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Reclaiming Ray Bradbury

“Now that Ray Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back? To these eyes, many of Bradbury’s most garishly ‘literary’ achievements are his least impressive. When the McCarthyite gloom of Fahrenheit 451 fades, it’s the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick.”

A Sitcom About Terrorists? Fuhgeddaboudit!

A sitcom about terrorists in America has been making the rounds of Hollywood. But though the scripts have won a lot of interest and admiration, the show hasn’t found a home. “Though a number of dramatic movies and mini-series about 9/11 are already being produced, executives who passed on “The Cell” told the writers they feared that Americans – particularly in New York and Washington – were nowhere near ready for a sitcom that could be seen as trivializing the attacks, even after four years.”

This Just In: Shakespeare Was…

Enough with the theories on Shakespeare’s life and motives. A new book “claiming Shakespeare for the Pope stirs up intense indignation among those who regard him as the most humanist of writers, notably thin on religious references, sentiments, ideas or ways of thought. Shakespeare scholars just sigh and consign the book to the great pantheon of ‘revelations’ about the real Shakespeare.”

Study: Those Scientific Studies? Half Of ‘Em Are Wrong

A new study says that “problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.” It found that “small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.”

A Statistical Analysis Of Every US Supreme Court Decision

A researcher plugged in 26,000 opinions issued by the Supreme Court between the early 19th century and the present day into his computer. “He treated each of these cases as a node and each citation from one case to another as a link. The result was a complicated web resembling a map of cities linked by dozens of airlines. He found the most important opinions, at least judged by how many times they were cited, by working out which nodes were likeliest to fall on the shortest paths between two other nodes. Intriguingly, the cases mostly come from an advanced and esoteric subject…

LA Times Welcomes Its New Theatre Critic

“It’s been mortifying to go so long without a chief theater critic,” said Bret Israel, the Sunday Calendar editor, who supervises arts coverage, and hired Charles McNulty as the paper’s new critic after three years. “But as I’ve told many people who didn’t always believe me, the main reason for the delay was the very high standard the paper sets for its critics, who are the soul of our cultural pages.”

When A Major Paper Doesn’t Have A Critic

“In the more than three and half years that L.A.’s largest newspaper has been without a lead drama critic, tension has mounted throughout the L.A. theater community, to the point of enragement. Most saw it as “insulting” that the paper with one of the largest circulations in the country did not fill the slot in a timely fashion. It was disillusioning even for those associated with the city’s landmark theaters, like Gordon Davidson, founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum.”

62nd Venice Film Festival Opens

“The festival opened on Wednesday with the Hong Kong martial arts epic Seven Swords and runs until 10 September. There are 19 films up for competition, including Goodnight and Good Luck directed by George Clooney, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Proof and Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. Security has been tightened in the wake of last month’s bomb blasts in London.”