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It's time to get your minds out of the gutter, everybody. We all know what you're really thinking about when you hear Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time." We won't say it, but let's all agree discreetly. This possibly imaginary meaning of the pop singer's iconic hit has plagued parents for years. Many mothers across the country simultaneously felt super guilty about letting their young children sing and dance along to lyrics begging for physical violence. But now it seems we've all been overreacting.  Author John Seabrook just released an anthology on the pop industry, titled "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory," that sheds...

Before his "Uptown Funk" gave it to us for 14 weeks straight, and before he helped Amy Winehouse go "Back to Black," Mark Ronson worked as a humble club DJ in downtown Manhattan. In conversation with John Seabrook at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday at the Gramercy Theater — where Ronson performed six songs from his latest LP Uptown Special, with fellow producer Jeff Bhasker — the music producer described how Diddy, or Puffy, as he was called back then, helped bring him into the mainstream rap scene with encouragement in the form of a $100 tip.Ronson explained that he cut his teeth spinning at underground venues for such groups as Gang Starr and Brand Nubian; however, the range of celebrity surprisingly changed one night at a club formerly known as El Flamingo, on 21st Street: Then, all the sudden, people like Puffy and Biggie and Jay Z would be coming...

It's Sunday afternoon — your last chance to read all that stuff you meant to read last week before Monday brings a new deluge of things you will want to read. Below, some of our recommendations: "Factory Girls" by John Seabrook (The New Yorker): This is how your K-pop gets made. "Will & Grace changed nothing" by Christopher Kelly (Salon): TV's use of gay characters hasn't evolved as much as Modern Family's producers would like you to think. "The Solitude of Invention" by Stacy Kors (Columbia Magazine): Author Paul Auster opens up about his life and work. "John Cale" by Mark Richardson (Pitchfork): The founding member of the Velvet Underground talks about his favorite albums, from Vivaldi to Snoop Dogg. "Jay McInerney, the New York Fantasy, and Wine" by Tom Dibblee (The Los Angeles Review of Books): A chronicle of one writer's complicated relationship with Jay McInerney.

When New York's Lincoln Center opened in 1964, the columns of water bubbling from its center were the most technically-advanced water features known to man, controlled by "computer-programmed tapes" and able to propel a six-foot wide wall of water into the air. Fifty years later, the fountain began to falter, yet "liquid architecture" had since evolved beyond our wildest (wettest?) dreams, mostly thanks to one Mark Fuller, and his company Wet. So it was a natural choice for the folks behind Lincoln Center's fountain facelift to tap the man who revolutionized the way we interact with water.

A piece in this week's New Yorker by John Seabrook explores the fountain's revamp and Fuller's aquatic genius, beginning with an early trip to Disneyland that encouraged the construction of his own "jungle cruise" in his Salt Lake City backyard (precariously mixing water and electric current for underwater lights!). He later got a job with Disney as an Imagineer,...

Note to readers of John Seabrook's New Yorker profile of Iraqi female starchitect Zaha Hadid this week: The opening scene, full of potato chips and chicken falling from Hadid's mouth as he interviewed her lunching at the Mercer is no accident. It's advanced criticism.

The sandwich came with potato chips, and Hadid examined one, turning it in her fingers, which were long and tapered and ended in bright-red nails, before putting it into her mouth. The twisty geometry of an ordinary potato chip, to say nothing of the curves in modern cars and phones, is a reminder of how few buildings look as if they belonged in the digital world. Hadid is devoted to helping architecture catch up.

Well, now that we know of her love for chips--as well as her affinity for capes; it's a juicy piece!--we have to say that the salty snacks are exactly what...

I wish Flash of Genius were’t quite so staid, because it tells an important story, and one the likes of which we hear less and less of the more necessary they become: Robert Kearns, a Detroit engineering professor and part-time inventor, developed a device in the early 1960s to allow car windshield wipers to operate intermittently -- it’s a bigger safety issue than you might think, and this was a problem that, apparently, the big automakers had been trying to solve for years. But instead of working with Kearns, Ford stole his invention, which soon spread to the lines of all the other automakers. And then Kearns spent 30 years fighting one of the biggest corporations on the planet for a simple acknowledgment that what Ford did was wrong. (This is all true stuff: Philip Railsback’s script is based on a New Yorker article by John Seabrook.) This earnest film,...

Greg Kinnear in Flash of Genius

Photo: Universal Pictures "My name is Dr. Robert Kearns, I'm a college professor and part-time inventor. This is a schematic of my invention, the intermittent windshield wiper... it took me three decades to fight for it when the Ford Motor Co. claimed it as their own." Uh, what? Who cares? I am sorry, but that was my reaction as Flash of Genius began unfolding I could only think about how this film would best be told as an article rather than a feature film and as it turns out that's exactly what it is. Flash of Genius is an adaptation of the New Yorker article written by John Seabrook back in 1993. How anyone thought it would be interesting enough to capture the attention of an audience for two hours is mind boggling. The acting and the directing are all perfectly fine. Greg Kinnear is fantastic as Bob Kearns,...

A series of pictures from the forthcoming "Flash of Genius" has been brought forward. They are focused on the two cars, the brown Ford and the blue Continental Mark, used in the Universal Pictures drama starring Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham and Dermot Mulroney. The images display the cars from several angles and in different situations in the film.

Robert Kearns is a college professor as well as a part-time inventor. Marrying the love of his life and having six kids, Kearns lives his version of the American Dream. When one day he invents intermittent windshield wiper, he thinks that he has struck the gold. But, he soon finds out the harsh reality of business as he is shunned off from his creation by auto giants. Refusing to be ignored and silenced, he takes the corporate titans into a battle nobody thinks he could win.

Directed by Marc Abraham, "Genius" is...

As Summer is coming to an end and Fall is fast approaching, Universal Pictures have let out their complete Fall Preview Line Up. The list contains a diverse selection of movies from based-on-true story drama "Flash of Genius" to children fantasy book adaptation "The Tale of Despereaux".

All of the information of those six films can be viewed below.

Flash of Genius

Based on The New Yorker Article Flash of Genius by: John Seabrook

Release date: October 3, 2008

Rating: PG-13

Genre: Drama

Cast: Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney, Alan Alda

Directed by: Marc Abraham

Written by: Philip Railsback

Produced by: Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Michael Lieber

Executive Producers: Jon Glickman, J. Miles Dale, Eric Newman, Tom Bliss

Official Site: www.flashofgenius.net

Synopsis:

Based on the true story of college professor and part-time inventor Robert Kearns' (Greg Kinnear) long battle with the U.S. automobile industry, Flash of Genius...