Life

"God built me to last," Jackie Robinson says at one point in "42," and, thankfully, his remarkable story is built the same way. It would have to be to survive the full-dress Hollywood biopic treatment it gets in this film, which is unabashedly subtitled "The True Story of an American Legend. " And survive it does. You almost can't blame writer-director Brian Helgeland for taking an old-fashioned, earnest-to-a-fault approach to the genuinely heroic narrative of the Brooklyn Dodger who in 1947 - in a move masterminded by team General Manager Branch Rickey -- broke the Major League Baseball color barrier, led the Dodgers to the National League pennant and won rookie of the year honors.

Deep into Marie Arana's wonderful new biography of Simón Bolívar, "the George Washington of South America," there's a deliciously unexpected pause in the action. It's 1816, and Bolívar has set sail from Haiti. He's on his way back to Venezuela, with an army set to take on the hated Spanish colonial authorities. At the island of St. Thomas, he ostensibly stops for "supplies. " In reality, his fleet of ships has anchored so that Bolívar can pick up his mistress, Pepita Machado.

There are at least three great reasons to see "Sicily: Art and Invention Between Greece and Rome," the newly opened antiquities exhibition at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades. A major sculpture anchors each of the show's three rooms, and together they tell an accelerating story of artistic and social power on the ancient Mediterranean island. Chronologically, the first is a straightforward male torso, his finely chiseled marble body quietly brimming with latent energy. Second comes a preening charioteer, physically just larger than life but expressively very much so. And third is a depiction of a minor god with major fertility on his mind, his powerful physicality an embodiment of the contortions of carnal lust, both corporeal and psychological.

JERUSALEM--The Jerusalem District Court sentenced an American-born Israeli to two life sentences and another 30 years in jail for murdering two Palestinians and additional crimes Tuesday. Dubbed "The Jewish Terrorist" by Israeli media, Jack Teitel was arrested in 2009 after a years-long investigation by police and Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, for a series of terror attacks that began in the 1990s. In January, Teitel was convicted of the separate murders of two Palestinian men and the attempted murders of a prominent Jewish liberal professor and the teenage son of a family of messianic Jews.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - The most analyzed, dissected athlete of our time is passing the tests with greater ease these days. The people who administer the Rorschach would be proud of Tiger Woods. It is Masters week, and during Woods' career of golfing excellence, this tournament has also served as a professional description. He has been the master. In 18 tries, he has won four times, with eight other top-10 finishes including two seconds, and missed the cut only once. The Masters alone has increased the Tiger Woods' bank account by $6.853 million.

Malibu Barbie never had it so good. A Paul Smith rug, curtains sewn from Missoni fabric, LED sconces strung with Swarovski crystals, even a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona daybed cluttered with Rodeo Drive shopping bags - all small enough to fit in your pocket. These are but a few of the over-the-top luxuries decorating 10 couture play pads created for the 2013 Designer Dollhouse Showcase. The Los Angeles firm Richard Manion Architecture has constructed scale-model dream houses - Italianate, brownstone, beach house contemporary and other styles - that will be auctioned April 17 to benefit the UCLA Children's Discovery and Innovation Institute , part of Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA.

Jackie Robinson changed baseball and the nation that loves it on April 15, 1947, when he became the first black player to walk onto a major league ball field. He changed Carl Erskine's life in March 1948, when Robinson, by then a Brooklyn Dodgers star, sought out the minor leaguer after watching him pitch and told him, "You're going to be with us real soon!" And so he was - they were teammates through much of he Dodgers' legendary 1950s. The Robinson biopic "42" is mostly about matters that happened before they met, but Erskine knows what happened afterward: He pitched and won the first Dodger game in L.A., retired in 1959 to his hometown in Indiana, and watched the nation gradually understand the life lessons he later wrote about in "What I Learned from Jackie Robinson.

Terrible things are documented in the newspaper every day. A child kidnapped and assaulted. A family drowned. A 9-year-old girl forced to hike through the desert for help after surviving a car crash that killed her father. We read those stories and we feel for the victims, but for the most part they're just names in another, unimaginable universe we're just glad isn't our own. And then one day, you recognize a name. Alex Renteria. That was the man who was driving with his daughter near Acton last week when their car veered off the road and rolled several times before landing at the bottom of a canyon.

Julia Sweeney jokes first and thinks about it later. Luckily, her daughter and husband share her sense of humor (mostly). Best known for her stint on "Saturday Night Live" -- she was under the androgynous Pat's fat suit -- Sweeney has become a successful writer, in addition to continuing to perform onstage.  She brings her hilarious, intimate new book, "If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother, " to Book Soup at 7 tonight. She may read about her hatred of huge strollers, being mistaken for her daughter's grandmother and the misadventures of hiring a nanny.

The search for Earth-like planets, and ultimately life beyond Earth, is about to get a boost: In 2017, NASA will send a satellite called TESS into orbit with the goal of finding planets in our solar neighborhood that may be hospitable to life.  NASA's Kepler mission has been scanning a small portion of the sky since 2009 in search of planets that orbit stars other than our own, but the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission will be scanning...