Earlier this week, Rich Juzwiak published a deeply-researched history of director Quentin Tarantino’s love affair with the word “nigger,” a word he has always used liberally in his screenplays. Juzwiak unearthed and examined twenty years worth of Tarantino’s varied and contradictory defenses of his use of the word. He also produced this video, a supercut of every instance of a character in a Tarantino-written film (through 2012’s Django Unchained) saying it. It’s a very long supercut.

No contemporary white public figure has a more involved relationship to the word “nigger” than Quentin Tarantino. He’s used it in screenplays since the beginning of his directing career, he’s been criticized (and defended) by black peers for it, and he’s explained his rationale for it several times in a variety of ways. Americans are obsessed with the word “nigger,” a semantic memento of our country’s shameful founding legacy. But few white artists seem to me more obsessed than Tarantino.

CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield checked in Wednesday afternoon with Baltimore Councilman Carl Stokes for his take on the root causes of the protest going on in the city this week. But before she got to that, she took a minute to chastise Stokes for using “that word” in an interview the night before.

The controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino's supposed over-use of a certain expletive in Django Unchained is on everyone's lips — except that few can actually bring themselves to say the word.

If you aren't naturally attuned to the frequency at which internet conservatives are currently shaking with rage, you might've been surprised when you visited right-wing aggregation site the Drudge Report this morning and were confronted with the following headline, in 40-point type: "'N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER.'" Clicking on the headline wouldn't satisfy your confusion: it linked to The Hollywood Reporter's review of Quentin Tarantino's new slave-revenge movie Django Unchained — a review that barely touches on the word's use in the movie. It's just a review.