Word: polymaths
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...founding father of this brave new world is an affable, bespectacled, 42-year-old polymath named Will Wright. In 1981, after five years of bouncing around three colleges without graduating, Wright decided to try his hand at writing a computer game. He called it Raid on Bungeling Bay. "It was basically a pretty stupid fly-around-in-a-helicopter-and-shoot-people game," he admits. The object was to fly over various islands and bomb them back to the Stone Age. But Wright became fascinated with these tiny islands. He found himself spending hours giving each one a detailed, working...
There are other giants who walk alongside Mehldau, whose work is informed by both jazz and classical composers. Like piano great Bill Evans, Mehldau, 30, is a jazz polymath, filtering disparate philosophical ideas into his art (Mignon's Song, a Mehldau composition on a previous CD, is named after a Goethe poem; another one of his tunes is titled Elegy for William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg). And, evoking Chopin, Mehldau's best work has a kind of pristine, romantic beauty...
...everyone agreed, one of the planet's best dinner companions. At once sardonic and curiously boyish, he was both autodidact and polymath--his curiosity and his information equally boundless. To a film critic he might recommend some recondite movie that he had caught but that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty...
DIED. BOB MERRILL, 77, songwriting polymath whose hits ranged from How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? to Barbra Streisand's signature People; in Los Angeles. Merrill started his career writing such airy novelties for Tin Pan Alley as If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake and Mambo Italiano. He racked up 18 Top 10 hits between 1949 and 1956. His success continued on Broadway where he wrote the lyrics for Funny Girl and Carnival, among many others. Merrill also wrote screenplays, including one for Mahogany, starring Diana Ross...
...small role Macpherson is a mere cartoon character (her name in the film: Mickey Morse). But Bart the grizzly, who starred in 1989's The Bear, deserves a Best Supporting Animal award for his ferocious work. Baldwin is persuasive in his familiar persona, the cagey sleazebag. And as the polymath plutocrat, Hopkins manages to make erudition sexy; a library intelligence and a steely intellect make him Baldwin's ideal adversary. The Edge merits a modest cheer as an action film that celebrates not brute force but survival of the smartest...