When he's choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future's "Jumpman" (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or at the gym going for a morning run on the treadmill, thinking about your gym and your treadmill, listening through headphones for changes in tempo and tone: Will this song push you through the pain? Is that one too long on the buildup? "It's hard to describe because it's more of a feeling or instinct," says Chery of his process. He's from Queens, New York, which, despite his residence in Los Angeles for the past four years, is obvious when you hear him talk. "It kind of just happens. You sit there and you start moving and just do it." For a while we thought we could choose our own music. In the wake of the last century we seized the right to take our pick from all of the songs in the world (All of the songs in the world!) and told anyone who didn't like it exactly where they could go.

It's no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so. The unmanageable volume and complexity of the big data that the world is now swimming in have increased the potential of machine learning--and the need for it. In 2007 Fei-Fei Li, the head of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, gave up trying to program computers to recognize objects and began labeling the millions of raw images that a child might encounter by age three and feeding them to computers.

Here are some story lines I don't want you to miss today. Orson Welles called Los Angeles "a bright and guilty place." No wonder developer money and L.A. politics have long gone hand in hand. Though some lawmakers insist the donations don't influence whether big projects get approved, a new group of City Hall hopefuls is trying to make hay by saying they won't accept developers' cash -- and they're pointing in part to an L.A. Times investigation over questionable donations connected to one project. Speaking of the fight over development … L.A. is experiencing its biggest building boom since the Roaring '20s and is reshaping its public transit system.

Do you think Hollywood has lost touch with American values? Do you think Hollywood has lost touch with American values? The contentious presidential campaign was filled with accusations of elitism and bias by the media -- from the news to entertainment. Many supporters of Donald J. Trump saw his victory as a repudiation of the so-called liberal elite. So as 2017 begins, we ask: Is Hollywood representing all Americans? Are Hollywood values out of sync with American values? It's the start of a conversation we'll have all year with Hollywood's creators, consumers and observers. Most of all, we want to hear from you. Is Hollywood out of touch with your America? Here's what our critics and writers have to say: KENNETH TURAN on potent Hollywood visions that helped elect Trump TV's affluent bubble: MARY McNAMARA on Hollywood's reluctance to deal with class issues Fear of the powerful woman: JUSTIN CHANG on working women and men still behaving badly Realistic or cliche?: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN on ...

The contentious presidential campaign was filled with accusations of elitism and bias by the media -- from the news to entertainment. Many supporters of Donald J. Trump saw his victory as a repudiation of the so-called liberal elite. So as 2017 begins, we ask: Is Hollywood representing all Americans? Are Hollywood values out of sync with American values? It's the start of a conversation we'll have all year with Hollywood's creators, consumers and observers. Most of all, we want to hear from you . Is Hollywood out of touch with your America? Here's what our critics and writers have to say: KENNETH TURAN on potent Hollywood visions that helped elect Trump TV's affluent bubble: MARY McNAMARA on Hollywood's reluctance to deal with class issues Fear of the powerful woman: JUSTIN CHANG on working women and men still behaving badly Realistic or cliche?: JEFFREY FLEISHMAN on film's working class men and women Building distrust: LORRAINE ALI on destructive TV portrayals of Muslims and how TV ...

In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

Propped over her breakfast at a West Hollywood cafe one morning in late October, Amy Adams was contemplating her dream role. The actress had just dropped her 6-year-old daughter off at school after returning from traveling to promote her two new films, the science-fiction drama "Arrival" and psychological thriller "Nocturnal Animals." Her mother and husband at a nearby table, Adams was preparing for extended family to arrive in town momentarily. "I need to play somebody who just goes around and gets spa treatments," Adams said, wistfully. "I would have to do a lot of spa treatments, just for research. Adams has certainly earned some downtime after turning in her two new complex lead performances. In Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival," which opens Nov. 11, she plays a linguist haunted by an unexplained melancholy who must learn to communicate with aliens in order to prevent a global war. In Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals," which opens a week later, she plays an aloof art gallerist obsessed with her ex-husband's novel. At 42, the five-time Oscar nominee's career has been characterized by a mix of supporting roles, from a naive nun in "Doubt" to the wife of a cult leader in "The Master" to journalist/love interest Lois Lane in the latest round of Superman movies. As "Arrival's" Louise Banks, she reluctantly leads a team of investigators including a scientist played by Jeremy Renner. Much of the film's 10-week shoot took place on a bare soundstage in Montreal, with puppeteers behind a lighted screen serving as the aliens. For the entire production, Adams said, she had a stomachache, a side effect of internalizing Louise's anxiety. "She's not heroic in the traditional sense," Adams said of the character. "I love that she gets to rely on her intellect and instinct as opposed to brawn and bravery." Adams said she prepared for the role by studying linguistics and working with her acting coach on the film's psychological underpinnings, but she is ill-equipped to answer the deep questions the movie raises about science and the nature of time. "It's funny when people start challenging me about it," Adams said, of the movie's internal logic. "If I were able to explain how the science of this film works, I would not be an actress." In "Nocturnal Animals," Adams plays a woman who is equally unmoored, although the milieu -- the Los Angeles fine-art scene -- is far more familiar. Adams' husband is artist Darren Le Gallo, and though his work resides more in the underground art scene than the rarified one depicted in the film, she found some uncomfortable parts of the character to latch onto. "I have definitely been invited into that world at times, the wealth and privilege of a very specific part of the Los Angeles art scene," Adams said. "I found myself really judgmental of this character.

In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

It's no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so. The unmanageable volume and complexity of the big data that the world is now swimming in have increased the potential of machine learning--and the need for it. In 2007 Fei-Fei Li, the head of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, gave up trying to program computers to recognize objects and began labeling the millions of raw images that a child might encounter by age three and feeding them to computers. By being shown thousands and thousands of labeled data sets with instances of, say, a cat, the machine could shape its own rules for deciding whether a particular set of digital pixels was, in fact, a cat.1 1.Fei-Fei Li, "How we're teaching computers to understand pictures," TED, March 2015, ted.com.

The online dating app has announced that its latest update allows users to type a word that describes their gender identity. The West Hollywood, California-based company says in a blog post Tuesday that users also can choose to be shown in searches that best reflect that identity.