But Bernd Heinrich, a renowned naturalist and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Vermont, argues in his eye-opening new book, "The Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy," there's little reason to suspect birds don't fall in love just like we do. Love, Heinrich writes, is an adaptive feeling that many animals share, one that causes them to act irrationally for the sake of reproduction. He suggests monogamy among birds evolved in a similar way, as a sexual strategy for rearing young in demanding environments.

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McKibben’s hair-raising new book, "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," is a scrupulous and impassioned account of the severely compromised globe on which we now live. He lays out the myriad ways in which climate change has remade our world, but he also goes much further, chronicling its current and future human toll. He explains how droughts in Australia helped precipitate the 2008 food crisis and put 40 million people at risk of hunger, and how the rapidly melting glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas may soon threaten the water supply of billions. Our only hope of survival, McKibben suggests, is a reversion to small-scale, local ways of life. "We simply can’t live on the new earth as if it were the old earth," he writes. "We’ve foreclosed that option."

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As Anya Kamenetz suggests in "DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education," these problems, and the fact that students and teachers are increasingly venturing beyond campus walls to gather and share information, spell trouble for the future of the conventional university. In her book, Kamenetz, the author of “Generation Debt” and a staff writer for Fast Company magazine, argues that a decentralized college experience — in which the least effective parts of college life are replaced by technology, social media and self-directed learning — can limit dropout rates and reverse the devastating cost spiral.

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We talked amiably over the phone a few times, but I never asked her out. Then one day, I came across an ad in the Village Voice for a workshop called "Erotic Bondage and Dirty Domination," given by the adult sex shop Toys in Babeland. I was not involved in the BDSM scene -- in fact, I'd never even considered bringing sex toys, far less weapons, into the bedroom. But I thought it would be a kind of anthropological adventure for Darla and me. It might speed up the expensive and psychically exhausting courtship ritual, and give us a shared experience to discuss. At the very least, it was more original than a bar or a club or a show. A friend of mine had just been to an S/M party, and returned swearing that everyone should try it. That night, I sent a text message to Darla, suggesting we attend.

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Even in the age of Lolcats and Sugar Bush Squirrel, taxidermy, the subject of Melissa Milgrom's riveting new book, "Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy," remains an esoteric and divisive field. But Milgrom proves there's little reason for the latter. Most taxidermists, after all, are animal lovers, humbly striving to glorify the majestic animal form. As part of her research into how taxidermy is practiced today, Milgrom attends the World Taxidermy Championship, and even enters her own stuffed squirrel into a novice competition at the Smithsonian.

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Colson Whitehead, novelist (most recently of "Sag Harbor"):

"In honor of our fallen Corey, we should all sing David Bowie's 'Fame,' substituting Haim where appropriate."

Kevin Smith:       

"Lost Boy goes home: Corey Haim, dead at 38. G'bye, LUCAS. You gave hope to the weird & unlikely."   

Jeremy Piven (appeared in "Lucas" with Haim):

Retweeting Tinybuddha: "Until you stop breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you." ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Melissa Joan Hart:

"No way! I just saw him last week at a Lupus event! RIP! RT @dietcokebottle: Did you see Corey Haim died? So sad =("

Soleil Moon Frye:

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Adams' follow-up to her 2005 novel, "Harbor," reads like a season of "The Wire." Only here the Washington Spectator (a thinly veiled Washington Post) has replaced the Baltimore Sun, and the streets of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, stand in for the projects. Written in a precise, lyrical voice, the book takes place shortly after 9/11 and provides an inside view of both the U.S. intelligence community and the newsroom floor, allowing Adams to explore how reality is created, warped and disguised at the whims of those in power.

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No one knows. But the stresses of captivity seem responsible. Captive orcas often decline to eat, and are force-fed until they do. And while there are no known cases of an orca killing a human in the wild, around two dozen cases exist of captive orcas attacking humans.

In response, SeaWorld, whose brand-image depends on friendly-looking killer whales, has found itself in a public-relations quandary akin to what Accenture experienced with its “Go on. Be a Tiger” ads. And yet it’s been suggested that Wednesday’s death may generate a new audience for the park -- that of teens and young adults, enlivened by the possibility of violence.

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"For sure" is nothing new, of course. It's been around since the 1580s, arriving after the expression "sure enough" and before "sure-footed," which, sadly, never really caught on. Today it is associated with groovy Californian optimism ("Fer shurr, dude!"), and tends to pepper the speech of Gen Y'ers, the demographic most represented at the Vancouver Games. But the frequency with which Olympic competitors, coaches and officials have been saying "for sure" lately suggests it is more than a meaningless verbal tic.

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A new generation of young, hip and occasionally tattooed librarians is driving them out. They call themselves guybrarians, cybrarians and "information specialists," and they blog at sites like The Free Range Librarian and The Lipstick Librarian. They can be found in droves on Second Life, but also outside the Republican National Convention, dodging tear gas canisters and tweeting the location of the police.

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"The Whale" does not disappoint. First, there are the simple, shocking facts about whales. A fin whale off the coast of Nantucket can be heard by its counterpart off the coast of England, about 3,000 miles away. Inuit harpoons dating back 235 years have been found in the belly of hunted bowhead whales — one of the world's longest-living mammals. The right whale is the owner of the largest testes in the animal kingdom (around 1,100 pounds each), and, after foreplay sessions involving sensuous flipper stroking, the female may let more than one partner enter her at the same time.

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Having scrutinized the lives of Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Castle here investigates her own relationships and obsessions -- including Sontag herself, in a hilarious (and not entirely flattering) meditation on their rocky friendship called "Desperately Seeking Susan."

The rest of the material is rather bleak: pilgrimages to World War I battlefields and the Palermo catacombs, psychotic step-siblings, a traumatic graduate school fling with a crippled female professor. Yet every page hums with a kind of cathartic glee -- a testimony to Castle’s ability to transform even the grimmest scenarios into savage comic prose. One-liners abound ("If one had to be female, after all, one might as well be Janis Joplin," she writes of her attempts to blend in with '70s hippie-chic.) And a serious knowledge of feminist theory mingles with digressions on the "hotitude" of Daniel Craig. "The Professor and Other Writings" documents a brilliant mind discovering a deeper, more intimate mode of expression.

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Jess Walter is one of your country's most interesting younger novelists, and one of my favourite contemporary writers. And his latest book, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," seems to me to contain most things that one can reasonably expect from a good novel: It's wise, moving, very funny and timely, dealing as it does with economic calamity and how that whole mess impacts our lives and relationships and souls. Oh, and it's a joy to read, too — a sine qua non, given the darkness of the times, both within the book's pages and out here in the world.

Judy Blume, children's book author, most recently of "Soupy Saturdays With the Pain and the Great One"

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