Kaleidoscope

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Published: May 19, 2009

If you dig movies steeped in style, watch Rian Johnson's Brick (then read Sam Adams' review on Johnson's second film, The Brothers Bloom). It's a shoestring-budget high school noir about a loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, giving Bogey a run for his money) in search of his missing ex. It could all be a mess: There are teen femme fatales and characters named The Brain and The Pin, but Johnson so wholly constructs his world, Brick could fit in the Raymond Chandler canon.

- Molly Eichel

All the longform interviews and stories on troglodytes, dark energy and Earth 3.0 are great, but my favorite part of Science Talk — Scientific American's free weekly podcast — is the Totally Bogus segment at the end. That's where host Steve Mirsky cleverly paraphrases the week's most interesting/important discoveries, and really makes you think about the mutative properties of science.

- Patrick Rapa

Impossibly dark and overrun with skeletons, Bonnie Prince Billie is the La Brea Tar Pits of rock 'n' roll. His latest, the beautifully arranged Beware (Drag City), is the sound of plain people struggling in the service of a careless god. And even when Will Oldham's lyrics stumble up words like "happiness" and "friend," the cowboy guitars slide, the back-up singers swoon and you just know somebody's gonna end up dead in a ditch forever. He plays the Troc on Friday.

- Patrick Rapa

When I was a kid, my dad would eat a Snickers bar every night at 9 p.m. As the swelling diameter of his belly suggested, creatures of habit take comfort in their routines. Which is why Kurt Vonnegut's guileless "Little Drops of Water," about a lifelong bachelor's compulsive resistance to marriage, feels so familiar. Read it in this month's Harper's, or wait till Delacorte Press publishes the whole collection, Look at the Bride, in October.

- Carolyn Huckabay

Brogue Wave
Grey Gardens
Salt
Scar Trek: Thick Skinned Thin
Finding Lincoln
Aqui Estamos
Mighty Writers