The most famous fictional creation this side of Tarzan has undergone innumerable changes over the years, and author Tom DeHaven tries to chart them all in his new book on the Man of Steel.

In mythology, Alcestis is the model wife, willing to give up her own life for her husband’s. In Katharine Beutner’s lyrical retelling, the truth is more complex.

Unlike its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 makes being a jerk a rewarding experience–Phillip A. Lobo explores the paradoxes of the Enlightenment, and the complicated morality of being bad.

The elephants of South Africa and the right whales of the North Atlantic are enormous, complex – and confronted with a growing human population. Two books estimate their chances.

Giambattista Tiepolo spent a lifetime fulfilling contracts and covering walls with glowing celebrations of light and life. In Tiepolo Pink, Roberto Calasso delves into those bright works.

“It is so easy to create illusions with film, but how can you create an engrossing visual experience with an object? I am obsessed with human nature’s interest in being fooled.”

If names like “Number Muncher,” “The Oregon Trail,” and of course “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” prompt nostalgic smiles for you, you’ll love this affectionate look at educational video games

In the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson both rose to greatness that reached across racial divides. Two new books look at the prices they had to pay.

Can Fantagraphics’ Spectrum series of contemporary fantasy art yield the same sort of enjoyment as a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Steve Donoghue looks into the newest collection.

Phillip A. Lobo leaps from the classic 1970s game Zork to Andrew Hussie’s webcomic MS Paint Adventures in his nostalgia-inducing discussion of the allures of interactive fiction computer games

Jonathan Safran Foer is not the first, but is certainly the most famous, to investigate the ethics of eating animals. Megan Kearns studies both the style and the substance of his argument, with an eye to his less acknowledged allies in vegetarianism

Two books by Jeff Mynott and Colin Tudge explore why it is that birds have such a hold on our hearts. Honoria St. Cyr adds her observations – on the books and on those little marvels around the feeder.

In the 1970s, two giants of the Spider-Man comic book, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita, reunited for a daily newspaper comic strip. Paradise? Ask Khalid Ponte.

In Assassin’s Creed II, the player plays a player playing a player, all hunting for buried memories and hidden clues to the nature of identity. Philip A. Lobo explains.

The smell of sawdust, misplaced props, shouts about lights: Steve Brachmann reports on a play going up and the ways in which several real people play their parts.

For a season, Maurice Sendak’s iconic Wild Things have become specifically what Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze want them to be … but what is that? Janet Potter goes out to meet them.

Midwest Rock icon Bob Seger’s former tour manager gives us a behind the scenes look at old time rock & roll; John G. Rodwan, Jr. turns the page.

Counter-culture icon R. Crumb has produced an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis—sincere tribute, or sacrilege? Brad Jones adjudicates.

Tropico 3 tempts its players to become petty, manipulative tyrants; Phillip A. Lobo will permit you (unworthy though you are) of reading his musings on the game.

Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland straddles the divide between light family fare and flesh-eating mayhem; Deirdre Crimmins is naturally intrigued.

In A Vindication of Love, Christina Nehring has set herself the task of reclaiming romantic love for the Twitter Age. Ingrid Norton rates the results.

Norman Mailer fought about writers and wrote about fighters, and even after his death, the brawling continues. John G. Rodwan, Jr. enters the ring.

Two new books, Life Ascending and Why Evolution Is True, explore the details of Darwin’s great theory, and Ben and Terry Soderquist wonder if the election’s been called before all the votes are in.

Does the latest Halo game portend the fracturing of history and the death of narrative, or is it just a really cool game? Phillip A. Lobo explains, naturally.

He ruled the world of Sunday comics with a singing sword and a grin. He was Prince Valiant, and Fantagraphics lets him fight again. Steve Donoghue goes blow-by-blow.

Open Letters talks shop with cover photographer Michael George

Did it all start with Bjork, or was she riding an inevitable wave? The world of Icelandic pop is weird, wild, and disarmingly wonderful – let Marc Vincenz be your guide.

If you don’t know The Jazz Book, then as Miles Davis would say, ‘you ain’t never gonna know.’ Brad Jones shows us the groove.

Self-appointed jazz authorities like Wynton Warsalis weigh in on jazz festivals and the musicians who love them, and their listeners. John G. Rodwan, Jr., devoted listener, sorts the noise.

The blips and whistles of Mario’s soundtrack have evolved into grand strings and horns. Phillip A. Lobo assays how real music has come to video games, and vice versa.

Music correspondent Marc Vincenz voyages to the end of the world – the windswept Faeroe Islands – and reports back on the entrancing music they make there. And the parties.

Your father’s FM radio can close up shop, as far as Steve Brachman’s concerned; the music you want is at your fingertips, and you hear it the way you like it, on your computer.

In Following the Water, David C. Carroll has written another paean of praise to the gentle world of pond turtles. But is he writing about a lost world? Tuc McFarland hopes not.

Julia Child is all the rage: a new movie (Julie & Julia) and a couple of related books (My Life in France and the gastronomically-inclined Gourmet’s Rhapsody), etc. Sharon Fulton samples the wares.

In Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer suggests that science has prematurely evicted a prime mover from cellular biology, and he would like it put back. Ignazio de Vega tests his case.

They live, love, strive, and thrive, but they don’t scrimp, save, hate, or discriminate – is it rapturous capitalism, or virtual virtue? Phillip A. Lobo plays The Sims.

He transformed the American musical – and Judy Garland. Now Vincente Minelli has finally got his due – Brad Jones reviews America’s Dark Dreamer by Emanuel Levy.

The noble sport of fisticuffs has done more than a little for cops, kids, and US Presidents. So why is touching the gloves so widely maligned? John G. Rodwan, Jr. steps in the ring to find out.

The Academy often forgets Oscar-caliber performances from the first half of the year, but movie maven Sarah Hudson doesn’t! Here are some of her earliest nominations.

Brilliant novelist/amateur crank Mark Helprin despairs of your online thievery, and Esther Schell despairs of his new book, Digital Barbarism.

Larry Tye has written a book about the greatest, longest baseball career to date; Brad Jones benches the Babe and tallies up Satchel.

Carl Van Doren called her “the princess who takes off her pants,” but who was Gypsy Rose Lee, really? Kindly let Michael Adams entertain you in looking at two recent biographies.

Quick: What’s Iceland like? Faint idea? Marc Vincenz reassures—your knowledge of Japan will do just fine.

“It’s an energy field that connects us all” Obi-wan Kenobi has told us, and Phillip Lobo attests to the truth of it in his review of the latest Star Wars MMO.

Their cinematic pairings are the stuff of movie legend, but do their movies stand the test of time? Sarah Hudson takes in the films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

An excerpt from Edmund White’s forthcoming memoir City Boy

John Goodman, John Glover, and Nathan Lane are currently starring on Broadway in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece; Andrew Martin’s got an aisle seat, and reports back on a surprisingly sunny Waiting for Godot.

Before Arthas was a character in a new novel, he was a character in a video game (World of Warcraft, naturally) – which makes him fair game for our gaming expert, Phillip Lobo.

The late Roger Deakin celebrates his beloved trees one last time in Wildwood, and Bryn Haworth gladly finds himself within a dark forest.

The Decemberists seem benign enough, but their songs are blood-dimmed with rape, drownings, and even cannibalism. The body count rises on their new release The Hazards of Love, but Lianne Habinek also discovers fresh wellsprings of feeling.

Jerry Siegel and Miguel Cervantes: each created an immortal literary character (Superman and Don Quixote, of course), but what else could they possibly have in common? Taking his cue from Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow, Robert Latona says: more than you think.

J.J. Abrams’ long-awaited Star Trek reboot has hit theaters, and Steve Donoghue looks into whether it carries on a proud legacy, or else overturns it.

Joshua Redman’s new album Compass makes some daring allusions to the all-time titans of jazz; John G. Rodwan, Jr. listens to hear how Redman borrows from those pastmasters and how he departs from them.

You’d think any brand of movie that could produce Super Mario Bros. would have no advocates left, but you’d be wrong! Our gaming expert Phillip A. Lobo diagnoses the problem to date and charts a new path for video game movies.

In 1911, the unthinkable happened: the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. R. A. Scotti tells the story in The Vanished Smile, and Jan van Doop has some ideas of his own.

Jeff Buckley’s famous father and early death insured him a cult status in the pop culture pantheon. Nivedita Gunturi uncovers the music behind the myths.

Veteran comics illustrator David Mazzucchelli takes center stage writing and drawing his first full-length graphic novel, Asterios Polyp, and Sharon Fulton takes a look at the result.

The advent of the CD threw the retail music business into a disarray from which it hasn’t recovered. Brad Jones, a veteran of that disarray, reads Steve Knopper’s account of the industry’s Appetite for Self-Destruction.

Notorious for its violence and misogyny, or misunderstood for its biting social commentary? Grand Theft Auto IV polarizes; video game docent Phillip A. Lobo attempts to broker a meeting.

Malcolm Gladwell is once again on the bestseller lists, this time for Outliers, about the social science of genius. Peter Coclanis begs to differ with the vox populi.

It’s been twenty years since the robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Jan van Doop retraces the art crime of the century in Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist.

Culture critics decry video games – including 2K’s BioShock – as mindless, pointless haphazard wastes of time. Phillip A. Lobo offers one fan’s spirited rebuttal.

Thug or genius? Artist or gangster? In his brief, troubled life – and now in the new movie Notorious – The Notorious B.I.G. was an enigma. Andrew Martin sorts myth from legend.

Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: the Biography is a rambling, list-laden account of the much-storied river. Our London correspondent Bryn Haworth tests the waters.

The one jazz album even hardened jazz haters own – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue – turns fifty this year. John G. Rodwan, Jr. plays out the tracks of its long, strange life.

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer tries to anatomize the choosing brain. Lianne Habinek – with an assist from some guy named Plato – anatomizes the anatomizer.

Harold Pinter, a giant of 20th century literature, is dead, but the legacy of his work lives on. In a letter from London on a recent performance of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, Bryn Haworth takes a look at how the poet and playwright prepared his own memorial.

The city that never sleeps also never stops eating, or writing about what it eats. The new food writing collection Gastropolis, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, takes the reader on a culinary safari through the history and variety of New York’s food culture. Mary Jane Weedman tucks in and savors the fare.

It’s been years—too long!—since Martha Argerich has preformed solo. Greg Waldmann eagerly pours thorugh her new DVD and the history of her brilliant career for clues to her reclusiveness and for glimmers of hope.

Saxophone legend John Coltrane took jazz further from its traditional sound than any artist of his day. Philip Larkin kept traditional rhyme and meter alive in English verse. Richard Palmer’s new study, Such Deliberate Disguises, attempts to make the case for one influencing the other. John G. Rodwan Jr. puts the emphasis on “attempts.”

When life and art overlap, the results are always complex – and that’s certainly true of autobiographical graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus. Sharon Fulton takes a look at a tricked-out new reprint of his earliest work, Breakdowns.

For decades, Oscar Hammerstein transformed the world of musical theater, writing the lyrics for such blockbusters as Showboat, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. Michael Adams gives us front row seats for a tour through the master’s many moods.

Before there was Norman Rockwell, there was J.C. Leyendecker, inventor of the advertising brand, star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post, and clandestine gay man. America loved what Leyendecker drew; Steve Donoghue shows us what they were really seeing.

Three new books trek the red rocks of Mars, and although they don’t exactly admit it, they’re in search of one thing: signs of life. Astrid Van Sarisgaard tells us what they discover, or don’t.

Euripides’ Medea has been explained, performed, and debated for the last 2000 years. Panagiotis Polichronakis looks at Robin Robertson’s new translation and ponders whether it’s fit for scholars, dramaturgs, or the all-elusive common reader.

Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.

“It assaults me, and I adore it!” exclaimed Isabella Stewart Gardner of the legendary city of Venice, and legions of visitors have felt likewise. Venetian writer Tiziano Scarpa writes a love-letter to his spellbinding native city. Professor Hugh Seames has the oar.

William Shakespeare lived under the Tudors for most of his life, but he only wrote about them once, in his play The History of the Life of King Henry VIII – or did he? In our latest One Encounter, and also the new installment in his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue takes a look at that play and the fractious theories attendant.

While confabulating postmodern fictions, Haruki Murakami has also been running – first to stay fit, then at grueling length. Contributing editor Lianne Habinek jogs us through his book on the subject, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.

All life on Earth is bound to our vast and complex oceans, the subject of The Smithsonian Institute’s new exhibit. Ben Soderquist dives into its companion volume: Ocean: Our Water, Our World.

It has been a part of every human life since mankind was born – but how much does any of us know about lightning? Terry Soderquist reviews John S. Friedman’s Out of the Blue and tries to fill in the gaps on this most scarifying of natural phenomena.

Lianne Habinek reviews Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs and gives up all the gossip on one of the most strange and successful relationships in music history, the ménage a trois among Glenn Gould, a blind piano tuner, and a one-of-a-kind Steinway concert grand.

If you don’t tell a good story then you’ve got no business writing history. According to Jan van Doop – who knows his fakes, phonies, and forgeries – Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell is the genuine article.

Tuc Macfarland was forever changed when he first heard whalesong, something he shares in common with the men and women exploring those haunting sounds in David Rothenberg’s Thousand Mile Song.

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon sonically reshaped a generation, and Sheila Weller has talked to almost everyone who saw them do it. Laura Tanenbaum, reviewing Girls Like Us, assesses the job Weller does in letting these women roar.

In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.

Becka Podlertz decries the blinkered arrogance of all animal researchers, just as she celebrates the unique and thought-provoking contribution of Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford in their new book, Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins

More than any other dynasty in history, the Tudors are ready for their close-up. In this installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue leads us on a royal progress through film archives to access the heart and stomach of these undying superstars.

We know that we can digitize books, but is it possible to translate digital texts back onto paper? Carolyn Grantham explores this and other 21st-century dilemmas in her review of Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs.

Lianne Habinek forges into the beguiling part-adult, part-childish, part-real, part-dreamlike films of Michel Gondry

In February, the great pianist Alfred Brendel gave his final performance in New York City. Greg Waldmann was in Carnegie Hall to see it and in this regular feature he shares the experience.

The premise of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is that all of us are a lot more irrational a lot more often than we thought; Steve Donoghue tries to determine if the inmates really are running the asylum

A comprehensive new theater book, London Stage in the 20th Century, leads Honoria St. Cyr to reminisce on performances magnificent and disastrous staged in the world-famous West End.

Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys is an often funny and moving anthology about the varied relationships between women and gay men, although, as Tom Cardamone observes, the friendships featured tend only to represent the posher strata of gay America

In this regular feature, John Cotter examines two brutal, disturbing pieces of 20th-Century German art—and they come disturbingly close to examining him in return.

Studio interference severely compromised Ridley Scott’s visually stunning 1982 film Blade Runner. Now with Blade Runner: The Final Cut on DVD, Brian Kirker explores the remastering of a masterpiece.

Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist attempts to reconcile the ageless turf war between the arts and sciences, but, as Lianne Habinek reports, Lehrer’s propositions may leave both sides feelings shortchanged.

Joy Division was post-punk at its ecstatic, abrasive best. Peter Law reviews Control, the soundtrack to the documentary that briefly brought the emblematic band back on the stage.

The bestselling New Atheists presume that a simple faith in reason will make short work of the longing for God. David G. Moser takes them to task for what Nietzsche would have called their “complacent rationality.”

Uncanny Bodies identifies an early affinity between talking pictures and the horror genre. Adam Golaski finds this chillingly true, but sees Robert Spadoni as the wrong man to explain it.