Alexander Stuart

I first met Nick D'Aloisio on Twitter when he was fifteen and had created Summly , a remarkable algorithm (and company) that summarized news stories into 400 characters that you could then expand into a longer article if you wanted greater depth. I introduced Nick to our wonderful friend Stephen Fry  (of whom he is a huge fan), and Stephen became a spokesperson for the company, making an entertaining and highly memorable commercial in which he and Nick sat opposite each other in quite distinctive blue chairs. Nick D'Aloisio and Stephen Fry. In March of 2013, Nick sold Summly to Yahoo for a reported $30 million, started working with Marissa Mayer and headed up a team that has created another truly beautiful and innovative news app, Yahoo News Digest , which deservedly won the 2014 Apple Design Award. Presenting a mix of summarized news, photographs, quotes, a highly relevant Twitter feed and deeper background information, Yahoo News Digest is the first tru

Photograph Copyright  ©  2014  Charong Chow Boogieboarding with my family is one of my absolute favorite things to do. We do it often, but rarely capture it on camera. This photo of me in the surf with our daughter was taken by my wife, Charong Chow.

My Buddha hat.  P hotograph Copyright  ©  2014 A lexander Chow-Stuart. I have an unnatural love for my Buddha hat. Many thanks to True Religion for making it! (The camel pin is mine:)

To mark the birthday last Friday of my dear friend, the groundbreaking British director, Nicolas Roeg , here is a post originally from March 19 2011 , about the huge impact Nic has had on my life, and about our work together on the film Insignificance , about Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, which I optioned as a play and executive produced together with the great British producer, Jeremy Thomas. Insignificance is not yet available as a legal download or stream in the US, as far as I know, but the crisp Criterion Blu-ray DVD is available from Amazon. Nicolas Roeg - His Own Timing, His Own Wisdom and Kindness   Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing I look on British film director Nicolas Roeg as many things: a friend, a mentor, almost a second father to me, but also the filmmaker who had the greatest personal influence on opening my eyes to what film could do. His films, not least Performance, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Don&

I'm in a reposting mood today, so here is the most popular post of all time from this blog (followed in rank by a personal favorite, Hudson and the W Hotel Hollywood: A Love Story:) , featuring our friend Dwayne Moser's photograph of the High Tower Apartments, one of the key locations in one of my all-time favorite movies, Robert Altman's incomparable  The Long Goodbye  (available to download from iTunes or Amazon ). This post first appeared on March 9 2012. Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film pla