Nick Cave talks about writing, morality and his tough new movie.

Beyond the Multiplex

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago returns to the scene of his haunting last novel to satirize the incompetence of government hacks.

'Seeing' | Salon.com Books

If you didn't laugh at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the bloggers insist, you're a White House lackey

Was Stephen Colbert Funny?

The western may be lost to us as any sort of sustained tradition, but as the titles Unforgiven, Dead Man, and A History of Violence suggest, it intermittently returns as an unquiet ghost—this week in an Australian variant, The Proposition.

Village Voice on The Proposition

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

The Management Myth

A guide to the U.S. military’s future in Iraq

Hunkering Down

A monograph, scanned as PDF.

Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis

Page had "it," a photographic quality that resists being put into words. Like Marilyn Monroe, Page's images have a tactile impression -- as if you could reach out and touch her just from looking at a two-dimensional photo. Mol superbly replicates the way Page's personality comes through her modeling work. In her early photo shoots, she's amusingly self-conscious and silly when she tries to look "pert" or "haughty," but becomes more confident and playful the more popular she becomes.

The Devil and Bettie Page

The haunting Belgian drama L'Enfant recalls other timeless films about human desperation: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, about a neglected French schoolboy, and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, about a father driven to commit a crime to escape poverty.

Like those films, L'Enfant's greatest triumph is inserting viewers into the hopelessness and desperate scramble to survive that define the lives of its characters -- who are young, poor, homeless residents of the bleak Belgian steel town of Seraing. L'Enfant, which received the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 2005, is a glimpse into lives defined by the kind of quotidian despair that has settled so deeply into its characters's bones, it has become second nature.

And baby makes three

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An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore