NYT Magazine. "Screens."

"What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema?" asks AO Scott in the "Screens" issue of the New York Times Magazine. His answer: "The digital age may well turn out to be a golden age of cinephilia, with a wider variety of movies available for viewing in better conditions than ever."

"A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture," argues Kevin Kelly. "We are becoming people of the screen."

"Why is it so hard to find out what movies you'd like?" That's the question Clive Thompson pursues in his interviews with programmers competing to improve Netflix's Cinematch recommendations program, in both his article and in its accompanying video. Whoever hits on a way to improve results by 10 percent wins a million bucks. A few teams have hit 9 percent. But now they're stuck.

30 Rock "is, like most of the deeply funny and cutting-edge comedies of the last few years, a bold experiment in narrative," argues Ross Simonini. "Avant-garde literature gave America its first tradition of subverting narrative, but what was once a wild experiment in language has become an accepted counterpart to our Internet culture, where digressive Googling and link-clicking are a way of life. The dusty sitcom has caught up to the modern mind."

"There is hardly a public space left - a bar, a gym, the dentist's office - that hasn't been vanquished by some kind of screen. Now, let's say I've got something to sell. This multiplicity of screens would seem to be a good thing, wouldn't it?" Jack Hitt moderates a roundtable of creative marketing types.

Emily Gould asks 12 "writers, directors and bloggers" (among them, Darren Aronofsky and David Byrne) to "describe the year's most memorable clips, scenes, shows, videos and computer graphics."

Virginia Heffernan profiles Virgil Griffith, who "likes to think of himself as a superhero of online anarchy: a 'disruptive technologist.'"

"Any format is a good format for meditation," David Lynch tells Deborah Solomon.

Lynn Hirschberg talks with Jennifer Aniston; Ruven Afanador snaps the pix.

Jeff Johnson deals with his mother's Collapse addiction.

Edward Lewine talks with game designer Will Wright about his RL home.

A slide show: "These images of kids playing video games were created by Robbie Cooper, a British photographer who employed a Red camera - a very-high-resolution video camera - and then took stills from the footage."

As if, a decade after its last season, Seinfeld didn't have enough die-hard fans, Sony's looking to court a whole new generation of fans, reports Rob Walker.

Posted by dwhudson at November 21, 2008 2:59 PM