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Since 2008 we have published a letters page in Intelligent Life to showcase the best comments—and occasional quibbles—from our readers. Now that we are publishing the print magazine six times a year, it's a fine time to publish the letters page online, too.

You are a lively bunch, hailing from all over the world, with differing tastes and eclectic experiences. And we love to hear from you. Whether it is voting in the poll on the Big Question, commenting on articles online or putting pen to paper, we are always glad when you feel inspired to join in.

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~ GEORGIA GRIMOND

When Marc and Nick Francis came across Chinese workers building a road in the Ethiopian countryside in 2005, they felt like they were seeing the future. China’s footprint on Africa's soil was expanding in front of their eyes.

The film-makers had been interested in China since the 1990s, when Marc lived in Shenzhen. But it wasn’t until they encountered fast-growing Asian investment in Africa that they knew which story they wanted to tell, and how. “When China met Africa” follows three men in Zambia, who help to illustrate the Afro-Cino relationship: the country’s trade minister, Felix Mutati; a Chinese farm-owner; and a project manager for a Chinese multinational. The film explores the daily dependency and friction between them in their jobs.

China has recently become Africa’s largest trading partner, lending more money to the continent than the World Bank, so the film is a timely observation of geo-political change. “China’s foray into Africa is indicative of a wider shift in power from West to East,” says Nick, “and something we all need to try to understand”.

The brothers are drawn to deconstructing big global issues. Their last film, “Black Gold”, which premiered at the Sundance film festival, was about the struggle of one man against the multi-billion dollar coffee industry. It brought the topic to the attention of thousands. “When China met Africa”, now available on DVD, continues to travel on the international festival circuit.

More Intelligent Life  interviewed the brothers over e-mail, and asked them about some of the challenges and revelations involved in making this film.  read more »

Africa has made a phenomenal leap in the last decade. Its economy is growing faster than that of any other continent. Foreign investment is at an all-time high; Senegal has lower borrowing costs than Ireland. The idea of a black African billionaire—once outlandish except for kleptocratic dictators—is commonplace now. At the same time an expanding African middle class (similar in size to those in India and China) is sucking in consumer goods. Poverty, famine and disease are still a problem but less so than in the late 20th century, not least thanks to advances in combating HIV and malaria.

Africa’s mood is more optimistic than at any time since the independence era of the 1960s. This appears to be a real turning point for the continent. About a third of its growth is due to the (probably temporary) rise in commodity prices. Some countries have been clever enough to use profits to build new infrastructure. The arrival of China on the scene—as investor and a low-cost builder—has accelerated this trend. Other Asian economies are following its lead, from Korea to Turkey.  

Yet factors unconnected to resources have been equally or even more important. Africans are taking a greater interest in each other. Regional economic cooperation has improved markedly—borders are easier to cross now, especially in the east. Technology helps too. Africa has 400m mobile-phone users—more than America. Such tools boost local economies, especially through mobile banking and the distribution of agricultural information.   read more »

Yesterday, Joe Biden praised Steve Jobs with a simple line: he democratised technology. He did, but he did so in a very specific way.

While writing an article on Google and Apple for Intelligent Life, I knew little about design. So I called someone who did, my former colleague Cliff Kuang, now the editor of Fast Company's award-winning design blog. He put Apple's great achievement better than anyone I've heard, and so I paraphrase it here: it used to be that when you got a computer or a gadget, you had to read a long manual or spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it. One person in the family might take the time to do so, and then spend the rest of the Christmas holiday teaching everyone else how to do the things they wanted to do. 

Apple changed all that. Take the iPad: an extremely expensive bit of high-tech kit, it comes with no instruction manual. You open a luxuriously thick cardboard box and behold what looks like a piece of art. What next? You press the one big button on the front. The iPad jumps to life and starts setting itself up to work for you. Then you start playing with it. How many people have ever downloaded, printed or read a bit of the instruction manual? After using an iPhone, there are few things more complicated than figuring out how to work a Blackberry.    read more »

Industrial art is thriving. The shortlist has just been announced for a new pylon design in Britain, a government-sponsored competition run by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The finalists have all come up with possible replacements to the 1927 construction of Sir Reginald Blomfeld, which continues to march across the landscape barely changed (except a little taller). The winner is announced on October 5th and National Grid, the company that runs the electricity network, will consider whether to use that design in the future. 

There are some interesting structures in the mix: one is a painted, lattice cylinder; another has slivers of steel pointing up to the sun. Others seem to perform the function—there is a Y-shaped offering, for example—albeit with a less striking form. 

My personal favourite in design terms, though, is a pylon that didn’t make this list but won the 2010 Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture award. Called “The Land of Giants” (below), it features huge lattice men who look as though they’re carrying the wires across the landscape. It was designed by Choi+Shine Architects, and the images on the firm’s site are simply stunning. A feasibility study was under way in Iceland to see if the figures could be used, but when things got a little tricky in the Icelandic economy in 2010, the project was put on hold. It’s unlikely to thaw any time soon.   read more »

The rise of e-readers has already introduced big changes for both publishers and readers. Electronic publications can be turned out faster than the paper kind, and the devices allow for more flexible formatting and pricing. We have already seen, for example, a rise in short books and free-standing articles presented as one-off downloads, as in Amazon's Kindle Singles. One contemporaneous example is Sasha Issenberg's "Rick Perry and his Eggheads". Originally part of a longer book about the science and analytics of political campaigns—called "The Victory Lab" and due next year—the chapter about the Texas governor was brought forward and published electronically just days after Mr Perry announced that he is running for president.
 
What will this mean for traditional books and magazines? Gabe Habash, writing at Publisher's Weekly, is worried. He notes that Amazon has just published a one-off short story from Tom Rachman, author of the novel "The Imperfectionists":  read more »

Lee Siegel takes a step back from the surreal antagonism on Capitol Hill to figure out how we got here ...  read more »

For a fleeting moment, his achievement was a unifying symbol of human progress, not just national strength ...  read more »

David Mamet confirms—with no small amount of chutzpah—that all politics is personal, argues Lee Siegel ...  read more »

Two of the biggest trends in music listening in recent years: aggregating your collection, and disaggregating your collecting.

That is, devices like the iPod let you carry most of your music in your pocket (and Apple’s new iCloud will increase consumer access to the rest of the collection). And if you’ve been buying music through iTunes or Amazon, you can choose whatever songs you want, even if they aren’t the singles.

These are trends driven by economic and technological factors, but they have had an impact on how music is conceived, composed and presented. If music is now experienced through songs—a single on the radio, a video someone posted on your Facebook wall—then what’s the point, really, of carefully crafting an entire album?

So I was intrigued the other week when a friend working in the music industry started talking about an “entirely new format”—the playbutton. This is a new company, a few months old, that’s selling a small roster of albums as a wearable badge. There’s nothing to download or sync; it’s grab-n-go. There’s also no way to increase its capacity or change its content. Wired calls it a “willful technological step backwards.”  read more »