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The New Republic
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From The New Republic
“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??
If you’ve heard of Chief Keef, a 17-year-old rapper from Chicago, it may be because he signed a $3 million dollar recording contract with ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
There’s an old Gestapo story. A prisoner is brought in for interrogation, and one of the guys in black does the regulation line, “We have ways of making you talk.” He can shout it out, or whisper it; there are stylistic choices. Either way, the prisoner’s face brightens— he loves to talk. And almost before the Gestapo can get a shorthand typist in to take it all down, the fellow is talking, talking, talking, and it’s lovely stuff, with different voices for ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
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? Crude exploiter, extravagantly repurposing fabulator, sly prankster tweaking everybody else's racial hangups and categories—he wouldn't be our Quentin if he didn't give us plenty of ammo for all three takes. But if you go along with Stuffyville's abiding ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
Writing about his obsession with art books in a wonderful little volume published this year—Phantoms on the Bookshelves—Jacques Bonnet says that “Images send you on to other images, artists to other artists, periods come one after another or echo each other, all with their cargo of art works.” And so it is when I think back on remarkable art experienced in the year just past. One show sets me to thinking about another, and I find myself remembering the exhibitions ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
The New Republic’s film critics on some of the best, under-appreciated films of 2012:
Amour: Amour is as hard and bright as bone. The love it observes is intense, selfish, and nearly insane (these are the film’s greatest truths). – David Thomson, watch trailer
The Deep Blue Sea: [Terence] Davies, who is now ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
Barack Obama's pre-presidential manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has only one extended riff on gun control—not a homily on behalf of the cause or even a meditation on the deep divisions opened by the debate, but a story of crummy luck. While State Senator Barack Obama was vacationing in Hawaii, visiting his grandmother and hoping to "reacquaint myself with Michelle," the Illinois legislature abruptly returned to consider bills making the possession of illegal firearms a felony ... Quick Read |
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From 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. His parents ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
“Holy fucking shit,” said Adam Kokesh from the stage at the Clarendon Grill, in Arlington, Virginia. “For those of you who weren’t there, it’s hard to understand the courage, the literal courage it took to hand out those flyers today.” Kokesh was the doyen of the Disinauguration Ball, a gathering of “liberty activists” – or, if you want to get technical, “anarco-capitalists” – who had gathered to anti-celebrate Barack ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
At a pre-inaugural party three nights ago, rapper Lupe Fiasco lived up to his reputation for stirring controversy when he played an extended, 30-minute version of his anti-Obama track “Words I Never Said.” For this, he was thrown off the stage by security guards. It’s unclear whether Fiasco was booted for repeating the song’s lyrics ad nauseam or for what StartUp RockOn, the concert’s organizer, described in an official statement as a “bizarrely repetitive, ... Quick Read |
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From The New Republic
The Music Libel Against the Jews
By Ruth HaCohen
(Yale University Press, 507 pp., $55)
IN NOVEMBER 1934, Privy Councilor Wilhelm Furtwängler, vice president of the Third Reich’s Music Chamber and conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, imprudently took to the pages of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung to defend the composer Paul Hindemith against the charge of “Jewishness” with which Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda and ... Quick Read |
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