The funniest of these essays depict the author’s metamorphosis from a latent misogynist who takes himself too seriously into a serious man with feminist sympathies. “Cosmodemonic” is a brief portrait of the artist as “a little shit” — his 22-year-old head full of Henry Miller, recklessly lusting after his female classmates at the University of California at Irvine’s MFA program. “The Miller hero — my hero — does what he wants, when he wants, whether it makes sense or not,” Chabon writes. This pose is crushed after two years of exposure to “the hard-earned skepticism of grown women” in his workshops. Two decades on, in “William and I,” we see Chabon protesting the high standards of motherhood compared to the meager demands of being a good dad. And, as if to complete the transformation, “I Feel Good About My Murse” has the 45-year-old Mike proudly shouldering a suede man purse. “I seem every day to give a little less of a fuck what people think or say about me,” he confides.

Another of the book’s consistent motifs is the disappearance of childhood. With vivid access to his own, Chabon is able to contrast the ways in which his kids’ imaginations are imposed upon and pre-imagined by, for example, the “authoritarian nature of the new Lego” and “the orthodoxy of ‘Toy Story.’” To Chabon’s mind, these products lack the open-endedness of “crap” entertainment like the short-lived “Planet of the Apes” TV show of his youth, into whose shaky plotlines a child could more easily project himself. Still, he trusts in the innovative potential of the child psyche: “Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of things we give them and the things they derive from the peculiar wiring of their own heads.” As a manual to Chabon’s own peculiar wiring, “Manhood for Amateurs” makes for an insightful and highly entertaining guide. 

Darnielle claims he’s always been fascinated by religious texts, but up until now more secular fixations have dominated his music: Ruptured relationships, literary heroes and his own difficult childhood are among the most common subjects of nearly two decades’ worth of studiously lo-fi Mountain Goats songs. And, as a die-hard black metal fan who, last year, published a short novel based on Black Sabbath’s “Master of Reality,” Darnielle may seem a particularly unlikely candidate to explore the spiritual.

It makes sense, then, that “The Life of the World to Come” isn’t a straight take on the Bible. You’ll find no retellings of Moses’ escape from Egypt or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount here. Darnielle, who is quick to assure fans that he hasn’t undergone some kind of radical conversion, is merely enamored with biblical language and imagery. Sometimes he borrows lines or words from the text: Gently upbeat “Romans 10:9″ plucks from its source material the exhortation to “Believe in your heart, and confess with your lips,” but its conclusion — “Surely you will be saved one day” — sounds shakier, more uncertain that salvation is even possible. Often, the connection between Bible and ballad is less obvious. On the whispery guitar track “Samuel 15:23,” Darnielle transforms a diatribe against rebellion and arrogance into the fantastical tale of a crystal healer.

The Mountain Goats are best known for raucous yet deeply bleak singalongs (a favorite of the band’s cultish fans is “No Children,” whose shouted chorus climaxes with the words, “I hope you die! I hope we both die!”), but on “The Life of the World to Come” they make hushed piano dirges equally absorbing. And even though the songs sound more restrained than usual, they remain obsessed with perennial Mountain Goats themes of illness, death, redemption and escape. As it turns out, the non-believing songwriter and the text that launched two ancient religions have more in common than meets the eye. That’s what makes “The Life of the World to Come” a much-needed reminder, to us godless liberals, of the Bible’s beauty and power — even if we only love it as literature. 

But a surprising number of the featured shorts stand the test of time. “Fears of Children,” in which a 5-year-old boy is coddled by his mother and pressured by his father, ought to be required viewing for every parent. “Improve Your Personality,” despite its egregious name, explains how we can change the way people affect us by improving our own understanding and empathy. 

As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”

 Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. “Let’s Make a Sandwich” isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it’s an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational. 

In just three episodes, Abed has evolved from a potentially cruel punch line into a nuanced, fascinating and, thank heaven, still hilarious character, one who observes that documentaries are “like real movies but with ugly people.” His frequent cluelessness is a rich source of comedy, but he keeps the upper hand by being the source of the joke instead of the butt of it.

Last week, Abed, spurred by a classmate, took an introductory filmmaking class. His new obsession threatened to alienate everyone in his life, particularly his conservative, immigrant father. But in a witty scene with just the right amount of pathos, Abed showed his dad his short film — a weird, dark little take on his mother’s abandonment. He had, movingly, found a way of expressing himself. And then he said something offensive.

The pleasure of Pudi’s performance is the way he lets Abed be as utterly exasperating as he is bright and talented. He’s not the huggable romantic hero of “Adam”; he’s just another goofus in the ensemble. Watch Pudi rap in Spanish or try his hand (and foot) at crunking, and behold the joy of an actor being funny without making fun. 

Ndegeocello has always had the dangerous charisma of a gorgeous depressive: You’re drawn in, only to find that everything is darker and heavier than you expected it to be. “Let Me Love You Down” takes an early, sex-obsessed Prince groove, knocks out the treble entirely and slows the whole thing down to an almost hypnotic crawl. The off-kilter percussive “White Girl” wobbles between anger and lovelorn flights of fantasy, tumbling into ambient, daydreamy canyons and then climbing out again. There’s a little Kate Bush in the unexpected rhythms, digital effects and spoken lines of “Mass Transit,” which reminds us that “At the end of the day, no one wants to be alone.” “Slaughter” is spaced-out bliss that solidifies into enraged rock ‘n’ roll; “I’ll make you suffer,” Ndegeocello sings, sounding like a mix of Sade and the Marquis de Sade.

Even the friendly, quiet Sunday morning strumming of “Blood on the Curb” comes unraveled with the line “I wanna kill you all.” From anyone else, this album would be a big messy pile of one-offs, but Ndegeocello’s rich, consistent voice is always there to pull us in, even as she’s throwing us off her scent once again. Like a world-weary muse, Ndegeocello taps into something rich and melancholy at the sludgy bottom of our hearts, then steps back and watches, amused, as we’re undone by her latest trail of mournful oddities.