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With "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" (or "Children of the Revolution", depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on), Dinaw Mengestu earned his reputation as an impressive young novelist on the rise.

His 2007 debut illustrated a facility with grand subjects, such as displacement and identity. It was a textured story about the immigrants' struggle in America, rendered in beautiful prose and from the perspective of an African shop-owner in Washington, DC. His latest novel, "How to Read the Air", not only confirms his nascent place in the world of letters, but delivers an even more profound story, this time about two generations of Ethiopian immigrants in America—the parents who fled their homeland in search of a life in Nashville, Tennessee, and their son who retraces their steps years later. The story is the son's, Jonas, now an English teacher in a fraught marriage in New York, who eagerly mines these stories about the past for truths about himself.

Mr Mengestu has earned quite a bit of attention for both books. In 2010 he was also named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. Here he speaks to More Intelligent Life about trying to define the American novel, the loneliness of immigrants and the beauty of myth-making.  read more »

There’s a scene from “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”, Alison Klayman’s documentary about a recently detained Chinese artist and activist, that borders on farce. Mr Ai has travelled to the police station in Chengdu to file a complaint about a previous beating. During the interviews and paperwork at least eight cameras are tracking his every move. His friends and studio assistants are there recording the proceedings, as are Evan Osnos, the New Yorker's China correspondent, and Ms Klayman, the documentarian. The other cameras are held by the police, who always seem to be documenting Mr Ai. Everyone stands there filming each other, a cinematic détente.

This scene nicely captures Mr Ai's refusal to back down from government pressure, his interest in exposing the cracks in the Chinese police system and his interest in turning everything into art. Such moments also take on greater resonance in light of recent events—while en route to New York, Ai Weiwei was detained and arrested at the Beijing airport on financial charges. This is the latest in a series of escalating skirmishes between him and the Chinese government.

For "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry", which will be released in the autumn, Ms Klayman filmed and followed the artist from 2008 to 2010. She also created this "Frontline" segment on Ai Weiwei, which aired the week before he was detained. Here she answers questions about the artist and his arrest.  read more »

Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia" is about so many things: physics, love, romanticism, poetry, academia, gardening, history and determinism. This sweeping story takes place on a single English estate during two periods, the early 19th century and the present day. The play features two versions of a single narrative—the original events as they unfolded in the past, and a reconstructed account painstakingly pieced together by modern-day historians. Central to the story is a precocious young girl, Thomasina Coverly, who realises before her time that just as one can't un-stir jam from rice pudding, Newtonian equations can't run backwards. As the world of the play moves forward, relics from the past accumulate on stage in an entropic collage. The two eras ultimately collide in a beautiful waltz. 

Mr Stoppard's impressive epic of a play is now enjoying a revival on Broadway. David Leveaux, the director, has already been nominated for two Tony awards for Stoppard plays, "Jumpers" and "The Right Thing". (He has also garnered nominations for his direction of  "Nine", "Anna Christie" and "A Moon for the Misbegotten", all on Broadway.) Mr Leveaux's production of "Arcadia", which first opened in London in 2009, is now at New York's Barrymore Theatre with a new ensemble cast, including Raúl Esparza, Byron Jennings and Billy Crudup (who starred in the original Broadway show as Thomasina's tutor, Septimus; he returns as Bernard, a rather weaselly academic).  read more »

Is religion a force for good in the world? The answer is complicated, but most of our readers seem to think not, according to The Economist's current debate on the subject. The problem may not be with religion itself, per se; who doesn't love some good stories mixed with reasons to gather and over-eat, served with a dollop of befuddling mumbo-jumbo? The hitch, alas, is the believers—those folks who say and do such silly things because they follow scripture like it's some sort of rule-book written by God. Oy.

The debate is worth reading, though anyone else who decides they want to challenge Sam Harris's atheism ought to know that they are bringing a banana to a knife fight.

With this debate as a backdrop and America's mid-term elections breathing down our necks, now is a good time to consider the wisdom of Damon Linker's new book, "The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders". Whereas Americans like their politicians religious, Mr Linker makes the case that certain theistic beliefs are incompatible with the country's liberal democracy.  read more »

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 »