Explore the vast range of titles available.

The US television series Alphas features an unusual breed of superhero: ordinary people with extreme abilities. In the run-up to the second season, head writer Bruce Miller explains how he sifts through the latest scientific findings to craft an array of superpowers .

Zak Penn has a confession -- the screenwriter whose name has appeared in the credits of two \"X-Men\" films, \"Elektra\" and \"The Incredible Hulk,\" has a real problem with this whole superhero thing that has been dominating Hollywood's attention for the last decade. \"I loved comics growing up, but even then I was always skeptical of straight-ahead superhero stories -- I never liked Spider-Man and Batman,\" the 43-year-old Penn said. \"The idea of superheroes always struck me as odd. Why are they putting on costumes to fight crime? Why are these people doing this?\"

\"They're super, but they're not heroic - they want to know, 'What's in this for me?' \" Penn said. \"Alphas\" stars David Strathairn as Dr. Lee Rosen, a preeminent neurologist with a fatherly devotion to his team of operatives, all of whom (unlike Rosen) possess Alpha Skills. He needs all of his wisdom and patience just to defuse the conflicts within his team, which includes the superstrong Bill Harken (Malik Yoba), the will-bending Nina Theroux (Laura Mennell), powerfully perceptive Gary Bell (Ryan Cartwright) and hyperkinetic Cameron Hicks (Warren Christie).The genesis for the show was [Michael Karnow]'s interest in MK-ULTRA, the real-life covert project that sought to unlock secrets of the human brain for military uses. Those programs inspired the loopy film \"The Men Who Stare at Goats,\" but in this new venture they have also led to an adventure-team concept that Penn says \"is closer in its DNA to procedural shows like 'The X-Files' or 'Fringe.' \"

Zak Penn has a confession -- the screenwriter whose name has appeared in the credits of two \"X-Men\" films, \"Elektra\" and \"The Incredible Hulk\" has a real problem with this whole superhero thing that has been dominating Hollywood's attention for the last decade.

[Bette Graham] \"connected those two dots,\" [Michael Nesmith] said, and invented Liquid Paper in her kitchen. A few years later, she moved her business into a portable, metal building in her back yard. (It's now on display at the Gihon Foundation headquarters.) The rest, as we know, is secretarial history. Graham built the company into a multimillion dollar outfit and sold it to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million. Graham died in 1980. By that time, Nesmith was a household name in his own right, achieving fame in the late 1960s as the wool-hatted member of The Monkees. He also had a solo singing career and is widely credited with inventing the idea behind MTV. Nesmith won the first Grammy in the category of home video for a music video he made called \"Elephant Parts.\" The five are members of the Council on Ideas, a project of the Gihon Foundation based in Nambe. Every two years, the Foundation invites five heavy-weight thinkers to its grassy headquarters 20 miles north of Santa Fe for a day and a half dedicated to identifying \"the most crucial issue facing society today,\" according to Gihon literature.

  1. Members of the Council on Ideas discuss their statement with the public Sunday afternoon. The council members are, from left, [Murray Gell-Mann], [Anna C. Roosevelt], [Stanley Karnow], [Nikki Giovanni] and [M. Cheriff Bassiouni]. 2. [Michael Nesmith] sits in the workshop where his mother, [Bette Graham], invented Liquid Paper. The Gihon Foundation, which sponsors the Council on Ideas, was established with earnings from Liquid Paper. 3. Poet Nikki Giovanni said the statement for Ideas 2000 needed more emphasis on issues such as Christian fundamentalism, homophobia and prisoners not being able to vote. 'Damn well should vote. Got nothing else to do but bone up on the issues,'she said.; Credit: Charlotte Rushton

Inexplicable. What do you make of a man who says that after his wife complained of hearing rats in the walls of their San Francisco apartment, they moved back East and he became a cartoonist? Of a man who offers an album of 213 cartoons that have appeared in The New Yorker and other publications, and divides it, without discernible reason, into such sections as ''Prologue,'' ''Tuesday,'' ''Noon,'' ''Later That Same Day,'' ''4:36 P.M., E.S.T.,'' ''Is This the End of Rico?'' and ''Epilogue''? Who calls his collection Filthy Little Things (Doubleday/Dolphin, $6.95), when there's only one cartoon in it to which that caption applies? Jack Ziegler's sense of humor defies definition, and his range of targets is as wide as the contemporary scene, but in almost every case they produce a chuckle. The cartoon reproduced above is typical. GOING TO EXTREMES, by Joe McGinniss. (NAL/ Plume, $6.95.) A journalist's chronicle of his two years' residence in Alaska, during which he wandered through the boondocks, across the tundra and glaciers and around the cities and tiny settlements, observing the ways of the natives and the boisterous newcomers from the ''lower 48.'' Joe McGinniss lacks the high style John McPhee displayed in ''Coming Into the Country,'' but his vignettes are vivid and persuasive.

Furnishes Norodom Sihanouk's replies to Washington Post's cabled interview questions.

Mr. Wilson's award for ''The Piano Lesson'' is his second Pulitzer Prize for drama; he won his first in 1987 for ''Fences.'' ''It adds fuel to the fire,'' Mr. [August Wilson] said yesterday. ''It makes me want to do more work.'' Until less than a decade ago, he was a little-known poet; then the manuscript of a play he had written was discovered by the director Lloyd Richards at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. That play was ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' which opened on Broadway in the 1984-85 season and won much critical praise. ''Ma Rainey'' was followed on Broadway by ''Fences'' - which won the Tony Award for best play as well as the Pulitzer - and ''Joe Turner's Come and Gone.'' They and ''The Piano Lesson'' - the story of a dispute between a brother and sister over a piano that has involved their family since the days of slavery - are part of a series of plays that Mr. Wilson is writing, one for each decade, on the life of black Americans in the 20th century. The newest, ''Two Trains Running,'' is now at the Yale Repertory Theater. Mr. Wilson, who will be 45 years old on April 27, lives in St. Paul, Minn. ''I like the man,'' said Sebastian de Grazia yesterday, speaking of [Machiavelli]. ''I like the texts he's written. And I like the way he comported himself.'' Mr. de Grazia's biography seeks to portray a more complex man than is commonly imagined and draws extensively on Machiavelli's own words. Not just his political works are quoted, but also letters, plays, and sonnets. ''No one thought of Machiavelli as being the life of the party; yet he was,'' Mr. de Grazia said. ''He could be very funny.'' In the book published by the Princeton University Press. The author helps set the personal tone of the book with his decision to address his subject by his first name: Niccolo. Mr. de Grazia, 72, received his Ph.D from the University of Chicago, served with the O.S.S. during World War II and has taught political philosophy at Rutgers since 1962. Given his admiration for his subject, why then the title of ''Machiavelli in Hell''? It is a question that Mr. de Grazia has been asked before. ''I did not consign him to hell,'' he says, laughing. ''If anything, I helped let him out of it.'' ''People on welfare and homeless people weren't anything shocking or new, since I grew up in a lot of foster homes,'' [Michael Williamson], a 33-year-old photographer with The Sacramento Bee, said yesterday. He and [Dale Maharidge], a 32-year-old Bee reporter, ''wanted to go to the roots of poverty and we'd both read 'Let us Now Praise Famous Men''' - James Agee and Walker Evans' influential 1941 book about Alabama sharecroppers. To produce their book, ''And Their Children After Them'' (Pantheon), ''we decided to go back and find the descendants of the people in Agee and Evans's book, and we found 128, nearly all of them,'' he said. ''Most were still poor, and 95 percent were still in Alabama.'' Since joining the Bee in 1980, Mr. Maharidge has reported on social issues in the United States, Latin America and the Philippines. Mr. Williamson's photographic assignments have ranged from Super Bowl games to the wars of Central America.