Arts

This week at Monkey See, we're looking at friendship in pop culture. We begin with a consideration of how half-hour comedies shifted away from being almost exclusively family- or work-focused.

Since Paula Abdul left American Idol, she's had her own dance competition show called Live To Dance on CBS (which failed) and a stint on The X Factor (where she lasted one season). Apparently still wanting that doctorate in reality-competition judging, she's making a guest appearance this week swinging a paddle (oh, behave) on ABC's Dancing With The Stars. The only major broadcast network left after that is NBC, where perhaps she can lead an aerobics class on The Biggest Loser.

H.W. Brands is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Fiction and nonfiction releases from Aatish Taseer, Naomi Benaron, Glenn L. Carle, Jonathan Lethem and David Bellos.

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Sixty years ago, the book Charlotte's Web first appeared in print. This children's classic is often seen as a story of a spider and a pig. But when E.B. White recorded a narration of the book, he said something different: "This is a story of the barn. I wrote it for children, and to amuse myself."

Whaam! Varoom! R-rrring-g! The canvases of painter Roy Lichtenstein look as if they're lifted from the pages of comic books. Comics were a big inspiration for this pop artist, who was rich and famous when died in 1997 at age 73. But at a major Lichtenstein retrospective at Washington's National Gallery of Art, you can see that the artist found inspiration beyond comic books; he also paid his respects to the masters — Picasso, Monet and more.

Journalist Chrystia Freeland has spent years reporting on the people who've reached the pinnacle of the business world. For her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, she traveled the world, interviewing the multimillionaires — and billionaires — who make up the world's elite super-rich. Freeland says that many of today's richest individuals gained their fortunes not from inheritance, but from actual work.

Chanel No. 5 is an iconic perfume, it's been around for 92 years. Marylin Monroe, Catherine Deneuve and Nicole Kidman have all endorsed the fragrance. Starting on Sunday, Brad Pitt is joining their ranks. He's the first man to endorse the perfume in its history.