My new Taki's Magazine column is an overdue tribute to Jodie Foster:

Movie folks think they are better than you or me, and sometimes they are right. Jodie Foster, for example, isn't the world's best director, but she may be the bravest. Who else would have the brass to direct her old buddy from 1994's Maverick and today's leading object of collective hatred, Mel Gibson, in The Beaver, a good dramedy about hereditary manic depression?

Read the whole thing there. I discuss the oddest of many odd things about Jodie: this calmest, most calculating of stars' enduring relationship with nuts, both onscreen and off.