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

A decade ago, critics predicted that September 11th would change how America thinks and feels. Lee Siegel argues that it's as restless as ever ...   read more »

James Marsh is a British film-maker drawn to stories of radical experiments. His 2008 documentary “Man on Wire”, for example, told the story of Philippe Petit's notorious tightrope walk on a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974. “It was out of the human scale," says Petit when he sees the towers for the first time. “Impossible.” The film ended up winning the Academy Award for best documentary. 

“Project Nim”, Marsh’s new film, follows the fortunes of another attempt at transcendance. In 1973 Herbert Terrace, a psychologist from New York’s Columbia University, set out to teach a young chimpanzee named Nim how to speak using sign-language. The film, built from archival footage of Nim’s education and interviews with the oddball humans who raised him, is a moving portrait of the life and times of a young chimpanzee fostered and then abandoned by a series of masters. It also manages to be a powerfully unsettling study of our own animal instincts, a narrative driven by lust and ambition as well as a scientific quest. More Intelligent Life spoke to James Marsh at London’s Bloomsbury Hotel.     

Why did you want to make “Project Nim”?  read more »

James Scudamore, a regular visitor, goes back to see how Havana is changing ...  read more »

Women in China have long been silenced or sidelined—if they weren’t smothered at birth. But now a booming economy has transformed their lives. Hilary Spurling sees the changes for herself ...  read more »

In an age of global communications, does it still make sense to talk about our national past?  Patrick Dillon sorts out a knotty issue ...  read more »

One is a gadget-maker, the other a search engine—but now they are at odds. Robert Lane Greene on a clash of cultures ...  read more »

Venice is in peril and so are we. Maybe some pizza will help, writes Robert Butler in his latest Going Green column ...  read more »

Along with her husband and their four children, Emma Williams has lived in New York, Jerusalem, Senegal and now Belgrade. Their travels have had some unexpected repercussions for family life ...  read more »

Funerals for medical cadavers have become increasingly common of late. Natasha Lennard investigates the practice ...  read more »

Over a thousand people die on Bolivia's roads every year, largely because the drivers are a little crazy. Simon Wroe heads to the country to investigate ...  read more »