“[She] gained a devoted following for her perceptive, deeply personal essays and parlayed that renown into a screenwriting career of wistful romantic comedies such as When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, the marital exposé Heartburn and the whistleblower drama Silkwood.” Her final film, as screenwriter and director, was 2010’s Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child.
Category: today’s top story
Artnet Magazine Closes Down
“Artnet magazine, an online publication that has served as the journalistic arm of the German-based tech company by that name, will cease publication today, after 16 years as a leading voice in the field of arts journalism.”
Everything We Owe To Alan Turing, On His 100th Birthday
“All of modern computing is underpinned by this notion. Every piece of software you use is running on layers of simulated computers that are as powerful as the physical hardware they’re running on — and as powerful as each other. A program running on a simulated Turing Machine works exactly the same way as one running on a non-simulated one; simulation has no effect on the complexity of the programs that can be run.”
UK Writers Protest Destruction Of Thousands Of Public Library Books
“The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and a host of other literary names have joined calls to halt the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books at one of the UK’s greatest municipal libraries. They have written to the head of libraries for Manchester, demanding that the book pulping stop immediately.”
Film Critic Andrew Sarris, 83
“Courtly, incisive and acerbic in equal measure, Mr. Sarris came of critical age in the 1960s as the first great wave of foreign films washed ashore in the United States. From his perch at The Village Voice, and later at The New York Observer, he wrote searchingly of that glorious deluge and the directors behind it.”
Scientist: We Don’t Need Composers To Make Music
“What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music,” says the professor of evolutionary developmental biology. “And we don’t think you do.”
I Almost Never Pay For Music, And Never Have, Says 21-Year-Old DJ
Emily White, manager of a college radio station and NPR intern: “I’ve never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts. … I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.”
The Rise Of The Very Young Maestro (And One Who Can Charm Audiences, And Donors)
“That is what conductors do: they concentrate the efforts and skills of an orchestra in one powerful individual, so that the paying public experiences the music, its emotional highs and soothing lows, through the personality of the maestro. [Gustavo] Dudamel, 31-year-old music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, one of the leading US orchestras, fulfils that role better than most. He is the epitome of the 21st-century maestro – dynamic, articulate, media-friendly and, above all, young.”
Can You Tell If A Composer Is Human Or Robot?
“Most of us like to think we could easily differentiate between a piece of music written by a human being and one generated by a computer. But a paper just presented at the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012 suggests otherwise.”
New Orleans Still Needs A Print Paper, And So Does Your Town
Why? Terrible web design. Advance Publications websites “all have the same generic design template. They are run independently of the affiliated local newspapers, sometimes by non-journalists, and it shows. They are generic, ugly and notoriously hard to navigate.” And that’s putting it mildly.