More Intelligent Life
Odd sport

Puck, stick and unicycle

In London's Hackney, Julia Belluz discovers a strange sport with a serious social mission More»

Julian Assange

Drinking tea, defending leaks

The notoriously elusive founder of Wikileaks seems noble, but perhaps also naive More»

Going Green

One word: plastics

Little seems more durable, insidiously, than plastic. In his latest Going Green column, Robert Butler makes a heartening trip to a high-tech recovery plant More»

Slawomir Mrozek

Found in translation

An ideal foil to Solzhenitsyn’s forensic tomes, Slawomir Mrozek's three-page tales mix paranoia with oblique plotting and mordant wit More»

Books of the month
Audio: Biographies

Our books and arts editor discusses the biographies of two of the most influential men of modern times More»

From our blogs
Prospero

Fanx to Graham Greene

The man could tell a good story, smart and nervy. His heroes are complicated, but readers are spared long stretches trapped in their thoughts. Instead we get to judge their actions... More»

What we're reading

The Last Supper grows bigger
(ARTnews)
Portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have increased over time

Dame badass, Helen Mirren
(Atlantic)
"[S]he's at her best when she's playing someone with a genuine unpleasant or strange edge"

In Defense of Amazon
(New Republic)
Don't blame the behemoth for the publishing industry's failures

Today's quote

"In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—'I am what I buy'—brings impoverishment of its own."

~ Tony Judt, "Words" (New York Review of Books)

Highlights
The history of historians

Not so ropey

Adam Sisman's biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper considers an historian who created and was destroyed by Hitler More»

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