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ON THE COVER: MASS INTELLIGENCE

"You don't publish a magazine called Intelligent Life if you think the world is getting dumber", writes Tim de Lisle, the editor, in the latest issue of Intelligent Life magazine. He explains the thinking behind the cover story  ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

The latest cover story in Intelligent Life magazine, on sale now in Britain and across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is about mass intelligence. We hear a lot about dumbing down, but there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is happening too. Dumbing down is such an insistent phrase that we tend to see intellectual standards as a river, heading in the same direction, always downhill. In fact they are more like a road, with heavy traffic in both directions.

In the cover story John Parker, a senior writer on The Economist, roams far and wide to gather the evidence that we are not merely dumbing down but also wising up. He looks at museum admissions, literary festivals, the broadcasting of opera to cinemas, the growth of classical music on the radio, and the quality of leading television series such as "The Wire", and delves into the factors behind the culture boom. At the root of it, he feels, is education: “far more people are going to university than before, and studies have shown that today’s graduates are cultural omnivores”.

For the cover itself, Intelligent Life brings together two formidable cultural figures: Leo Tolstoy and Paris Hilton.

Among the other highlights in the winter issue:

THE WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING
The Burj Dubai is the world’s tallest man-made structure, and it is still going up. J.M. Ledgard goes to gawp--and to ask the people behind it, what’s the point?

THE ABBESS’S YEAR OFF
Dame Joanna Jamieson spent half a century in an enclosed order of nuns, followed by one year at art school in Hoxton, east London. She tells Maggie Fergusson what she made of the modern world and how she got on in the life-drawing class

DOUGLAS COUPLAND ON THE APPLE MAC
It’s 25 years since Apple Macintosh gave us the first computer with a desktop with icons on it. Douglas Coupland, then a design student, now a bestselling author, remembers the impact the Mac had and how it “turned work into play”

AUTHORS ON MUSEUMS
Our series continues with Helen Simpson, a short-story writer, writing about the Villa Flora in Winterthur, near Zurich--a private home, still occupied, which has become a museum for the work of Felix Vallotton. She reveals how she had a poster of a Vallotton etching on her wall as a student, how it felt to see the original for the first time, and tells the story behind Vallotton’s connection with the house

A MONTH IN THE LIFE OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE
The National Theatre on the South Bank  used to be a fortress, dogged by disputes. Now it’s a flagship store on London’s high street of the arts, argues Robert Butler, who spent a month behind the scenes, talking to everyone from the young actor playing the messenger in Oedipus to the artistic director, Nicholas Hytner. We publish Butler’s portrait of a fast-changing institution over ten pages, with photographs by Brian Harris

PHOTO ESSAY: ARCTIC BLUES
The photographer Simon Roberts captures the radiant bleakness of northern Russia, and tells Alexandra Lennox how he went about the task

Most of the contents will be posted here, bit by bit, over the three months that the magazine is on sale. As ever, do let us know what you think. ~ TIM DE LISLE

Picture credit: Mike Prior (top); Sam Barker (portrait)