In the Darnedest Things Department: Band of Brothers by Nick Paumgarten takes a look at The Naked Brothers, a band comprised of the Wolff brothers—twelve-year-old Nat, and nine-year-old Alex.

Nat is the singer, songwriter, and piano man, while Alex primarily plays the drums, but writes a few songs, too. His latest is called “Three is Enough,” and goes something like this: “One is O.K., two is fine, three is enough.” His mother says it’s about girls. Nat says it’s about math. No, Alex says, it’s about doughnuts.

Hmmm. What can you possibly say to that?

Doughnuts.

Hmmm.

Regardless of the song’s meaning, Nick Paumgarten has a prediction. The boys have a movie airing on Saturday, and a TV show on Nickelodeon which begins next week. The show parodies fame, “and probably dooms them to it,” Paumgarten says. He thinks Nat will make the cover of Tiger Beat, if not Rolling Stone, by year’s end.

And I’m blogging about it.

Geez.

What’s the Trouble by Jerome Groopman is an enlightening, and often disturbing, article about the way doctor’s think. Ever wonder what is behind all those misdiagnoses? A medical degree. You see, doctors are trained in heuristics, a speculative formula based on discoveries. Say, for example, you walk into the emergency room with a high fever and a sharp pain in your side. A doctor is trained to assume that you suffer from appendicitis, because these are the classic symptoms. But such assumptions can also lead to errors.

Doctors typically begin to diagnose patients the moment they meet them. Even before they conduct an examination, they are interpreting a patient’s appearance: his complexion, the tilt of his head, the movements of his eyes and mouth, the way he sits or stands up, the sound of his breathing. Doctors’ theories about what is wrong continue to evolve as they listen to the patient’s heart, or press on his liver. But research shows that most physicians already have in mind two or three possible diagnoses within minutes of meeting a patient, and that they tend to develop their hunches from very incomplete information.

Examples of the “intellectual” mistakes doctors make range from overly judging appearance to a factor called “availability”—the tendency to judge the likelihood of an illness by the ease in which relevant examples come to mind. There’s also the case of “affective error,” in which a doctor’s personal feelings toward a patient come into play.

Because I’ve been misdiagnosed, I come into any doctor’s office suspect. I don’t take their word for anything. That said, given the examples in the article, I can see how mistakes were made. Especially in the case of the woman who came in with flu-like symptoms and claimed the only medication she took was a couple aspirin. Well, the couple turned out to be a couple dozen, and the woman didn’t have low-grade pneumonia like the doctor thought, but aspirin toxicity. Lesson: doctors make mistakes. But they can’t help you if you don’t own up to your symptoms, or you lie to them. Do the best you can, so they can do the best they can.

In Fiction: the gorgeous prose of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her short story “Cell One.” Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus, which was short listed for the Orange Prize and long listed for the Booker Prize, and the more recent Half of a Yellow Sun, which has been nominated for the 33rd Annual National Book Critics Circle Prize. Set in the university town of Nsukka, Nigeria, “Cell One” is an important story about the ideals of discipline and its dangers.