Periscope

--From Slate.com

Reality Check

Is screening embryos for potential diseases a good idea? More than 3 million children worldwide have been born through in-vitro fertilization, but nearly 500,000 embryos have been rejected in the United States alone. The practice originally targeted fatal diseases, but now includes low-risk illnesses like arthritis. Others, such as leukemia, have no clear genetic cause, and 42 percent of U.S. IVF clinics allow parents to select for gender.

--From Slate.com

BOOKS: How to Fake It

If they keep putting out books to get you up to speed on what everybody else knows, eventually there won't be any more Bluffers or Dummies. This fall's biggest threat is "The Intellectual Devotional," a secular equivalent of volumes with daily commentary on 365 passages of Scripture. It, too, is aimed at the insecure: the subtitle is "Revive Your Mind [since you're dead above the neck], Complete Your Education [which you never got] and Roam Confidently With the Cultured Class [to which you don't belong]." It's directed particularly at codgers and codgers-to-be: "These readings," says the introduction, "offer the kind of regular exercise the brain needs to stay fresh, especially as we age." Philosophers may be as disappointed in the entry on Leibniz as writers and literary scholars will be in the one on Faulkner, but there can't be many people who know about "Beowulf," Elizabeth Cady Stantonand nociception (the perception of pain, dummy). You know what the Sistine Chapel is, but do you know why it's called that? Well, I do. Now.