CULTURAS IN VITRO
The Irresistible Rise of Telephilia: Almost no one can resist the call. How else to account for Brent Scowcroft's appearance on "Da Ali G Show," in which the éminence grise of national security ended up parsing the difference between anthrax and Tampax?
But the urge to be on screen has rarely reached the epic proportions it does in "Capturing the Friedmans," the hit documentary about the destruction of a seemingly ordinary middle-class family in Great Neck, Long Island. In 1988, Arnold Friedman, a retired high school teacher, and the youngest of his three sons, Jesse, then 19, pleaded guilty to multiple acts of pedophilia carried out in the basement of their split-level home, where they held after-school computer classes for neighborhood kids.