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Foreign Policy has published a fine slideshow of pictures taken by teenagers in Kabul. These images are full of small pleasures, mundane exchanges and devilish smiles. They add depth and richness to a landscape otherwise viewed as a military map. In their ordinary humanity, they make life in Afghanistan less abstract, and remind us all of what's at stake.

The students of Afghanistan's Marefat School worked in partnership with picture-taking teenagers from Philadelphia's Constitution High School. An exhibition with work from both schools, “Being ‘We the People’: Afghanistan, America and the Minority Imprint”, is on display through September at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center and the National Museum of Afghanistan. An online component that launches later this summer will allow visitors to comment and make their own photo pairings (see www.constitutioncenter.org).

The ability to control acts of "public disorder"—everything from a peaceful protest to more hostile civilian riots or even an act of terrorism—has been a concern of public officials across centuries, societies and cultures. But as security tightens once again in the wake of the attempted car bomb in New York's Times Square, we return to the inevitable question: is there ever an effective way for people to prepare for the unpredictable?

For Sarah Pickering, a London-based photographer who made her exhibition debut at the Tate Britain in 2007, the futility of trying to anticipate trauma is at the core of her work. In "Explosions, Fires, and Public Order" (Aperture, £25), a new book of work from 2002 to the present, Pickering offers a four-part chronicle of the meticulous planning involved when soldiers, firefighters and law-enforcement officials attempt to simulate scenarios of chaotic events.  read more »

Despite our cars, houses and comforts, Americans are an unhappy lot: the numbers on subjective well-being have run flat since the 1970s. The worst part is, the things we think will make us happy often don't, such as raising children or even winning the lottery. "Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes," writes Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker in her review of Derek Bok's new book, “The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being”. “People do not always know what will give them lasting satisfaction,” Bok argues.

So what can Uncle Sam do to make us feel good? Bok suggests we stop worrying about financial inequality, for starters. “It is not clear... why growing inequality should elicit such compassion if lower-income Americans themselves have not become less happy,” he writes. Instead, he prescribes a raft of policies that deal with more prosaic anxieties: softer economic and psychological cushions for job loss, improved treatment for chronic pain, depression and sleep disorders (insidious, all), more sports programmes for children and better civic education (people are happier when they vote).  

Sounds good, but should more little league baseball teams pre-empt our striving for better income distribution? Just because money doesn't buy happiness doesn't mean it's okay for the lucre to be monopolised by the few, right? I suppose I'm just another one of those dissatisfied Americans who want it all: to eat my cake and to share it too.  read more »

Gabriella Gómez-Mont always feels a twinge of panic when she has to fill out her profession on immigration cards at various far-flung airports. The dynamic Mexican founder of Tóxico Cultura, an experimental creative lab, and a TED senior fellow, she is also a writer, photographer, visual artist and cultural entrepreneur–not exactly an easy title to put in a box.

Unsurprisingly, Gómez-Mont is fascinated by the intersections of different disciplines, creative and otherwise. This motivated her to create Tóxico Cultura in Mexico City four years ago, which functions as a kind of multidisciplinary think-tank. Artists, filmmakers, photographers and writers come here to discuss and present their work amid cultural workshops, lectures, exhibitions and film screenings. The city's creative types have all heard of Tóxico, and everyone wants to be a part of it.

Committed to reviving what she calls Mexico’s “cultural legacy”, Gómez-Mont is embarking on even more ambitious adventures. Bubbly and passionate, she gushes enthusiastically about filming her first documentary (about a reclusive Mexican scientist and artist), and about her creative approaches to social-justice problems. Here she talks to More Intelligent Life about Tóxico Cultura's mission, her interest in outsider artists and the impact of TED on her creative thinking.

More Intelligent Life: How would you describe what Tóxico Cultura does?  read more »

When dealing with intractable and often tragic problems, it can be difficult to focus. AIDS is an epidemic that kills 2m people annually. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most rampant, 1.9m people are infected each year. Between 31m and 36m people around the world live with HIV. These numbers are enormous and abstract, depressing and disempowering. Why think about it at all?

World AIDS Day on December 1st is a forced spotlight–a deadline for all of those official reports and announcements and lectures of what we've done and what we still must do. The day (and the weeks leading up to it) brought some good news: according to a new report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the number of new infections each year has gone down by 17% since 2001 (the year the UN began devoting itself in earnest to fighting HIV/AIDS). Antiretroviral drugs have also helped to lower the death rate and curb the spread of the virus. Good news, yes, but also a bit like spitting into a well.  read more »

There is such ease in the language of "Not That Kind of Girl", Carlene Bauer's memoir, that readers may be lulled into underestimating the alchemy that is taking place. Bauer has managed to transform the raw, melancholic, alienating challenges of religious scepticism and literary ambition into a readable story of one woman's messy struggle for authenticity. 

Like all coming-of-age tales, this one mixes the painfully familiar ("we were exhilarated by our loneliness because it meant we were being tested, or destined, or chosen") with the exotic ("my heart would flutter and whirr like a hummingbird until I said it: God"). Bauer describes an awkward youth of evangelical Christian schools and camps against a soundtrack of unbelievers (the Smiths, the Cure, the Replacements, the Pixies). Having looked to such models as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf for a sense of how to live, Bauer moves to New York City and waits patiently for her life to start. She yearns for a way to be both coolly intellectual and cosily devotional—to both love God and love the world. For a while she quietly keeps both her virginity and her piety. Ultimately (but not until time) she loses both.  read more »

For those who lack a natural fondness for abstractions, philosophy is a discipline best experienced in bite-sized pieces—on a Teaching Company tape for the commute, say, or in a profile of Peter Singer for the New York Times Magazine. Now we also have Tamler Sommers's new collection of philosophy-driven interviews, "A Very Bad Wizard".

Sommers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston and the go-to guy for interviews with philosophers at the Believer, five of which are included in this volume published by Believer Books (a division of McSweeney's). His subjects include Philip Zimbardo, Frans de Waal, Michael Ruse and Jonathan Haidt. Topics span everything from evolutionary theory to moral realism to meta-metaethics (whatever that is).

What first strikes a reader about the collected interviews is not the intelligence of the voices (that is to be expected), nor the subject matter (morality, justice, free will—the usual suspects), but the decisiveness with which convictions are laid out. The topics at hand are not ones that the average person spends much time considering, despite the fact that these questions are specifically human. What "A Very Bad Wizard" demonstrates is that some people do ponder such things, and with great nuance, and often in stark disagreement with one another.  read more »

In a fascinating piece for the Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov writes that "Wikipedia’s economics of knowledge creation are fundamentally unsound". It seems the people's encyclopedia is ripe for reform, or at least more scrutiny.

Reviewing Andrew Lih's "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia" (which comes across as an unnecessary read), Morozov highlights the limits of this dotcom miracle. Sure, it's amazing that a bunch of strangers have "leveraged the power of the Internet to create a highly functioning, über-productive community that voluntarily creates usable (and frequently used) knowledge for others". Yet at a time when Wikipedia has become a first stop for information gathering online, with more than 3m articles, how reliable is it?

As reliable as its contributors, of course. So it is a shame the system alienates actual experts, "who are forced to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments." Another quirk is the fact that Wikipedians are obsessed with popular culture ("The 711-word entry on nouvelle vague filmmaker Claude Chabrol, for example, is much less impressive than the 1867-word article on Transformers-director Michael Bay"). As Morozov writes:

There is something unappealing about the value system of a project that prizes, say, movie reviews quoted from college newspapers over elaborate entries in the authoritative Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, simply because the latter does not have an easy-to-link Web site.  read more »

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To accompany Peter York's cover story for the autumn issue on how marketing has got under our skin, Intelligent Life talked to six consultants based, variously, in Britain, Ireland, France and America. Two were men, four women. Four were over 40, and two of these were over 50. One would not reveal an exact age.

All worked to some degree on personal brands, though they had different approaches: one stressed “leadership development” through a psychoanalytical approach, two worked on image and presentation, and two specialised in internet marketing and networks. One covered all of these.

The majority were born, or had worked, in places outside Britain, including America, South Africa and Europe. Most started their businesses within the past five years; none had been going longer than 12 years. Previous careers included science and the law, but most had spent at least some time in marketing and/or human resources.

When asked what a “personal brand” was, the majority failed to give a concise answer (the longest racks up ten, mostly unintelligible, minutes on the tape), but there was a tendency to roam around the idea of “communicating yourself as unique to your target”, and “delivering messages consistent with your authenticity”. The clearest reply was: “Your personal brand is other people’s perception of who you are.” The majority agreed that there was a big difference between personal branding, PR, personality and reputation, but none was able to encapsulate this difference succinctly.  read more »