Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

What we're reading:

Against beauty (New Republic)

Adam Kirsch on Zadie Smith's concerns about her own fiction

Colour blind, pitch perfect (Discovery News)

Children choose friends according to similar speech patters rather than skin colour

Not for children (San Francisco Chronicle)

A violent and bleak "Little Mermaid" ballet

Museums: the new guard (New York Times)

A special section on the next generation of museum curators

Today's quote:

"There's not been much wit and not much joy, there's a lot of grimness out there... There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing."  read more »

What we're reading:

Tales of the unread (Second Pass): This literary website turns one, and celebrates with reviews of out-of-print books

Everybody have fun (New Yorker): Lessons policymakers can learn from happiness research

Historic preservation (AP): Federal grants to American projects are under threat

Academic elitism (In Character): Snobbery, exploitation and silliness in the ivory tower

Today's quote:

"'Lloyd Webber' has become a kind of synonym for 'naff'. Ask yourself, dear reader, how many of your friends are big Lloyd Webber fans? Probably not many. That isn't a coincidence. Judgements about art and culture are impossible to separate from the judgement about social status."

~ Tim Lott, "Are Vettriano, Lloyd Webber and Dan Brown really so naff?" (Independent)

(Via The Economist) Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

What we're reading:

Bard to go

Will kids understand Shakespeare better if they don't have to sit still? (Guardian)

A show of letters by J.D. Salinger

Salinger's dam of silence has sprung its first leak (Wall Street Journal)

Atheists en masse

Thousands of non-believers zealously converge in Melbourne, Australia (BBC)

What's in the David Foster Wallace archive?

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas inherits the mess of papers he had stashed in a dark garage over-run with spiders (New Yorker)

Today's quote:

"By focusing on criminalising a government and making military intervention the top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur Coalition] has made peace more elusive and increased the suffering of ordinary Darfuris."

~ Rob Crilly, author of "Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War", in a review by Philip Hammond, "Darfur: every celeb’s favourite African war" (spiked review of books)  read more »

What we're reading:

A demolition of Hank Paulson's memoir

A critic huffs that Paulson sounds tough but was in fact all too weak (New Republic)

RIP: The novel

A book that defends plagiarism, champions faked memoirs and declares fiction dead has the literary world up in arms (Salon)

Variety's "economic reality"

The trade paper fires its two top critics, moving to freelance reviews (Los Angeles Times)

Merce Cunningham's final bow

The late choreographer's dance company embarks on a final tour before disbanding (Wall Street Journal)

Today's quote:

"[T]his poor sap of a show feels as eager to be walloped as a clown in a carnival dunking booth."

~ Ben Brantley on "Love Never Dies", Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequal to "The Phantom of the Opera", "Same Phantom, different spirit" (New York Times)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

Extraordinary intelligence may not be genetic (Salon)

The problem with a new biography of Nina Simone is the woman herself (Washington Times)

Is a "Best Actress" award sexist? No (Los Angeles Times)

It's time for Russian writers to engage with the country's dodgy past (New York Times)

Today's quote:

"Well, the time has come."

~ Barbara Streisand, presenting the best director Oscar to Katherine Bigelow, the first woman to win; in Roger Ebert's Oscar round-up "No Pain for 'Hurt Locker,' Bigelow" (Chicago Sun-Times)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

Nostalgia for bookshelves, already (Globe and Mail)

Not even an Oscar boosts box-office sales for documentaries and foreign films (Los Angeles Times)

Ostrich eggs used in stone-age communication (Discovery News)

Know the name St Clair McKelway (New York Times Book Review)

Today's quote:

"Surrealism isn't surreal anymore. It doesn't shock or jolt. It isn't confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners."

~ Morgan Meis, "Say 'Fromage!': Photography's surprising impact on the Surrealists" (Smart Set)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

When children's books go gay (New Republic)

Public-service ads that rely on shame don't work (Ad Age)

The rise of the sombre musical (New York Times)

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a great story-teller, but how much was fiction? (Guardian)

Today's quote:

"We all of us change and develop as we pass into adulthood and beyond, and there is no reason to suppose that a child who murders should be exempt from this inevitability."

~ Brian Masters, "Jon Venables is no longer the guilty boy who killed James Bulger" (Telegraph)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

Boys read as much as girls, just simpler books (Independent)

Chile's earthquake may have shortened days on earth (Space.com)

How much should an e-book cost? (New York Times)

The healing power of music (Los Angeles Times)

Today's quote:

"Traditionally people say you have to study the bad films to know how good films are made. But I think watching a bad movie is a qualitatively different experience than watching a good movie. I think we enjoy bad films more intensively than we enjoy good ones."

~ Lance Duerfahrd in Rex Huppke's "Finding treasure in trash films" (Chicago Tribune)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

Peter Schjeldahl on the Whitney Biennial (New Yorker)

The upside of depression (New York Times Magazine)

Museums see more visitors, less money (Wall Street Journal)

Would "Lord of the Rings" exist if Tolkien were Jewish? (Jewish Review of Books)

Today's quote:

"What I see of Internet reviewing is people of just surpassing ignorance about the medium expressing themselves on the medium."

~ Richard Schickel in Thomas Doherty's "The Death of Film Criticism" (Chronicle Review))

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Today's links:

Is Frederick Seidel an exquisite misogynist? (Poetry Foundation)

How Google's algorithm rules the web (Wired)

Tabloid stories are our Old Testament admonitory allegories (Slate)

Art Olympics: Ranking the Whitney Biennial (Flavorwire))

Today's quote:

"As we move toward a digitally integrated world, here is something television can learn from the Internet: the power and beauty of silence."

~ Mary McNamara, "NBC commentators don't know when to shut up" (Los Angeles Times))

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com