Newsweek Society

Cose: Oprah, the Un-Palin

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:40:46 GMT

Oprah is the real unifier in chief.

Dining as Extreme Sport

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:35:05 GMT

High-end adventurers have plenty of options, from luxury safaris to guided Antarctic treks. But few think of food as a frontier offering the same kind of adrenaline-rush-inducing excitement. Maybe they should: a growing number of restaurants offer new opportunities for those bored with traditional dining. Forget wearing a sport coat while waiting for a soufflé; this is eating as extreme sport.

A New Kind of Bollywood Film

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:07:59 GMT

Midway through Vishal Bhardwaj's 2009 movie (), the hero is captured by thugs looking to recover $2 million in stolen cocaine. As the goons torture him to find out where he's hidden the drugs, they run into a problem: he stammers so badly that they can't get a word out of him. So sing, they say. Out come his answers, to the tune of a popular song. Problem solved. Except the hero the thugs have captured isn't the thief. His twin brother, who lisps, stole the dope. And the twins haven't spoken to each other for years.

What Coolio Is Cooking for Thanksgiving

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:16:52 GMT

Best known for his 1995 rap album, Gangsta's Paradise, Compton-born rapper Coolio has a new cookbook that will teach you how to pimp your skills.

Orson Welles: Back From the Dead

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:05:17 GMT

Welles's death in 1985 didn't rescue his reputation. "For the television generation," wrote frequent lunch companion Gore Vidal in 1989, "he is remembered as an enormously fat and garrulous man with a booming voice, seen most often on talk shows and in commercials where he somberly assured us that a certain wine would not be sold 'before its time,' whatever that meant." In 1993 the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of Welles's most perceptive chroniclers and staunchest defenders, lamented that he is "mainly regarded in the U.S. today as a failed artist." Even now, YouTube serves as a repository of Welles's bad late-life behavior, like the gruesome clips that keep "Orson Welles drunk" and "Orson Welles frozen peas" among his most popular Google searches. (Look them up for yourself if you're cruel.)

Movie Review: Tom Ford Directs 'A Single Man'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:57:19 GMT

The movie has a hushed, sensual intensity and formal elegance that leaves no doubt Ford knows what he's doing behind the camera. , as you might expect, is beautiful to look at—too beautiful, in fact. Ford's devotion to style can become a distraction. Do all the men George cruises have to be so fashion-model gorgeous? A black-and-white flashback to George and Jim sunning on jagged rocks looks right out of an old Calvin Klein ad. Would Isherwood's professor live in an midcentury home and have drawers of perfectly folded clothes? Charlotte's lair, bursting with fabulous early '60s furniture, is similarly overly art-directed. Still, that's where one of the movie's most riveting and revealing scenes is set—a long, intimate, drunken evening where all the simmering tensions between George and his closest confidante bubble up. 's sleek surface may go against Isherwood's crisp, understated prose, yet the story's beating, wounded heart and its spiky intelligence still come through, personified in Firth's moving, eloquently internalized performance. In its microcosmic way, addresses mighty big questions—love, death, and the difficulty and necessity of living in the Now.

Movie Review: 'Crazy Heart'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:56:04 GMT

First-time director Scott Cooper, who wrote the screenplay from a Thomas Cobb novel, gives his cast (which includes Duvall, in a small but tasty role) lots of breathing room. What he prizes in this character study is not originality, but authenticity. From the songs Blake sings (written by Stephen Bruton and T. Bone Burnett) to the light in the eyes of his aging groupies, the details feel right. gets to you like a good country song—not because it tells you something new, but because it tells it well. It's the singer, not the song.

Movie Review: Clint Eastwood's 'Invictus'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:53:45 GMT

During his incarceration, Mandela studied his Afrikaner enemies and was wise to the role sports played in the national psyche. South Africa's less-than-sterling rugby team, the Springbok, was as beloved by whites as it was despised by the black population, to whom it had become a symbol of oppression. Yet Mandela, taking a huge political risk, refuses to give in to his supporters' demand that the team be dismantled and renamed. To do so, he sees, would only stoke fear and racial paranoia in the Afrikaner population. Enlisting the team's captain (Matt Damon) to his side, Mandela challenges him to turn its losing ways around. His goal is to use rugby to bridge the racial divide in his country.

Jason Reitman: The Grown-Up's Director

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:46:01 GMT

There hasn't been a studio movie as unapologetically adult, sophisticated, and nuanced as in some time. Reitman wrote the lead with George Clooney in mind, and there are echoes of the unmarried Clooney's life here. He's playing another urbane charmer, but there's a panic, a vulnerability, under the slick surface that Clooney has rarely shown. The rootless, no-strings life Bingham has constructed is imperiled when a young efficiency expert (Anna Kendrick) hired by Bingham's boss (Jason Bateman) concludes that the company can save time, money, and manpower by firing people remotely—via teleconferencing. Threatened with permanent grounding, Bingham takes the brash woman on the road to show her why the delicate but brutal job must be done in person. There's a second challenge to his beloved autonomy: Alex (Vera Farmiga), another corporate frequent flier with whom he begins a hot affair. Alex is his perfect counterpart ("Think of me as you, with a vagina," she quips), as wary of emotional baggage as he is, content with occasional romps in airport hotels when they can coordinate their flight patterns. Farmiga is a great partner for Clooney, her wry sophistication setting off silky sexual sparks against his jaunty seductiveness. But Alex gets further under Bingham's skin than he expects. Suddenly, he experiences need, and it's profoundly uncomfortable.

Movie Review: Tobey Maguire in 'Brothers'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:32:05 GMT

Movie Review: 'The Last Station'

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:19:14 GMT

It's easy to see whose side Hoffman is on: Sofya may be hysterical and manipulative, but on this seriocomedic battlefield her lust for life (and property) trumps Chertkov's rigid ideology. The role lets Mirren unleash her inner diva: Sofya's love-hate combat with her husband plays like "Who's Afraid of Leo Tolstoy?" McAvoy rings virtuoso variations on idol worship and naiveté, and his excitement when he falls in love for the first time with the free-thinking communard Masha (Kerry Condon) is hilarious and touching. slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there). Both sides are captured in Plummer's sly, volcanic portrait of an icon far less Tolstoyan than his followers. Was this wildly contradictory genius really this lovably irascible? Perhaps not—but in movie terms, he sure is fun to be around.

The History of America's Beloved Turkey

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:54:04 GMT

The history of America's beloved—if a bit dry—Thanksgiving turkey.

Why Evolution Should Be Taught to Younger Kids

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:41:17 GMT

On the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, an argument for teaching evolution to younger children.

In Defense of Elizabeth Lambert

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:17:16 GMT

The soft bigotry of high expectations.

Losing TV Show Won't Diminish Oprah's Power

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:33:41 GMT

Fear not, America: Oprah Winfrey isn't going anywhere. Yet.

Movie Review: New Moon, the Twilight Sequel

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:12:50 GMT

The real fears on display in New Moon aren't about the vampires.

East European Writers Take on Communism

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:15:26 GMT

Twenty years after the death of communism in Europe, writers like Dragomán are still working to come to terms with a past they say defines and disfigures their societies to this day. In many countries, that past remains a painful memory, half or fully buried. Romania is still ruled by its old communist-era elite, which has made reckoning with past crimes difficult at best. In Hungary, where post-communists have been in power for seven years, key secret-police archives remain closed. Russia, after a brief flowering of atonement and confrontation in the 1990s, has reverted to something between historical amnesia and glorification of Stalinism.

Tracking Down Truffles in Tuscany

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:07:19 GMT

Most people who live in Italy for any period of time eventually become curious about truffles. It's not so much that Italian truffles, with their pungent smell and earthy flavor, are an acquired taste; they are simply hard to acquire, appearing on menus only at certain times of year and in certain regions. Unlike French black truffles, which are far more common, the Italian Precious Whites are a rare delicacy, worth as much as €4,000 a kilo, and surrounded by colorful folklore. Personally, I always imagined graying men with woven baskets and funny hats roaming the Tuscan countryside behind pigs, in pursuit of a mysterious fungus. A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to go on a truffle hunt and found most of the myths shattered.

Lady Gaga's Music and Fame Hypocrisy

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:45:18 GMT

French intellectual Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the age of 100 last month, before he could comment on the latest single from Lady Gaga. If you think this an absurd notion, note that Lévi-Strauss's major project—discovering the common aspects of myths from different eras and continents—has influenced many pop scholars, including Greil Marcus. In our -ized culture, few myths loom larger than pop fame, which is why the philosopher and anthropologist might have had something to say about Top 40's self-professed conceptual artist of the moment. In a way, he still does.

Abu Dhabi: An Oil-financed Cultural Center?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:43:05 GMT

In 2007, named Abu Dhabi the wealthiest city in the world, and like nouveaux riches everywhere, it has gone on a bit of a spending spree. Local branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums are under construction. They'll join the Abu Dhabi Poetry Academy and the Arab Heritage Village, with exhibits on life in the Gulf centuries before the mall with the ski slope moved into the neighborhood. And then there's Zaha Hadid's swooping design for the five-theater Performing Arts Center, which will make the Sydney Opera House look like a grade-school auditorium. Aside from the sand that still occasionally blows across the modern cityscape, the Abu Dhabi of a few decades ago wouldn't recognize itself today. But the most impressive display of cultural pride—not to mention deep pockets—sits on the floor of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque. It is the world's largest prayer rug—60,546 square feet of vibrant wool, handmade in Iran. It is so dazzling, you almost don't notice the gold-leaf domes above. Almost.