Portrait

As Hurricane Isaac battered parts of Louisiana on Wednesday, leaving some in southern parts of the state stranded and causing thousands to lose power , residents and observers took to social media to ask for help and to share updates and prayers. Posts on Twitter painted a portrait of devastation and urgency in Plaquemines Parish, a small region south of New Orleans with just over 26,000 residents, where a levee was topped. Some Twitter users turned to the site to call for rescues.

Two decidedly different portraits emerged Wednesday of the U.S. Open tennis umpire accused of killing her 80-year-old husband and then trying to pass it off as an accident. Prosecutors said Lois Goodman, 70, bludgeoned her husband, then callously left him to die as she went to "tennis and to get her nails done. " Deputy Dist. Atty. Sharon Ransom accused Lois Goodman of meticulously planning the killing in advance, but did not lay out any evidence to support that claim. She said the umpire used a broken coffee mug like an "improvised knife," stabbing her husband 10 times.

TAMPA, Fla. - Surrounded by giant-size family photos, Ann Romney offered a glowing testimonial to her husband. Jabbing an accusing finger, Chris Christie painted a grim portrait of America under Barack Obama. Each in their own way attempted something important: to warm up a presidential nominee whom voters find distinctly chilly and to persuade them to fire a president that many still find personally likable. A political convention is a lot of things: a campaign rally, a rubber stamp, a gathering of tribes.

Just as teens hold up their cellphones to snap a Myspace-worthy photo, the Mars Science Laboratory rover has taken its own self-portrait: a mosaic of images taken as the rover looks down from its navigation cameras, located high up in the robot's mast. The rover, nicknamed Curiosity, has also used its Mast Camera to send back a lower-resolution 360-degree color panorama of its surroundings in the landing site in Gale Crater. “We built the thing and we touched it with our hands here, and now it's on Mars,” said mission manager Michael Watkins.

Watching"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"is like experiencing a thrilling unfinished symphony: The story is enthralling, but it's not over, and there's no telling where it's going. Which makes what we see on screen all the more involving. Though he was named the most powerful artist in the world by ArtReview, Chinese provocateur/human rights activist Ai is simply a boldface name to most people, someone whose life and significance we are only vaguely aware of. Alison Klayman's documentary, a Sundance award winner, definitively changes that.

Right now, the most famous Van Gogh painting in a California museum happens to be one of his sunniest: The Getty owns an exuberant field of irises that the artist painted in 1889 as a sort of postcard for his arrival at a bucolic-looking asylum in Saint Rémy de Provence, France. But this winter, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, home to seven other Van Gogh paintings, will exhibit a darker work from the same year that is celebrated for different reasons. The intense self-portrait with jarring colors and turbulent violet-blue brushwork in the background seems to speak to the artist's volatile psychological state.

Hiking Workshop Experts discuss the best places to go locally for moderate hikes, scenic waterfalls and splash-worthy swimming holes. When, where: 7 p.m. Wednesday at the REI store in Arcadia, 214 N. Santa Anita Ave. Admission, info: Free. (626) 447-1062. ROCK CLIMBING Movie "Stoney Point: Portrait of an American Crag" is a documentary based on the history and climbing culture of a small park in Chatsworth, one of the most influential climbing areas in the country.

It's a small painting as paintings go, quite demure by the salacious standards of its artist, but, oh, the fuss it caused. As detailed in Andrew Shea's fascinating documentary "Portrait of Wally,"Egon Schiele's haunting 1912 painting of his mistress and favorite model Wally Neuzil had a complicated, extremely dramatic history as well as a legal and cultural significance that can't be overestimated. The battle to return this heartfelt painting - half of a de facto artist and model double portrait - to the family of the woman who originally owned it jump-started the current international art restitution movement that reunites misappropriated objects with their original owners.

2312 A Novel Kim Stanley Robinson Orbit: 576 pp., $25.99 As the author of the "Mars" trilogy, among other novels, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a superlative reputation for science fictional extrapolation. In his vibrant, often moving new novel, "2312," Robinson's extrapolation is hard-wired to a truly affecting personal love story. By the year of the book's title, humankind has (just barely) survived global warming, in part because of terra-forming technologies that have made possible the colonization of Mars, Mercury and Venus.

LONDON--Since her coronation in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has been painted, photographed and deconstructed more than anyone on Earth. A billion people carry her likeness around in their pockets every day -- not as a totem or religious icon but rather more practically as something to trade for milk or diapers.  Her station and her refusal to express an opinion on anything in public mean we all know what she looks like, some of us may have even...