Alyssa Rosenberg: "Both types of period pieces are valuable historical artifacts, not of the events and people they portray, but of previous generations of Americans' efforts to figure out how they feel about the Civil War. ... [What's more, the film] casts a more gimlet eye on the Confederacy than it often gets credit for."
“There are many studies that have shown that there is a strong genetic component to curiosity,” he notes. “It is also the case that some people are more curious than others, in the same way that some people have talent for music and others don’t or some people are smarter than others ... But all people are curious, with the possible exception of people who are very deeply depressed or have certain kinds of brain damage.” Humans exhibit two basic types of curiosity that show up in different parts of the brain during functional MRI scans.
"[He] splashed through crocodile-infested rivers, piloted hot-air balloons over stampeding wildebeests and lost a 'Coke bottle'-size chunk of his calf to an angry hippopotamus, all while producing nearly two dozen acclaimed nature documentaries."
"The information value of a message depends in part on the range of alternatives that were killed off in its choosing. Symbols chosen from a larger vocabulary of options carry more information than symbols chosen from a smaller vocabulary, because the choice eliminates a greater number of alternatives. This means that the amount of information transmitted is essentially a function of three things: the size of the set of possible symbols, the number of symbols sent per second, and the length of the message. The search for order, for structure and form in the wending catacombs of global communications had begun in earnest."
"Samuel French, Inc., which licenses it, reports that Godot will be professionally produced at least ten times around the world in the next three months, nearly 65 years after it first premiered." Shannon Reed considers the reasons why - including this one: "we return to Godot at least partly to be able to walk out of Godot."
"In what began as a one-year experiment last summer, the New York pubcaster [WNET] carved out regular time slots for fundraising programs on its flagship channel, ending the campaign-style drives that go on for weeks. With pledge confined to a limited number of slots - including Thursday primetime and weekends - the station also changed how it communicated with viewers and members about fundraising."
Granted, this isn't truly a first - an opera singer and a violinist have done the same thing - but it's for a very good reason.
The board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “left intact Rule Two, the one that established that a film” — in...
