Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

In writing his book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Dr. Atul Gawande says, “I’m trying to examine all the gaps involved in what we do. I wanted to show how situations of risk really work, how people in different situations grapple with that.”

Questions like, why do so many people in a hospital die, not from their ailments, but from infections acquired at the medical facility? Or, how does one measure excellence as a physician, when the currency is human life?

Or, as he states, “The paradox at the heart of medical care is that it works so well, and yet never well enough.”

Dr. Gawande is the guest on this repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, November 21, at 2 pm ET.

You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to 90 days after broadcast.

Total hotness from Ignition Print, on the Feb 2009 Clive Owens / Naomi Watts thriller, The International, using the sloped interior of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum as an eye-ripping design element.

Did anybody notice the way The Oprah Winfrey Show rewrote history yesterday?

Brad Pitt was the guest, along with Cate Blanchett, in Chicago to promote their new David Fincher project, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, out Christmas.

At one point, a pre-produced package talked about Brad’s career, beginning with his arrival in Hollywood, and his breakthrough roles in Thelma & Louise and Interview with the Vampire, before moving on to George Clooney, Brad’s life with Angelina Jolie, their kids, etc. It was brief, compact, fast-moving, and entertaining.

It was also untrue. Completely absent from the piece was any mention, whatsoever, of Jennifer Aniston, the actor with whom Pitt was a couple for seven years and married to for five years; 2000-2005.

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That’s how Jackie, a guest on The Tyra Banks Show last week, described discovering the Ashley Madison Agency, a dating site uniquely designed for married people who want to discretely step out of their relationships and into sexual ones with over 2 million other, similarly motivated people. (The company’s motto: “Life is Short. Have an Affair.”)

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As reported by the Associated Press, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin-Laden’s No. 2 man, has released a video—”al-Qaeda’s first response to Obama’s victory”—in which he

called the president-elect — along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — “house Negroes.”

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Forget Crank Yankers. Using this flash soundboard stuffed with audio quotes from the The Dr. Phil Show, these goofballs prank call a woman to tears…or to a breakthrough reconnection with her inner self, I can’t really tell. It’s hilarious, either way. Plus, when you’re done, the late Fred Rogers, from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, gets in on the action.

The new Star Trek trailer, above, is finally out…and it’s kinda bananas.

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Notes one Black female writer in Salon.com, on January 20th, Michelle Obama will not only become America’s premiere Black First Lady, but she’ll also be the first to shake what our Mama (Africa) gave her: An authentic, 3-dimensional, fully-realized butt.

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This is a mile late, but I didn’t think about it until after the election, and I have to ask: Why didn’t the Obama campaign use the Pointer Sisters’, above, 1973 hit “Yes We Can Can” as their unofficial campaign theme song, as opposed to Stevie Wonder’s 1970 classic “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours”?

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Fan fiction, or fanfic, is a literary subgenre where super-obsessed viewers of a given TV show or film write their own stories, based on the characters and conventions of that film or show, exploring new or different narrative directions that don’t appear in the original. (For example, in Lord of the Rings, having Frodo and Sam trying to kill, and take the throne from the king, Aragorn.)

Slash is a subunit of fanfic, typically written by women, that enages the otherwise straight male characters of a narrative in homosexual sex with each other. For example, at each rest stop, having Frodo toss Sam’s salad.

Without question, one of the longest ongoing and most voluminous bodies of slash belongs to the original Star Trek universe, which, for some reason, compels fans to create bodice-rippers based on the misadventures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

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