Venkatesh, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of African American Studies at Columbia University in New York. His newest book –American Project: The Rise and Fall of the Modern Ghetto,— (Harvard 2000) was awarded the 2000 Professional/ Scholarly Publishing Award of the Association of American Publishers. His research interests are based in investigating the social organization of poor urban neighborhoods. He lives in New York City.
His new book is called Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self. What is the self? and what is the relationship between the brain and selfhood? Feinberg uses the stories and interesting cases of his patients to try and answer these questions from a neurological and psychological standpoint. Feinberg claims that the way patients with brain damage or disorders like alien hand syndrome talk about themselves can tell us a lot about how the brain creates itself.
Tom Fontana of HBO's, Oz, the realistic drama about life in an experimental unit of a maximum security prison. Fontana also created Homicide: Life on the Street and the 1980s drama set in a city hospital, St. Elsewhere.