If you missed Nobel Laureate Wungari Muta Maathai’s conversation with National Geographic ed-in-chief Chris Johns here this past September, you can now download an audio version of it at Audible. We blogged about the event here.

The same goes for Governor Mario Cuomo’s sold-out talk on our common views as Americans back in October. 

· Off the Op-Ed Pages: New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich stops by to talk politics on Monday, November 21.

· The Secrets of Baking: Gain esoteric baking knowledge from New York’s master bakers on Monday, November 21. Amy Scherber of Amy’s Breads, Dorie Greenspan (Baking With Julia), Nick Malgieri (A Baker’s Tour) and Eileen Goudge (Something Warm from the Oven) offer tips just in time for the holidays.

· 39 Pounds of Love: See the story of Ami, a 3-D animator who weighs 39 pounds and is only able to move one finger, in the award-winning documentary 39 Pounds of Love on Tuesday, November 22. Meet the director afterward.

· Foreign Policy at the Y: Analyst Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution will discuss developments in Iraq and Iran on Tuesday, November 22.

· And have a very happy Thanksgiving weekend.

Charity Navigator is an excellent site which analyzes and ranks charities according to their operating efficiency and financial health. Its mission is to guide “intelligent giving.” We recommend using it to research any charitable organization you’re thinking about giving to.

And we’re not just saying that because Charity Navigator recently renewed their four-star rating of the 92nd Street Y.

The Y needs your support so that we can continue to provide all the programs you read about on this blog (and many more). You can donate online anytime using our secure form. 

One more movie post for the week: the ever-expanding Wikipedia has an entry listing movie clichés by genre. Some of the clichés of disaster movies:

· No one believes the protagonists until it is too late.

· The protagonists’ boss will give them an unrealistically short time to prove their theory.

· The “crew” consists of experts from different backgrounds who have never met, and don’t like each other.

· A mistake or setback will fundamentally alter the mission, and generally kill at least one crew member.

· If there is a dog or cat in danger, there will always be a scene of it escaping to safety.

· When the people run away from some sort of monster or disaster, there will always be someone tripping, and the hero always goes back to carry him/her (usually children and women).

· Cows always die.

Empire magazine has put together a nice list of what they consider to be the 50 greatest independent films of all time. Film buffs will no doubt disagree with some of their picks but that’s part of the fun of these things.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the next generation of great independent films are screened nearly every night at Makor. The Makor screening room (right) seats 72 quite comfortably. And some of the movies are free, like tonight’s Yesterday sneak peek.

We’ve just added two new guests to our popular and prestigious Reel Pieces film/interview series: actor Dennis Quaid on November 22 and actor Ralph Fiennes on December 6.

Mr. Quaid will be interviewed by Dr. Annette Insdorf prior to a screening of Frequency (2000). Mr. Fiennes will be interviewed following a preview of the new film The White Countess (2005), set for a December 21 release.

Who knows who will end up filling the November 30 and January 11 Reel Pieces slots? We don’t. That’s part of the fun of being a Reel Pieces subscriber.

Over in the New York Times, we’re offered a retrospective of author Frank McCourt’s (Angela’s Ashes) years as a teacher at Stuyvesant High School:

Long before Mr. McCourt became a literary figure, he was somebody’s high school English teacher. In his new memoir, Teacher Man, published by Scribner, Mr. McCourt recalls the successes (asserting control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom, or introducing students to literary criticism through nursery rhymes) and travails (patronizing supervisors, grading fatigue and parent-teacher conferences) of three decades in the city’s public schools.

And on Thursday, December 15, Mr. McCourt will be stopping by to give us a reading of Teacher Man. His work is meant to be heard.

Before New Yorker pop critic (don’t call him a rock critic; he hates that) Sasha Frere-Jones stops by Makor along with book blogger Maud Newton and arts critic Terry Teachout for a panel discussion on The Art of Online Criticism on Tuesday, December 6, we thought we’d ask him a few questions via email.

After the jump, Sasha Frere-Jones on Richard Meltzer, 50 Cent and the differences between writing and playing music.

Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in a forthcoming film adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink, according to the Guardian [via kottke.org]. Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is about how people make instant decisions. The movie takes its inspiration from a chapter of the book and tells the story of a man who has a gift for reading body language.

Audible has Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Krulwich at the 92nd Street Y available for download as well. It’s from Gladwell’s April 2005 appearance here. More audio content is scheduled to posted at Audible.com/92Y soon.

In celebration of tomorrow’s just-added preview of the new movie about Johnny Cash—Walk the Line—we thought we’d point our readers over to an audio archive of Johnny Cash on NPR’s Morning Edition.

In one of Cash’s last interviews, the “Man in Black” discusses recording with Rick Rubin, the new popularity he found in the 1990s and being an American icon.

The movie version of Johnny Cash doesn’t seem too bad either. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Johnny and Reese Witherspoon plays June Carter. The film’s website is worth a look with plenty of Cash memorabilia, music and historical info.

We were recently lucky enough to speak with Jonathan Lethem.

The author of (among other books) Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude and the new short-story collection Men and Cartoons was recently in the news for winning a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as a “genius grant") for $500,000 in recognition of his work.

On Wednesday, December 7, Lethem will be appearing at Makor along with author Elissa Schappell for a reading and a discussion of the short story form.

After the jump, we speak with Lethem about writing, comics and the Mets.

We recently came across JewishGates.org, a fascinating site devoted to Jewish spirituality. Among its articles are some short historical pieces that shed light on some little-known parts of Jewish religious history, like these on Judea in the Byzantine Empire, ancient Jewish coins and currencies and the development of Purim Spiels.

But what really caught our eye was an article on the influence of coffee on Kabbalah scholarship. Scholar Elliot Horowitz found convincing evidence that Kabbalah meditation and vigils switched from the early morning hours to late nights as a result of the coffee bean’s spread from Ethiopia to Palestine and points beyond:

Coffee arrived in Tzfat in 1528, and the first coffee house appeared in Tzfat in 1580. None came to Jerusalem. The use of coffee as a stimulant might have encouraged the mystics of Tzfat to focus more on all-night and late-night rituals because they couldn’t sleep anyway. Karo’s Tikkun Leil Shavuot appeared two or three years after the introduction of coffee to Tzfat. Horowitz quotes the following description of Tzfat in 1587: (Abraham haLevi Beruchim) would rise at midnight and walk through all the streets, raising his voice and shouting bitterly, “Arise in honor of the Lord… for the Shechinah is in exile and our Temple has been burnt.”

As Ottoman-controlled trade brought coffee to Europe, Kabbalah practices on the continent changed accordingly. Meditation circles in Italy and Germany switched from before dawn to overnight hours in the same time periods as coffee’s popularization in scholarship centers such as Venice and Worms. Britain’s Bramah Museum of Tea & Coffee (yes, they have one) offers a good overview of the history of coffee.

Curious about Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism in general? Spaces are still open in A Taste of Honey: An Introduction to Jewish Spirituality—a beginner’s survey of Jewish mysticism happening next Monday, November 21.

· Monday Night Poetry: Irish and American poets meet when the Pulitzer Prize-winning Paul Muldoon and Nebraska-born bard Kevin Young take the stage on Monday, November 14.

· New York’s Favorite Sport—Real Estate: Douglas Elliman VP Ruth Indyk Lubick offers a crash course on Negotiating the NYC Real Estate Market on Tuesday, November 15.

· Movies with a Movie Star: Sharon Stone introduces a screening of Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead and sits in for an interview with Columbia University’s Dr. Annette Insdorf for our first Reel Pieces event of the season on Tuesday, November 15. UPDATE: Sharon Stone unfortunately won’t be able to make it due to illness. So what have we got instead? A preview of the new film Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. An interview with the director, James Mangold, will follow.

· Celebrities—They Like Being Jewish: Jason Alexander (Seinfeld), Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek) and Kyra Sedgwick (Closer) are the featured speakers at Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish on Wednesday, November 16.

· Heady Musical History: The Istanbul-based Bezmara Ensemble will be performing the songs of Sabbatian Mysticism and the Jewish Composers of the Ottoman Court on Thursday, November 17.

· Hey, Adults Love Them Too: Prolific “paper engineers” Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart lead a kid-friendly workshop on The Art of Pop-Up Books on Sunday afternoon, November 20.

We’re currently scrambling to get the 92nd Street Y’s upcoming winter/spring catalog online so posting will be light for the next few weeks (though we have a few good interviews lined up).

But this spring, we’ve got some interesting guests coming: L. Paul Bremer, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Mike Wallace, Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, James D. Watson, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Neil Gaiman, Pete Hamill and Tom Wolfe, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Howell Raines, Jane Pauley, Carl Reiner and Dick Cavett—just to name a few.

‘Pro-growth’ and ‘progressive’ aren’t mutually exclusive terms for Gene Sperling, the Bloomberg columnist and former national economic adviser to President Clinton who will be speaking here November 17.

Sperling knows that bad economics makes for bad policy and politics. With a growing $800 billion current account deficit, a costly war and a devastating hurricane, political gimmicks such as tax cuts may yield a growth spurt in the short-term but wreck fiscal health in the long term.

Replacing part or all of Social Security with risky private accounts isn’t any smarter and evades the hard political work of promoting saving among Americans, according to Sperling, who supports a ”universal 401(k)” in addition to Social Security:

The president can promote the individual ownership he wants and protect the guaranteed Social Security benefits Democrats insist on with a new universal 401(k) that offers all Americans a private retirement account in addition to Social Security and uses government funds to match contributions made by moderate and lower-income workers.

A universal 401(k) would increase savings far more than partly privatizing Social Security. Privatization that simply allocates part of the current 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax for employees to invest in private accounts does nothing to increase national savings: it’s like taking $1,000 a year from your parent’s 401(k) and putting it in your own individual retirement account.

Sperling’s new book is called The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity. He’ll be here pitching more of his solutions next week during his on-stage conversation with The Wall Street Journal‘s Tom Herman.