the Times

Jeff Bridges is famous for what he does in front of a camera, acting in iconic roles such as Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski in The Big Lebowski. But the Oscar winner is a masterful still photographer as well. The International Center of Photography recognized Bridges' work behind the camera, this week at its 29th annual Infinity Awards, and The New York Times spoke to the actor about the honor.

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Bradley Manning.

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Over the course of two hours in a military courtroom today, Bradley Manning explained why—and in precise detail, how—he sent WikiLeaks confidential diplomatic cables and "war logs." Bradley's 35-page statement, read over the course of a few hours this afternoon, followed the news that he had pleaded guilty to 10 lesser counts among the many charges against him. The admissions were not part of a plea bargain; Manning still faces trial in June on the most serious charges, such as "aiding the enemy."

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington sets the scene:

Manning was flanked by his civilian lawyer, David Coombs, on one side and two military defence lawyers on the other. Wearing full uniform, the soldier read out the document at high speed, occasionally stumbling over the words and at other points laughing at his own comments.

The American people had the right to know "the true costs of war," Manning said in court today today. He continued:

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For the past four months the New York Times has been under attack by Chinese hackers, the newspaper says.

The hackers were able to "infiltrate its computer systems" and get passwords from reporters and other employees. The Times says it hired an outside firm to study the hacks and block them for good. It also says that no customer information was leaked by these attacks.

The Times thinks the motivation was an investigation into the relatives of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and how their business dealings turned them into billionaires.

The hackers were tricky about hiding their tracks. They used a technique called "spearphishing" where they sent emails laced with malicious links. Once opened, malware was secretly downloaded onto the recipients computers. The email was routed through U.S. universities to disguise their origin. These were the same U.S. universities used to disguise Chinese hacker attacks on the U.S. military, the Times says.

Chinese officials deny that the government or military were involved in the attacks.

These type of super targeted attacks, where hackers work to break into a specific company, are particularly hard to defend against. The industry calls them "advanced persistent threats." But there are some U.S. security startups with technology that can thwart them including FireEye, which earlier this month landed a $50 million round of financing and a big name new CEO, Dave DeWalt.

Don't miss: The 15 Most Important Security Startups Of 2013

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Europe's sovereign debt crisis has largely been a story told through numbers. Telling that story photographically, however, has required looking beyond common depictions of demonstrations or evictions - at how Europeans actually live the crisis.

A photographic presentation, online and in Sunday's paper, of the stories of 2012.

From 1914 till 1936, The New York Times published a separate photo feature, the Mid-Week Pictorial, which sometimes included winners of Times photo contests. The contest judges seemed to favor the quirky, the animal and the surprising.

Because the President’s limousine passed almost exactly in front of Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder on Nov. 22, 1963, just as he was playing with his new film camera, and precisely at the moment that Lee Harvey Oswald fired his rifle from a nearby books depository, his silent, 26.6-second home movie has become the focal point of America’s collective memory on that weird day. For many of us, especially those who weren’t alive when it happened, we’re all watching that event through Zapruder’s lens.

Other footage from the scene turns up here and there, becomes fodder for documentaries (like this new one disproving the “second shooter” theory). But Zapruder’s film is still the canonical ur text of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the most complete and most chilling visual record. In many ways, it prefigured all sorts of American pastimes, from widespread paranoia about government to a loss of faith in photographic truth and the news media, from the acceptance of graphic violence to newer concerns about copyright. Don DeLillo once said that the little film “could probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics.” Without the 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm safety film, our understanding of JFK’s assassination would likely be an even greater carnival of conspiracy theories than it already is. Well, maybe.

Compiling images for his fourth book was like getting a primer in his own career, as the photographer Arthur Grace found countless pictures that he didn't remember taking.

Nobody Walks, the third film by director Ry Russo-Young, and co-written by Lena Dunham, opens this weekend in New York and L.A. You can read an in-depth review in the Times here (which manages to get some specifics of the plot wrong), and although it’s a fine review, I don’t really think it conveys how good the movie is. With minimal production value and a straightforward story (short version, a girl moves to LA and gets in the middle of a marriage), what matters, and what is great about the movie, is the characters. They are so clearly rendered and layered that when I posted the trailer just now, I watched it again so I could slip back into their lives for a few more minutes, even though I literally just saw the movie. I read a couple of reviews that talked about the characters being unlikable. I couldn’t disagree more. One of the things I thought was so impressive about the film is that everyone is humanized. Everyone is treated with sympathy, even when their behavior is entirely unsympathetic.

This is an independent film, so if you think you might want to see it, opening weekend is a good time to do so, as it effects how widely a film is released. The director is doing a Q&A after the 7.10 screenings and an intro to the 9 pm screenings at Sunshine both Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets for New York screenings are available here, and for LA are available here.

When they convened in 1968 in Chicago, the Democrats, like the nation, were deeply divided. Outside the convention, protests got out of hand and the police came down hard - a Times photographer captured it all, including an arrest.