The New Republic

Katie Couric’s interview with Manti Te’o—which aired yesterday on her daytime talk show, “Katie”—made for a queasy spectacle. Te’o sat stiffly in a pale cardigan, looking bug-eyed and stricken. “I was just scared, and I didn’t know what to do,” Te’o said, when asked why he did not tell his parents and coaches the moment he discovered that the girlfriend he’d thought was dead might have been an elaborate hoax.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

The Oscars are odd. It’s just about the only reason left for having them; that and for the sake of the people who make red carpets. Every year when the nominations come out, there are three or four days of stories about the “surprises” and the people who were “snubbed.” So Tom Hooper and Kathryn Bigelow were overlooked, but Michael Haneke was remarked on.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

“Retirement is for sissies,” read the billboards for the new action film, The Last Stand, opening today. The words appear below a photo of the Governor of California Emeritus, who is firing a huge machine gun, while former constituent Johnny Knoxville, of “Jackass” fame, cheers wildly in the background.

Architecture occupies a peculiar place in the life of democratic societies. Most buildings get built because some private concern, an individual or a corporate entity, commissions it. Because procuring land and constructing buildings is expensive, the private concerns that do so typically enjoy the benefits of wealth, which include social and political influence in excess of the democratic credo of one man, one vote.

The Music Libel Against the Jews
By Ruth HaCohen
(Yale University Press, 507 pp., $55)

“It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air … Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.”
 — James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 1951



The release of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained has kicked off the gnarliest round yet of a debate that never gets old. What are we supposed to make of his alternately frisky and convoluted relationship to African American culture?More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

This is 40, which premiered Friday, is Judd Apatow’s most autobiographical project yet. Like Funny People, it stars Apatow’s own family: his wife, Leslie Mann, and his daughters Maude and Iris, now evolved from cute set pieces into sassy tweens with distinct personalities.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Many people mistakenly believe that the one true symbol of the American Christmas is Santa Claus. These people are wrong. Sure, every mall worth its Auntie Annie’s salt has a Saint Nick in the food court.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

May I suggest an amendment to the Constitution? It should be as illegal as it is misleading to open a movie with any statement about its being “based on fact.” That very assertion precedes Zero Dark Thirty, the new picture by Kathryn Bigelow, which has already won several critics’ awards and must be in the running for the Best Picture Oscar.