Published: April 10, 2013

Falling Fortunes The price of gold has had an extraordinary run up in the last 10 years, creating wealth for investors. But its price has fallen in the last two years.

 

A 1-ounce gold coin. Some investors expecting high inflation are sticking with gold, but it lost $28 an ounce on Wednesday.

U.K.

Whatever you thought of Margaret Thatcher — and during an unbroken stretch in office from 1979 to 1990 the former Prime Minister, who died on April 8 after a stroke, aged 87, attracted both passionate support and deep loathing — you never doubted her force of will. The Iron Lady showed her mettle again and again, wrenching Britain, often brutally, out of a malaise and sense of all-encompassing failure that had blighted it for much of the era after the end of World War II. This meant not only facing down opponents but also critics in her own party, who ran scared as the strong economic medicine she prescribed sickened swathes of voters. “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say,” she declared at the 1980 Conservative party conference. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

(COVER STORY: The Lady Bows Out)

Britain keeps state papers secret for 30 years. A trove released at the end of 2011 revealed a leader who may have been more sensitive to public opinion, and counterarguments, than legend suggests. In July 1981 she authorized secret contacts with Irish republicans to try to halt the hunger strike by IRA prisoners that would see 10 of their number starve themselves to death. During the same month she fended off hardliners in her Cabinet who proposed consigning the riot-torn city of Liverpool to “managed decline.” But these stirrings — of conscience or pragmatism — also prove that she was prepared to override resistance from those closest to her. Indeed, her peremptory manner with her own colleagues attracted the attention of Britain’s inspired satirical TV puppetry show, Spitting Image. In one sketch Thatcher and her Cabinet are seated in a restaurant. She orders raw steak. “And what about the vegetables?” the waiter inquires. “Oh, they’ll have the same as me,” Thatcher replies.

A Boadicea, she led her nation into battle in the Falkland Islands and fought off attempts to draw the U.K. into a closer political embrace with Europe. “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,” observed the French President François Mitterrand, revealing the queasy mixture of antipathy and attraction she stirred in many of her male associates.

Ronald Reagan’s feelings for his helmet-haired, be-handbagged friend in Westminster were clearer cut. She was his ideological soulmate and theirs was a truly special relationship. Together they reinvigorated political conservatism, and by refusing to believe that history moved in only one direction, led a challenge to Soviet communism that in the end saw its fall.

(PHOTOS: Margaret Thatcher: Portrait of the Iron Lady)

As the first female premier not only of Britain but of any leading industrial democracy, she forged a template by which women anywhere might measure their ambitions. At the time, many of us in the U.K. found it impossible to savor her achievements. Most brands of feminism held that women were (at least) as capable as men of governing, but there was also an anticipation that we would bring different qualities to the job, not least empathy for the underdog, a consensual approach and a determination to do right by the sisterhood. Thatcher appeared to glory in her utter lack of these instincts, stigmatizing the poor as work-shy, decrying consensus politics as “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies” and averring “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” In 2009, I mentioned to a friend, who had also lived through Thatcher’s polarizing reign, that I had just encountered our old bête noire at a party. More than a quarter of a century had elapsed since we had marched down a street chanting “Maggie, Maggie Maggie! Out, out out!,” but my friend reacted with undiminished hostility. “Why didn’t you punch the old bag?” she snarled.

In truth I had long since revised my views of “Maggie.” You can argue that her economic reforms ought to have been introduced with greater care for their social impact, but not about whether most of them were necessary. The history of Thatcherism is also a history of the failure of the left to articulate any viable alternative. This analysis was shared by Tony Blair, who was able to build on Thatcher’s economic legacy after remodeling the Labour Party lnto an electable force.

(MORE: The Frugal Lady: Newly Released Files Show Margaret Thatcher’s Thrifty Side)

But even if I still harbored resentments, the frail woman I encountered at the U.S. ambassador to London’s Christmas drinks evoked quite different emotions. A year previously, her daughter had publicly confirmed that her mother was suffering from dementia; the initial symptoms appeared in 2000. I first saw the evidence of this deterioration at a photoshoot for TIME in 2006. A devoted assistant and a brace of security officers ushered a woman with disheveled hair and a crumpled face into the studio. As the hairdresser and makeup artist plied their skills, so the familiar, imposing figure emerged and with this transformation came renewed clarity and a graciousness that endeared her to the team working on the shoot. The only residual sign of her decline was her unshakeable conviction that Mikhail Gorbachev would shortly join us, no matter how many times I assured her he would not.

This was not simply the dementia talking. There had never been a plan to photograph the former leaders together, but TIME had photographed Gorbachev the day before, for an issue of the magazine featuring the Europeans who had done most to shape the world in the 20th century. Even before President Reagan, Thatcher spotted in Gorbachev, who became General-Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, “a man we can do business with.” She helped persuade a skeptical Washington that glasnost and perestroika were for real, and that some at least in Moscow had understood that their bankrupt society could not continue in the ways that it had done before. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Europe’s annus mirabilis, she had her vindication.

Yet in a curious sense, the end of the Cold War was also her political undoing. She would not accept, as her contemporaries Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl did, that a new, post-Soviet architecture was needed in Europe. As the U.S. gratefully looked at Europe as “job done” and turned its attention to other matters in the world — the dysfunction and violence of the Middle East, the rise of China — she stood obdurate against the impulse towards closer political and economic integration of the European nations, helping to foster divisions in her own party that would eventually lead to her ouster and are once again widening the Channel between Britain and the rest of Europe. In November 1990, she lost the Conservative leadership and was driven from Downing Street with tears glistening in her eyes.

(MORE: Meryl as Maggie in The Iron Lady: A Stunt of Genius)

It was a rare defeat for someone who had beaten Britain’s class system and dusty attitudes to women in the workplace to rise to the summit of public life. Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925, the daughter of a small-town storekeeper in Lincolnshire, a featureless county in the east of England. Devoted to her father — who served as an alderman and mayor in their town — she took a degree in chemistry at Oxford, where she first dabbled in Conservative Party politics. She married Denis Thatcher, a successful businessman, 10 years her senior, in 1951, and two years later gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol. After an arduous battle to convince her own party and voters that she had the right stuff to be a politician, she won a seat in Parliament for Finchley, a constituency in North London, in the 1959 election, and was quickly recognized for her intelligence and energy. From 1964 to 1970, the Labour Party governed Britain, but when the Tories, against the odds, won the 1970 election, Edward Heath, the new Prime Minister, made her Secretary of State for Education and Science. After Heath lost power in 1974, she ran against him as party leader in 1975 and, to the astonishment of Britain’s famous chattering classes, was successful. In 1979, as the minority Labour government of James Callaghan floundered and Britain’s antediluvian labor unions visited their grievances on long-suffering voters, her party won a decisive victory. She secured two more terms of office, in 1983 and 1987, extending her majority in the House of Commons on both occasions, at the time an unprecedented feat in modern British political history.

As Prime Minister, Thatcher was motivated by a few simple principles. Government regulation — and confiscatory taxation — neutered the animal spirits of capitalism; the world was a dangerous place, in which it paid to be on one’s guard; Britain was not finished; communism was an evil which threatened the world and stunted the life-chances of those who had to live under its heel. But beyond that, she understood what it was that a significant strand of ordinary people wanted from political leaders: not necessarily ringing phrases and great speechifying (though she could certainly do that) but a sense that decent lives, decently lived, were worthwhile; that growing prosperity was not a sign of capitalism’s rapaciousness but the mechanism by which families could live a little better each year.

In the first few years of her first term in office, she squeezed inflation out of the British economy and made plain that those enterprises that could not compete in the modern world would not be rescued, as had been the case under her predecessors. Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, saw its smoke-blackened heartlands rendered into rustheaps. As unemployment climbed and riots broke out in the cities her position appeared precarious. But by 1982, the economy was beginning to show the first signs of life. That spring, she refused to accept that the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands was a done deal, and dispatched her armed forces across the Atlantic to fight a fierce little war. Triumphant, she won re-election in 1983, and then took on the coal miners — the vanguard of the old left-wing English working class — crushing them in a year-long strike. Like many of her victories, the casualty toll was high, with communities blighted and families plunged into grinding poverty with no means of escape.

(MORE:  Q&A with David Cameron: Why Britain Needs a ‘Compassionate Conservative’)

She had arrived in Downing Street in 1979 improbably quoting St Francis of Assisi. “Where there is discord,” she intoned, “may we bring harmony; where there is error, may we bring truth; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; and where there is despair, may we bring hope.” She failed in the first objective at least, and the human costs of Thatcherism—and the unequal distribution of hope—mean she may prove almost as divisive in death as in life, as Britons squabble over her legacy. At her own request she will not be granted a state funeral, though many believe she deserves one.

There are those, like my friend, who feel a more appropriate response would be to dance on her grave. I cannot share that view, and not only because I believe Thatcher left Britain, on balance, in better shape than she found it. Politicians have forfeited public trust in recent years, relying too heavily on spin and connecting too little with voters. Thatcher’s greatest flaws — a strength of conviction that brooked few moderating influences, a strength of character that rendered her viscerally incapable of understanding human vulnerabilities — were also her greatest assets. There was little difference between the public figure and private one. She was motivated by her belief in what she could deliver to public office, not by what public office could deliver to her.

(MORE: The Queen Expresses Sadness over Thatcher Death)

So when she clutched my arm at that Christmas drinks party, I wasn’t tempted to recoil. She seemed disoriented and a little anxious. Now even the teased hair and mask of make-up couldn’t disguise that she had become the sort of person she once least understood: someone incapable of looking after herself. A colleague attempted to engage her in conversation about world affairs but she stared at him, blankly. I commented instead on her clothing. In recent years she had taken to wearing shades of deep rose and magenta instead of her signature blue. “I do think pink is such a friendly color,” she said.

The 2011 biopic The Iron Lady focused on the poignancy of Thatcher’s declining years. While Meryl Streep’s performance in the title role was uncannily accurate, the film’s depiction of Thatcher’s legacy was far less so. That she overcame obstacles of class and sex to rise to power tempered her resolve but it isn’t the reason she will be remembered as one of the most significant leaders of the 20th century.

By standing shoulder to shoulder with Reagan and calling Soviet communism for what it was — a cruel sham, an economic failure — she helped liberate those Russians and east Europeans who had spent generations with their dreams on hold. Many of her own countrymen will never accept that she performed  a similar function for Britons. She was not an empathetic person, not one to suffer fools gladly (or at all), not one who could appreciate that men, women and families could imagine different ways to a satisfying life from the one that she thought best. She was hard-headed, perhaps hard-hearted. She was that most polarizing of beings: a conviction politician. In our current age of weak leaders transfixed by oncoming global crises like rabbits in the headlights, it’s sobering to realize that the Lady’s not for returning.

MORE: Milestones in the Life of Margaret Thatcher

IRVINE, Calif.

FOR most of my teenage years, I made a hobby of hacking into some of the world’s largest government and corporate computer systems. I was “lucky” enough to be raided by theF.B.I. when I was 17 years old. After that wake-up call, I eventually started a software security company and now find myself helping to plug security holes, not exploit them.

The nature of hacking has changed, too, since I left it in the late 1990s — from a game of curiosity and occasional activism into a central tool in cybercrime and nation-state attacks.

Alongside that shift has come a loud and often misguided conversation about what to do to stop this new breed of hacking. Too much of the debate begins and ends with the perpetrators and the victims of cyber attacks, and not enough is focused on the real problem: the insecure software or technology that allows such attacks to succeed. Instead of focusing solely on employees who accidentally open e-mails, we should also be pressuring software makers to make significant investments in their products’ security.

When you read headlines about the latest cyber attack, you typically do not hear about how attackers were able to put a virus or other malware on a system in the first place. In many cases, it begins with attackers exploiting a software vulnerability or weakness in order to install their malware.

The unspoken truth is that for the most part, large software companies are not motivated to make software secure. It’s a question of investment priorities: they care more about staying competitive with their products, and that means developing the latest features and functions that consumers and businesses are looking to buy. Security issues are often treated more as a marketing challenge than an engineering one.

A result is an open door to hackers inside some of the world’s most popular software systems. Perhaps most famously, during the early to middle parts of the last decade, hackers discovered a significant number of glaring security weaknesses in Microsoft products (some of which were discovered by my company). Several of these weaknesses were exploited in high-profile computer virus and worm attacks.

To be fair, securing software is not a trivial task. Often it means building in multiple barriers to entry and keeping those defenses current with the latest developments in hacker techniques. Security has to be a central and significant investment in any software development project.

Still, given the heightened impact of recent attacks on both corporate and government operations, we must begin to hold software companies accountable for such vulnerabilities.

Fortunately, there is a lot a company can do to secure its code, should it choose to. After Microsoft’s software vulnerabilities drew significant negative attention — one of the few times the public has correctly affixed blame to a software company — Bill Gates himself addressed the issue in 2002 in his now famous “Trustworthy Computing” memo.

In that memo, sent to all Microsoft employees, Mr. Gates made it clear that the company’s future depended on building software and a platform that could be reliably secure. It was more than talk: in the decade or so since, Microsoft fundamentally changed its software development process to make security a core part of the program.

Too many other companies, though, seem to have missed the memo.

Take Oracle, and specifically the security challenges surrounding its Java software, which the company inherited through its 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Java, one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software in the world, is so full of security holes — including multiple avenues for hackers to take control of a computer remotely — that the Department of Homeland Security recommends that its users completely disable the software in their browsers.

Oracle is not alone. Adobe, which makes the popular Adobe Reader and Flash applications, has seen a significant number of security weaknesses over the years and also a sharp increase in its software’s being a gateway for cyberattacks. The risks associated with Flash were one reason Apple decided not to allow it on iPhones.

Like Microsoft, Adobe has made strides to increase the security of its technology over the last couple of years, and more recently some of those security improvements seem to be paying off. But it still has work to do.

In his 2002 memo, Mr. Gates cast the security challenge as not just a Microsoft problem, but one for the overall industry. A computer or a network is only as secure as its weakest link — no matter how secure one program might be, a poorly protected bit of software could compromise everything.

That means that on top of investing in their own security, companies have to make efforts to coordinate with other developers to present a united front. Adobe and Microsoft have worked together in recent years to identify and close off mutual vulnerabilities, and other companies should follow suit.

A lot of the talk around cybersecurity has centered on the role of government. But investing in software security and cooperating across the software industry shouldn’t take an act of Congress. It will, however, take a new mind-set on the part of developers. They should no longer see security as an add-on feature, nor should they regard holes in their competitors’ security efforts as merely a competitive advantage. As the world comes to depend more and more on their products, it should demand nothing less.

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Thursday, I wrote that Web search is at its biggest crossroad since its invention, as users demand more from search and Google faces a broader array of rivals than ever.

Google, in response, is widening the scope of its ambition to include things that today’s Internet users might never even think to ask the search engine. Might Google someday help you, for instance, figure out how to get the $200 you need by next week, force your cat and your girlfriend’s dog to get along or tell you whether your husband is picking up the children from school?

Those are three of the types of information needs that currently go unmet online, Google discovered in a study the company did. Thirty-six percent of people’s information needs are unmet, Google found, and most are things people need to get through the day. The rest of the time, when people do find what they need, 59 percent do it using Google, the study found.

But Google wants to be the place people go to satisfy all their information needs.

“Our goal here really is to satisfy as many information needs as possible,” said Patrick Riley, a search analysis engineer at Google. “There are always things we’re not able to do, but there are a lot of possibilities, with the type of data that people are willing to share, that we can really use to make people’s lives better.”

To do the study, Google asked 150 volunteers to download a mobile app that pinged their phones at various times during the day to ask about their information needs at that moment, where they looked for the answer and whether they found it.

Their answers broke down into four categories. The first two Google already does well — answering simple questions (“when is Columbus Day?”) and more exploratory ones (“biography of Yves St. Laurent.”) The other two are more challenging — tasks to complete (“does my local library have this book available for checkout?”) and complex issues that often do not have a single answer or an answer findable on the Web (“best path to deal with borderline personality disorder” or “is my wife picking the kids up from school?”)

Even though cold, hard data is sacred at Google, the study shows why its engineers also have to rely on human interaction and intuition, Mr. Riley said.

And the results show that search is far from a solved problem, said Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president for search.

“Search is by no means perfect,” Mr. Singhal said. “If anything, it’s really, really imperfect, far away from the dream we want to build.”

He envisions the company climbing a pyramid, he said, with data at the bottom, then information, then knowledge and finally wisdom.

What would the ancient philosophers think of finding wisdom in a search engine?

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 4, 2013

 Copyright 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

Because of an editing error, a picture caption with an earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Google’s senior vice president for search. He is Amit Singhal, not Senghal.

Facebook Software Puts It Front and Center on Android Phones

Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.

His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002.

It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.

President Obama reacted to Mr. Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans — especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.”

Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”

In recent years, Mr. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well.

He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented,James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet.

He swore he would not become addicted to Twitter, but emphatically did. But Mr. Ebert — whose handle was @ebertchicago — never tweeted during a movie.

Mr. Ebert liked to say his approach — dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions — reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.

“I will one day be thin, butVincent Gallowill always be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ ” he wrote.

His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Mr. Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was “not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show.” But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that “it’s O.K. to have an opinion.”

In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns. In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert,” Mick LaSalle, movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010. “Others as influential as Ebert have not been as esteemed. Others as esteemed as Ebert have not had the same direct and widespread influence. And no one, but no one, has enjoyed the same fame.”

With Mr. Siskel, Mr. Ebert popularized television film criticism. Their collaboration began in 1975. Mr. Ebert was asked to appear on WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, as co-host of a new movie-review program. He was intrigued, but then taken aback when told that Mr. Siskel, the film critic of The Chicago Tribune, would be his partner.

“The answer was at the tip of my tongue: no,” Mr. Ebert told Time magazine in 1987.

As for Mr. Siskel, he said he initially had no desire to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.”

But the pairing worked. The show, originally titled “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You,” was a public television hit. It evolved into “Sneak Previews,” which went national when the Public Broadcasting Service began syndicating it in 1978. It eventually attracted more viewers than any other entertainment series in the history of public television.

Seeing its commercial potential, Tribune Entertainment acquired the show in 1982 and syndicated it under the title “Movie Views.” In 1986 Mr. Ebert and Mr. Siskel signed a contract with Buena Vista Television to syndicate the program as “Siskel and Ebert at the Movies.” Most people knew the two as intellectually engaged, sweater-wearing, often contentious men sitting in cozy armchairs ad-libbing about a film’s strengths and weaknesses. Mr. Ebert was the larger one with the owlish eyeglasses, Mr. Siskel the taller one who was losing his hair. For all their combativeness, however, they actually agreed on a movie’s worth much more often than they differed.

“We liked each other; we even loved each other,” Mr. Ebert told Television Week in 2005. “And we also had days when we hated each other.”

They even hugged, in 1985, when they appeared on “The Tonight Show” withJohnny Carson.

A typical Siskel and Ebert program reviewed five films. Either Mr. Ebert or Mr. Siskel would introduce a clip and then give his opinion. Then the other would weigh in. Their disagreements were more entertaining than their agreements, complete with knitted brows, are-you-serious head-shaking and gentle (or not) barbs. Mr. Siskel once taunted Mr. Ebert about his weight: “Has your application for a ZIP code come through yet?” Mr. Ebert came back with a dart about Mr. Siskel’s receding hairline: “The only things the astronauts saw from outer space were Three Mile Island and your forehead.”

Finally, the denouement, harking back to the Roman Colosseum: both thumbs up, both down or, in a split decision, one of each. Mr. Ebert said that he was the one who had come up with the all-or-nothing gestures, and that Mr. Siskel had thought of trademarking them.

Mr. Siskel died of a brain tumor in 1999 at 53. Afterward, the show was renamed “Roger Ebert & the Movies” and began rotating co-hosts as a way of auditioning them. In September 2000 Richard Roeper, a fellow Sun-Times columnist, became the permanent co-host and the show was renamed “Ebert & Roeper.” Mr. Ebert left the show in 2006 because of his illness, and Mr. Roeper left in 2008.

Mr. Ebert believed a great film should seem new at every watching; he said he had seen”Citizen Kane,”his favorite, scores of times. His credo in judging a film’s value was a simple one: “Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you.”

Roger Joseph Ebert, an only child, was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Ill., to Walter Ebert and the former Annabel Stumm. The first movie he saw was the 1937 Marx Brothers comedy,”A Day at the Races,” at the Princess Theater in Urbana.

“It was part of a double feature shown with five cartoons, and you got four and a half hours of solid entertainment for exactly nine cents,” Mr. Ebert once recalled.

He was barely old enough to write when he started his journalistic career, publishing The Washington Street News in his basement and delivering copies to a dozen neighborhood houses. He worked at his grade school newspaper, edited his high school paper and by age 15 was earning 75 cents an hour covering high school sports for The News-Gazette in Champaign. He went to many movies and found time to publish a science fiction magazine called Stymie. In 1958 he won a statewide speaking contest for simulating radio broadcasts.

In 1964 Mr. Ebert graduated as a journalism major from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was editor of The Daily Illini. He also served as president of the United States Student Press Association.

He did graduate study in English at the University of Cape Town under a Rotary International Fellowship. He then became a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago but left to become a feature writer at The Sun-Times.

Though his knowledge of film was limited, he was named the paper’s first movie critic in 1967, when he was 24; newspapers at the time wanted young film critics to speak to the young audiences being attracted to movies like”The Graduate”and”Bonnie and Clyde”as well as films by directors of the French New Wave, includingFrançois TruffautandJean-Luc Godard.

Mr. Ebert got some firsthand moviemaking experience by writing the screenplay for the 1970 movie”Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”forRuss Meyer, a director known for his campy B-movies featuring busty women. Panned by fellow critics (“gratuitously violent,” Mr. Siskel said), the film seemed a point of pride for Mr. Ebert, who was paid $15,000 and never tired of talking about it. He wrote a half-dozen more screenplays for Mr. Meyer, at least one of which was produced: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).

As a critic, Mr. Ebert quickly gained traction. In 1970 Time magazine called him “a cultural resource of the community.” In 1973 the Chicago Newspaper Guild cited him as “ushering in a new era of criticism in Chicago.”

Mr. Ebert spoke out against the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system, saying it lurched between being too restrictive and too lenient. He criticized Hollywood for not supporting documentaries and relying too much on digital effects and what he called gimmicks, like 3-D.

He revived his television career in January 2011 with a new film-review program on public television. Using a computer-generated facsimile of his own voice, he discussed classic, overlooked and new films while co-hosts handled the “thumbs” judgments.

Mr. Ebert’s books included the “Great Movies” essay collections, a memoir, “Life Itself,” and a book of reviews titled “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.” He also wrote a book about being a pedestrian in his favorite city: “The Perfect London Walk.”

In July 1992 Mr. Ebert married Chaz Hammelsmith, who survives him.

Since 1999 he had been host of a film festival in Champaign, Ill., known as Ebertfest. Until 2008, it was called Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival because it showed movies Mr. Ebert thought critics, distributors or audiences had overlooked.

Just two days before his death, Mr. Ebert announced he intended to write reviews only of films he wanted to review. He said he would recruit others to do the rest, saying he was taking “a leave of presence.”

Mr. Ebert — who said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them — was once asked what movie he thought was shown over and over again in heaven, and what snack would be free of charge and calories there.

“ ‘Citizen Kane’ and vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream,” he answered.

<nyt_correction_bottom>

“When I was really little, I had this stupid theory that love was always going to be easy. I read a lot of fairytales and I think I put too much expectation in those stories, because I honestly believed that once you grew up, you’d find that one person you’re meant to find and that would be it, forever. But then I grew up myself and realised that it’s not actually that simple. Prince Charmings only exist because Walt Disney created them. I think I was twelve when I had my first real crush and he was really mean to me for the whole year so I figured all boys would be the same, but then I’d see my friends falling straight into relationships – even if they were silly and didn’t last – and that’s when I thought there must be something wrong with me, so I stopped caring again. I never really got the whole relationship thing anyway, because I was alwayss just really content with spending my time going on bike rides with my dad and climbing trees in my grandma’s back garden. I made mud pies while other girls made daisy chains in pretty dresses. It stayed that way for a really long time, and now I’m too scared to put myself into relationships because I’m not used to feeling wanted or loved. But two years ago, I found myself getting butterflies at the mention of a certain name and everything just felt different after that. But he broke my heart. Over and over and over. And that taught me everything I already knew and everything I was stupid enough to forget just for a second, because I actually believed I could experience a ‘happily ever after…’. But I was stupid and I was wrong. And I put my fairytales back in the attic again.’

Written by porcelain—bones (Advice blog) Copyright. 2013. All Right Reserved

porcelain–bones submitted to whitepaperquotes@tumblr.com