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There it was in black graffiti letters on an earthen wall in Mexico City: A todo madre o un desmadre. Liza Bakewell, a linguistic anthropologist at Brown University, noticed the phrase and puzzled over how to translate it. Her bewilderment inspired a lengthy investigation into the word madre (mother) and its complicated meanings, which she documented and distilled in her new book, "Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun".

Made up of only five letters and two syllables, madre, Bakewell finds, is like "a cell under a microscope"—seemingly small but "filled with more activity than I had planned and had seen with my own two eyes over the years." The word itself implies power and powerlessness; it is central yet marginal. Here More Intelligent Life has chosen five highlights from the author's charming book, a mix of memoir, research and travelogue.

On common phrases and their implications:

¡Qué padre! literally translates as "what a father", and means, "How marvellous and awesome."Me vale madre, however, translates as "it is worth a mother" and means, loosely, "I don't give a damn" or "It's worthless.

On grammar:  read more »

The sandwich is a simple, humble foodstuff, eaten daily by billions of people across the globe. Familiarity may breed contempt, but there is much to love and learn about the sandwich, acccording to Bee Wilson, author of a new history of the convenient meal. An historian and food journalist (and a contributor to Intelligent Life), Ms Wilson delves into the evolution and re-invention of the sandwich, and considers its cultural significance around the world. Along the way she delivers some charming anecdotes, amusing pictures and mouth-watering recipes.

From dainty, crustless cucumber squares to Yorkshire ‘mucky-fat’ doorstops (wedges of white bread and dripping), the sandwich has been enjoyed by both rich and poor. Its incarnations across the globe vary from the Chilean barros luco (hot steak and melted cheese in a roll) to the Vietnamese bánh mì (pate, pork and pickled vegetables in a baguette). It is indeed a wondrous and endlessly variable one-handed meal, which can “be applied to face and devoured in a trice”, and leave fingers clean to boot.

More Intelligent Life has plucked five juicy morsels about sandwiches from Ms Wilson’s book.

On the etymology of ‘sandwich’:  read more »

On October 13th the news broke that Nicole Krauss's third novel, "Great House", just published by W. W. Norton & Co, had been nominated for a National Book Award. It was an auspicious night for Krauss to share a stage with David Grossman, an Israeli novelist and the author most recently of "To the End of the Land" ("his most important novel yet," according to The Economist). At an event hosted by the New York Public Library in Manhattan, the two novelists (and good friends) spoke about the writing process, their Jewish identity and Israel, where Grossman still lives. More Intelligent Life extracted five snippets from the evening's discussion.

On language in the Middle East:
Grossman: "Part of the cost of our situation in Israel is the reduction of the language. The language is one of the main vehicles for us to sense reality. When reality is so violent and threatening, the natural defense is to close yourself down, and it affects the language of the people. Hebrew is now a very functional language; it's no longer as rich as it once was. The media looks more like graffiti—all short phrases and bywords. It suggests a world which is much more digestible, but it is not the real world."

On Israel:
Krauss: "I felt a sense of the familial there, and a straining at the seams, as though everybody's business poured into everybody else's business. One night I stood hugging a friend goodbye outside of a bar when a guy on a moped sped by and yelled: 'Don't strangle him—he wants to live!'"  read more »

If only there was an easy recipe for funniness. Personal jokes that seem perfectly hilarious in the indulgent hush of one's own bedroom sometimes (often) fall flat (splat) the moment an actual audience (mom) is introduced. What to do? The answer for most of us is to simply avoid the matter. Stop trying. Comedy is not really a field in which practice makes perfect. But perhaps there are some handy rules to follow for the more intrepid (dumb) among us.

Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert", a fantastically successful comic strip about office life (that happens to be only marginally less dreary than actual office life), has written up a few tips on "How to Write Like a Cartoonist" for the Wall Street Journal. (Perhaps the next instalment of this nascent series will be "How to report the news while being published by a cartoon".) So as part of our "Five things" series, we hereby submit five of Mr Adams's gems on humour writing.

On danger:
"Humour likes danger. If you are cautious by nature, writing humour probably isn't for you. Humour works best when you sense that the writer is putting himself in jeopardy."

On people:
"Humour is about people. It's impossible to write humour about a concept or an object. All humour involves how people think and act. Sometimes you can finesse that limitation by having your characters think and act in selfish, stupid or potentially harmful ways around the concept or object that you want your reader to focus on."  read more »

"On entering the waiting area," writes Michelle Williams of her interview to become a mortuary technician, "I saw a woman dressed from head to toe in black gothic clothing with very long curly straw-like red hair, who was one of the other applicants. She greeted me cautiously; I smiled faintly at her and decided to sit on the other side of the room."

The plucky Williams, a former health-care assistant who worked with learning-disabled patients, impulsively decided to take up work in a hospital morgue in Gloucestershire. "Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician" is a memoir of her first year on the job. Not surprisingly, the scenarios range from ghastly to extremely ghastly. During her first weeks of training, the 36-year-old Williams encounters maggot-eaten bodies, severed limbs and a 560-pound dead man whose cadaver, too large to fit inside a refrigerated compartment, slowly decomposes in the laboratory while technicians wait desperately for the sign-off authorising a postmortem. There's also the motorcycle rider, decapitated in an accident, who arrives on a gurney with his head riding shotgun. Her reaction to such sights is often to murmur a curse and fetch a cup of instant coffee. Williams is a cool customer, and her writing style is correspondingly concise and sportive. More Intelligent Life has extracted a few bits of underworld knowledge from this engaging memoir.

On avoiding mistakes:

Checking the identification on a body—via tags affixed to the big toe and wrist—is a technician's most important responsibility. "Every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated," Williams is told by her supervisors, "and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble."  read more »

Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”, Iranians jam to Django Reinhardt, and Indonesian teenagers favour the post-punk stylings of British cult classic Wire. Who knew? Richard Poplak, for one. Poplak is the author of “The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World”, a tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture, from cheesy reality television to Metallica. The chapters are organised by country—Libya, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, etc—with each section prefaced by religious statistics and venerated local pop-culture icons. The result is packed with surprises, five of which More Intelligent Life has chosen to highlight.

On heavy metal:

Egyptian heavy-metal fans call themselves Metaliens and, like America’s native metalheads, they prefer long hair and black T-shirts. On January 22nd 1997, Egyptian police conducted a series of raids on the homes of Metaliens, confiscating metal posters, CDs and instruments, interrogating about 100 suspects (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?” “Do you spit on graves?”) and jailing many of them for weeks. “Metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world,” Poplak points out, citing the massive Dubai Desert Rock Festival.

On video games as propaganda:  read more »

Given that Mary Roach has written about sex, cadavers, leeches and the human soul, it should come as no surprise that her forthcoming book, "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void", addresses such phenomena as “fecal popcorning”, weightless burping, and the exigencies of puking in your helmet during a spacewalk.

Her newest endeavour is an exploration of the human relationship with outer space. It takes the author on a shiver-inducing tour through simulation facilities, isolation chambers and NASA research centres, where she asks the questions a layperson might be too embarrassed to articulate. The book that results is a space manual filtered through the lens of Roach’s ingenious reporting and wry humour. Herewith, five things More Intelligent Life learned along the way:  read more »

All novels should be preceded by trailers. This, at least, is the conviction that most viewers will adopt after a glance at the four-minute preview of Gary Shteyngart's forthcoming "Super Sad True Love Story" (out later this month):

Here are five things More Intelligent Life gleaned from repeated viewings:

On James Franco:

If the debate over James Franco—future Yale PhD candidate, hunky actor and writer manqué—centres on whether he's ridiculous or a sly parody of a ridiculous person, the Shteyngart trailer seals the deal in Franco's favour. "What he really wants to do," Franco explains earnestly of the author, "is, uh, you know, cash in on the whole Hollywood vampire thing."

On creative-writing programmes:  read more »

Calling all couch potatoes and media theorists: "The Cult TV Book", edited by Stacey Abbott, has arrived. The volume—half textbook, half reference manual—assembles more than three dozen academic essays that address the question of what constitutes cult television and how a small number of smart, genre-busting shows have influenced a vast amount of our viewing material.

What counts as cult TV? Well, like the definition of the term itself, that’s a topic for productive argument. A short list might include "Star Trek", "Battlestar Galactica", "Twin Peaks", "The X-Files", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Alias", "Firefly", "The Avengers" and "Lost". Herewith we’ve culled five things from Abbott’s book to ponder over on the subject of television.

On where it all began:

The origin of cult-TV appreciation can be placed in the period following the debut of "Star Trek" in 1966, when the show teetered on the brink of cancellation and was rescued from a premature death by ardent letter-writing campaigns organised by fans.

   read more »

Something sad has happened to "Sex and the City". As a television series, it offered a not unintelligent escapist fantasy of the urban single female condition. Wearing Manolos and drinking cosmos, Carrie and friends spent week after week giggling and kvetching about love and life in a way that felt both resonant and idealised. These bosom buddies inhabited a vision of modern womanhood that mixed empowerment with vulnerability, materialism with frustration. They adored what they could control (their wardrobe) and lamented what they couldn't (their suitors). The result was meringue-like entertainment with just enough insight to keep feelings of disgust (self and otherwise) at bay.

So what's the deal with these movies? Oy. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon has written a beautifully zealous take-down of the latest. These are five of his finest moments:

On sadism:

"It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the "Saw" franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks."

On homosexuality:

"King seems to be posing the rhetorical question: Can a gay-wedding scene staged by a gay director still be homophobic and offensive? I think I'm voting for yes..."

On storytelling:

"King's storytelling operates on the premise that the viewer zones out every few minutes, and when she swims back up to the surface again, something new should be happening. Preferably involving camels."  read more »