Emotional Armor: Superheroes like Batman (Christian Bale) function as talismans when our fears are darkest — symbols of good, and of justice, when we wonder whether either exists.
The whole idea's ridiculous, always has been. Guy dresses up like a bat to scare criminals. Shyeah. Not something that can truly chill the blood — a snake, say, or a spider — but a bat, the sight of which causes most of us to sigh and reach for a tennis racket to shoo the little guy out the nearest window.
It's an idea a kid would come up with, which is one reason it's come in for such merciless lampooning over the years: Pow. Zap. "Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods, Batman," et cetera.
Fifty years ago, a young architect named Norton Juster decided to procrastinate by writing a children's book; his roommate, a young cartoonist named Jules Feiffer, did all the illustrations. The result was The Phantom Tollbooth, which has since become a beloved children's classic.
Since Juster knows enough about The Phantom Tollbooth already, we've invited him to answer three questions about The Phantom Menace.
Credit Eliot Kamenitz / The Times-Picayune /Landov
Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC's newest host, is a Tulane professor with a Ph.D. in political science from Duke. She hosts the two-hour Melissa Harris-Perry show, which airs on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Cable news channels tend to treat intellectuals gingerly — as fragile curiosities or as targets for ridicule — when they appear at all.
Not MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry. This newly anointed cable host commutes 1,300 miles each week for her eponymous program of opinionated conversation, interviews and essays that runs live for two hours each Saturday and Sunday morning.
We've been doing PCHH for two years now, and we've never really talked in detail about Breaking Bad. That's kind of weird, but it's partly an artifact of the fact that it took us a while to develop an adequate background, since the only one of us who was a regular watcher from the beginning was Mike Katzif, our producer.
But this week, with me and Glen fully up to speed (along with Mike) and with Stephen and Trey recent experimenters who watched a few early episodes and then jumped ahead to Sunday's season premiere — heresy, I know, but they did it anyway — we dive in.
Sylvia Woods moves to the music outside her restaurant in Harlem neighborhood of New York, during the restaurant's 40th anniversary celebration in 2002.
Sylvia Woods, known as the Queen of Soul Food, died yesterday at age 86. She opened the legendary Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem 50 years ago, around the corner from the Apollo Theater, and it soon became a gathering place for prominent African Americans, politicians, and foodies of all ages and races.
By the time this post goes up, I'll be vacationing in New Jersey. (No jokes please!) My destinations are Springsteen Country and the beach, or as we say in my home state, The Shore.
Novel-reading on the beach is one way I'll relax. During some future fantasy vacation, I'd love to do nothing but read, inhaling a book a day.
A zombie plague has wiped out 95 percent of America. Camps of survivors band together in pockets across the country, waiting for small squadrons of human "sweepers" to inch their way across major cities, destroying the remaining zombie-like creatures hiding out in office buildings and shopping malls.
But now the human sweepers have to tackle their biggest challenge yet: clearing the undead from Lower Manhattan.
The Woman Suffrage Cook Book: Containing thoroughly tested and reliable recipes for cooking, directions for care of the sick, and practical suggestions. Originally sold at an 1886 fair in Boston, this cookbook was the first to raise funds for and disseminate information about women's suffrage.
Credit Michigan State University Libraries
Buckeye Cookery, And Practical Housekeeping: Compiled From Original Recipes. Though it began as a charity cookbook published by the First Congregational Church in Marysville, Ohio in 1876, after more than 80,000 copies 30 printings in multiple languages it became an American classic.
Credit Michigan State University Libraries
The Settlement Cook Book: Containing Many Recipes Used In Settlement Cooking Classes, The Milwaukee Public School Cooking Centers and Gathered From Various Other Reliable Sources. This 1901 cookbook began as a fundraiser for the Jewish Settlement House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Through multiple printings over 75 years, this cookbook benefited many Milwaukee charities.
Credit IUPUI University Libraries
The Tabernacle Presbyterian Cook Book. A church cookbook published in 1922 from recipes compiled by the Tabernacle Auxiliary in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Credit Michigan State University Libraries
Washington Women's Cook Book. This 1908 cookbook, compiled by The Washington Equal Suffrage Association, shows the migration of the women's movement to the western United States. Along with recipes, it also provided readers pro-suffrage quotations and practical tips for cooking while camping.
Credit Michigan State University Libraries
The Woman Suffrage Cook Book: Containing thoroughly tested and reliable recipes for cooking, directions for care of the sick, and practical suggestions. Originally sold at an 1886 fair in Boston, this cookbook was the first to raise funds for and disseminate information about women's suffrage.
Credit IUPUI University Libraries
Hampton Cook Book: Tested Recipes. The community cookbook published by the Congregational Church in Hampton, New Hampshire in 1903.
Credit Michigan State University Libraries
The Blue Grass Cook Book. Published in 1904, most likely for charitable purposes, this cookbook celebrated the quintessential cuisine of communities in Kentucky. The cookbook was a compilation of recipes from many women in Kentucky.
Writer Michael Connelly hits a milestone this summer. It's been 20 years since he introduced the character that launched his bestselling books - Los Angeles homicide Detective Harry Bosch. In today's encore Crime in the City, we return to the City of Angels.
It was here, back in 2007, NPR's Mandalit Del Barco met up with Michael Connelly. He was living in Florida but still spending time on the mean streets of L.A.
Ask Me Another resident musician, Jonathan Coulton, keeps audiences entertained with his offbeat lyrics and entertaining covers of popular music. JoCo quit his day job writing software in 2005 to pursue a career in music.
Credit Steve McFarland / NPR
Jonathan Coulton, resident musician for Ask Me Another, backstage before the show's final taping during season one at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY.
Christian Bale as Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. The final film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, which began with Batman Begins in 2005, deals explicitly with our contemporary political times.
Credit Ron Phillips / Warner Bros. Pictures
Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), is one of the characters proficient in Occupy-style talking points in The Dark Knight Rises.
Before a hero can rise, he must suffer a fall, and fall the Dark Knight quite spectacularly did the last time around, taking the rap for crimes he didn't commit, marking himself as a vigilante pariah and even letting Heath Ledger steal the reviews. No way that's happening in this last installment. A comic-book tale that has gotten darker than anyone thought possible is now careening toward a burst of light — possibly a nuclear blast — at the end of the tunnel.
Pascale (Daniel Auteuil) with his sister Nathalie (Marie-Anne Chazel, right) and daughter Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), who, to his dismay, becomes pregnant in The Well-Digger's Daughter. The film is a remake of Marcel Pagnol's 1940 movie.
Credit Kino Lorber
Felipe (Kad Merad) tries in vain to win Patricia away from the son of a prosperous shopkeeper.
At 62, the actor Daniel Auteuil is French film royalty, a Renaissance man equally at home in comedy, drama, thrillers — or, given his perennial air of faintly amused irony, some combination of all three. An off-kilter looker, Auteuil fairly oozes Gallic urbanity, so it's easy to forget that he launched his prolific career playing a conniving rustic in 1986's Jean de Florette and its sequel, Manon of the Spring, both directed by Claude Berri and adapted from novels by the writer-director Marcel Pagnol.
When they outgrew their 26,000-square-foot mansion, David and Jackie Siegel set out to build their dream home, which was to be the biggest in the U.S. The Queen of Versailles looks at what happened when the recession ruined that dream.
Credit Lauren Greenfield / Magnolia Pictures
Jackie with five of her eight children. Thirty years younger than David, Jackie proves to be more than a typical trophy wife in the film.
When director Lauren Greenfield started filming The Queen of Versailles, a documentary about 74-year-old David Siegel, a billionaire timeshare magnate from Orlando, and Jackie, a trophy wife 30 years his junior, they had outgrown their 26,000-square-foot home.
In Grassroots, Seattle music critic Grant Cogswell (Joel David Moore, right) runs for city council with the help of his campaign manager, unemployed journalist Phil Campbell (Jason Biggs). Cogswell and Campbell were real-life campaign partners in Seattle.
Credit Erik Simkins / Samuel Goldwyn Films
Richard McIver (Cedric the Entertainer) is Cogswell's election opponent, portrayed as the advocate for an undesirable status quo.
Maybe we have Frank Capra to thank for the notion that in politics, at least as it plays out in the movies, the little guy is always the good guy. Stephen Gyllenhaal swallows that idea hook, line and sinker in Grassroots, in which an out-of-work Seattle music critic (Joel David Moore) runs for city council without bothering to think the issues through: He assumes he'll automatically change the status quo by donning a polar-bear costume and making an impassioned plea for extending the city's monorail system.
