, dodging the Taliban police, it was not a difficult role to play. … For the first four days of filming … Marina was terrified of the camera, which she took for some kind of weapon, and she shrank in fear whenever he pointed it her way. "I thought he was trying to kill me," she says, laughing now at the memory as she sipped tea at the one-room mud house she shares with 11 members of her family.

LANSING, Mich. — Selling Oldsmobiles has been Leo Jerome's life for four decades. One of the dealerships he owns sold 5,000 Olds models in a single year. Last month the 61-year-old Jerome suffered through the brutal indignity of selling one Oldsmobile. Just one. … Businesses collapse all the time and, as history has shown, so do car manufacturers—Studebaker, Packard, Nash, Hudson . … Some, like the Cluts, never—and perhaps thankfully—made it into production. But in Lansing, the hometown of Oldsmobile, the car's passing into the realm of memories and museums is painful. T-shirts boast that the wondrous mechanical creation of Ransom E. Olds predated Chevy, Dodge and Ford. Prominent landmarks, like the downtown home of minor league baseball's Lansing Lugnuts, bear the Oldsmobile name. Oldsmobile was the first mass-produced car with an automatic transmission. It was the first with a speedometer and the first modern car with front-wheel drive. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1907 visit to Lansing, rode down Michigan Avenue toward what is now Michigan State University in a 1907 2-cylinder REO. … Now Oldsmobile, once the nation's fourth-largest automaker, is the oldest carmaker to fold.

• What does the soul weigh? The recent film 21 Grams thinks it has the answer. So did the early 20th century doctor Duncan MacDougall, who established the weight of the soul as a scientific "fact" after elaborate but dubious measurements of how much weight human and canine bodies lose at death. Unfortunately, MacDougall's work is marred by "the poor accuracy of his scales, the huge variability in his data, the all-too-few people studied, [and] the tricky skill of pinpointing the exact time of death," says the Melbourne Age. That didn't stop MacDougall from publishing his findings in 1907, the same year Einstein put forth the more reliable E=mc2. While the body does indeed decrease in weight as it decomposes, MacDougall's belief that humans suddenly lose three fourths of an ounce with the departure of their soul does not, says the Age, carry any weight. Full story

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