The New Republic

"September 11 was a wake-up call." No, it was not. It was a hellish lullaby--a brutal sedative. Five years ago, the most powerful nation on earth fell into a slumber. It became a sleepwalking giant only half aware of its surroundings and oblivious to itself. When Hermann Broch wrote The Sleepwalkers, modern Europe had just been shaken from its Biedermeier trance by the guns of August 1914, and it was about to slip into new nightmares. READ MORE >>

"Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot," a voiceover intones at the opening of V for Vendetta. "I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot." The popular British rhyme--which the film generously repeats again less than ten minutes later for those stuck in the concession line the first time around--refers, of course, to Guy Fawkes's unsuccessful plot to blow up the British Parliament in 1605. READ MORE >>

A FRIEND RECENTLY TOLD me that his most important pedagogical tool as an architect is this maxim: the architect's primary ethical responsibility is to be the guardian of the public realm, in contrast to the myriad others who currently configure our built landscape— clients, politicians, contractors, developers, and NIMBY-driven "community action" committees. READ MORE >>

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism By Steven B. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., $32.50) Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem By Heinrich Meier (Cambridge University Press, 183 pp., $60) I. READ MORE >>

Apex Hides the Hurt By Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 212 pp., $22.95) READ MORE >>

Black Swan Green By David Mitchell (Random House, 294 pp., $23.95) I. READ MORE >>

TERRORIST By John Updike Alfred A. Knopf, 310 pp. I. READ MORE >>

Caché, the fascinating, frustrating existential thriller by Austrian director Michael Haneke, opens with a stationary shot of a nondescript townhouse in Paris. The movie titles, in small white type, slowly appear against this backdrop as if printing on a teletype machine. The only sounds are the occasional bird chirp and the momentary footsteps of a passerby. After about two minutes, the completed titles fade from view. A woman comes out of the townhouse but the camera, rooted as an obstinate child, does not follow her as she exits the frame. READ MORE >>

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In the 1950 introduction to his collection of stories Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler explained the difference between the classic murder mystery and the hard-boiled detective genre he helped invent. In the former, the conclusion--when the sleuth explains whodunit and how--was everything; what led up to it was mere "passagework," a careful alignment of plot elements to enable that final, big revelation. In the hard-boiled genre, by contrast, the opposite was true: "[T]he scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one that made good scenes." READ MORE >>