Music Tom Waits Real Gone The gravelly voiced veteran trades his piano for turntables and samplers, and dabbles in funk, hip hop, and African music. Longtime fans needn't fret: The trademark throaty growls, ramshackle blues guitar, and lopsided tempos aren't really gone. Plus, Waits' masterful tales of repenting sinners and love lost are as desolate as ever. On numbers like "Day After Tomorrow," he even gets political, weaving fiery opinions on current events into the mix. Who says old dogs can't learn new tricks? – Geeta Dayal
Music Junior Boys Last Exit Electronic producers can name-check Timbaland until the robots come home, but few can match his unique brand of stop-and-go funk. Enter this Canadian trio, whose debut album is a glorious mash-up of stuttering rhythms, electropop cool, and singer Jeremy Greenspan's evocative whispers. "More Than Real" clangs ferociously while the fey, flickering "Teach Me How to Fight" descends into a slow, majestic dissolve. Perfect for the heat of the night as well as the morning after. – Hua Hsu
Music Mos Def The New Danger This Brooklyn-based hip-hopper doesn't cover much new ground lyrically here, but he croons, howls, and raps with charisma to spare. The eclectic beats bounce from fuzzed-out rock to open-ended blues and jazz. The album's best track, "Ghetto Rock," employs surly guitar riffs and pouncing low end as a devastating backdrop to one of the MC's trademark singsong hooks. Its worst, "Rape Over," is a trite and repetitive assault on Jay-Z's "Takeover." Skip that track, and it's all good. – Tim Molloy
Music Various Artists Left of the Dial: Dispatches From the Eighties Underground Back before fans filled their iPods with Pixies bootlegs, music mavens had to scour import bins and obsessively scan college radio to hear even a fraction of the songs on this four-disc set. Call it Postpunk 101: From REM's "Radio Free Europe" to Bj�rk's old band, the Sugarcubes, Left of the Dial crams it all in. The compilation is as brilliantly schizophrenic as the era in which the music was born. – Philip Sherburne
Print The Cult of Mac Leander Kahney What's nerdier than a party celebrating the unpacking of a new computer? A book about it. This account of Macintosh fanaticism will strike a chord with anyone who's ardently defended (or cursed) an operating system. Wired News reporter Kahney details Mac groupies' fervor – their Apple logo tattoos, iBongs (made of Mac SE/30s), and passion for HyperCard software. At times the chronicle borders on self-parody, but it is sure to end up on Quadra-based coffee tables everywhere. – Joanna Pearlstein
Print The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution Richard Dawkins A revolutionary biologist takes humanity back to its origins. During the 4-billion-year trip, readers meet ancestors like the finch, the fruit fly, and the redwood. Though the story is picaresque, Dawkins refuses to see humans as evolution's protagonists. If elephants could write history, he notes, it wouldn't be a story of chimps learning to walk upright but of which species "had crossed the nasal rubicon, and taken the leap to full proboscitude." – Jennifer Kahn
Print Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug Diarmuid Jeffreys The little white pill is as versatile as it is effective. It lowered fevers during the flu epidemic of 1918, generated funds for Bayer to develop chemicals used by the Nazis, and when its patent expired, became one of the first (and most successfully) branded products ever. In his profile of the painkiller, Jeffreys encapsulates Big Pharma's ongoing desire to protect public health with its need to satisfy political interests and corporate bottom lines. – Aaron Clark
Print Gamers: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels Edited by Shanna Compton With ample reverence for the Atari 2600 era, this collection of personal essays tracks the cultural and historical significance of videogames. Among the highlights: Mark Lamoureux's article comparing the introduction of 3-D in games to the discovery of perspective by Renaissance painters, and Laurel Snyder's tell-all in which she admits playing Tetris in her head during sex. That way, she scores twice. – Shana Ting Lipton
Screen (DVD) Dawn of the Dead George Romero's flesh-crawling 1978 original has been pumped full of Botox and Red Bull; the new Dawn moves fast, skews young, and leaves a good-looking corpse. It also features the most gut-wrenching opener since the freeway pileup in Final Destination 2, jamming the better half of 28 Days Later into a 10-minute mass-mayhem prologue that makes zombiegeddon as irresistible as a Nike commercial. The "unrated director's cut" extras prove that less is more, even for fans of exploding head-fu. – W. O. Goggins
Screen (Theater) Primer The year's most effective science fiction film was also the cheapest to produce. With a $10,000 budget – a mere blink of Gollum's eye – director Shane Carruth tells the tale of two inventors who build a get-rich-quick gadget in a garage. They're not mad scientists, they're levelheaded yuppies – at least until their time machine proves too powerful to handle. With its twisted narrative, the f/x-free Primer is a reminder that the best sci-fi action requires you to think. – Jason Silverman
Screen (DVD) Paranoia Agent This Japanese miniseries plays out like a season of Twin Peaks. Residents of a small town are driven mad by a Rollerblading teen who delivers random beat-downs with a baseball bat. If that's not bizarre enough, investigators discover that his victims are often grateful: The attacks provide a brief reprieve from the pressures of their everyday lives. Anime director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue) eschews the sentimentality of his recent work and creates the most surreal police procedural ever. – Chris Baker
Screen (Theater) The Machinist Director Brad Anderson's film noir has all the trappings of a B-grade creep show – except the monster here is an insomniac. Trevor Reznik, a metalworker who hasn't slept for a year and subsists on cigarettes, coffee, and sex, causes a gruesome accident (yes, dismemberment is involved). In an unnerving performance, an emaciated Christian Bale uses his body's physical deterioration to make Reznik's mental disintegration palpable. Definitely skip the popcorn. – Beth Pinsker
Games (PS2) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Previous GTAs were set in ersatz versions of the Big Apple and Miami. This time the all-conquering franchise sets its sights on the entire state of California. It's circa 1991 and your character, CJ, is coming straight outta Compton. As your criminal empire expands, you get to take over clever reimaginings of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the newly annexed Las Vegas. New toys include BMXes, quad bikes, and monster trucks, but it's the sheer enormity of the landscape that astounds. – Sam Richards
Games (Xbox) OutRun 2 The original OutRun defined arcade racing games in the Reagan era. This Xbox sequel was worth the 18-year wait. OutRun 2 takes everything that worked in the original – exaggerated drifts, branching tracks, cherry-red Ferraris, a jangly soundtrack – and accentuates it. Best addition: Heart Attack mode, where you're scored on how much your driving impresses the cute blonde in the passenger seat. Play it alone or against friends online. – Brandon Sheffield
Games (PC, Xbox) Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth This brainbender pits players against the eldritch horrors of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Even seeing some of the bad guys – such as room-filling shoggoths that constantly grow new eyes, mouths, and tentacles – can unhinge the human mind. This is illustrated by an "insanity effect," which impairs movement and overlays reality with hallucinations. Check your first-person-shooter machismo at the door. – Chris Hudak
Games (PC) Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed Running around on alien planets is cool. Flying an X-wing in a deep-space dogfight is cooler. This expansion of the massively multiplayer online game lets you build and pilot your own ships, from a TIE Fighter to a Millennium Falcon look-alike. Of course, a captain is only as good as his crew, so invite your buddies to man the gun turrets while you try to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. – Will Tuttle
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