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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 »

Branding used to be for products. Now it is something ordinary people do to themselves, writes Peter York in his cover story for the Autumn issue of Intelligent Life. Isabel Lloyd interviews Esther (not her real name), the CEO of an international real-estate firm, who has used a personal brander since the 1990s:

I began employing a personal brander when I was just an agent showing clients round houses. I wasn’t even an office manager, but I knew that eventually I wanted to be a chief executive somewhere. I had read quite a bit about personal branding and knew it was important to get your personality consistent, so that people you work with know what to expect and know the signature style of your work. But I wasn’t sure what my brand was.

When I met my brander, the first thing she did was ask me what my aspirations were—what I wanted branding to help me achieve. We then talked about my personal qualities, and she gave me some very rapid-fire verbal feedback. Some of it was very confidence-building—she said I was intelligent, professional and articulate—but you could tell too that she was sizing me up, looking at how I was dressed, how I came across.

My clothes were the first thing she changed. She said they weren’t right for the boardroom, because they were too suggestive; her line was that they should encourage men’s eyes back up to my face. And oh my, did she take me shopping. We’d meet at 10am for coffee, and by 3pm I’d have a whole new wardrobe. It was wonderful: I don’t enjoy fashion, and she’d make all the decisions for me.  read more »

Can polymathy be taught? In the autumn issue of Intelligent Life Edward Carr laments that we seem to be experiencing a polymathy end of days--alas, our accumulated knowledge in any given field makes it far too difficult to become an expert in more than one. But one reader has suggested that the problem may lurk within our educational institutions, which shove students along narrow career paths without teaching all the short-cuts and connections in between:

I'm delighted by the idea that polymathy can be learned (my hopes for becoming a true Renaissance woman--the kind that isn't uneducated, consumptive and pregnant by 15--need not be dashed). But how would a polymath-inspiring curriculum compare with a more ordinary one?  read more »

Edward Carr ends his piece about polymaths with a plaintive observation:

Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

(This is Berlin's take on an epigram by Archilochus, as one reader observes.)  This morning Carr rued this state of affairs on Andrew Marr's Start of the Week radio show (yes, that Andrew Marr, he of the soothing, radio-show baritone and perhaps a polymath of sorts himself). He considered the question: How is it that in a time of more learning and wider access to education, we have so few polymaths?  read more »

A main feature for the autumn issue of Intelligent Life magazine looks at the decline of the polymath. The author, Edward Carr, argues that in this age of specialisation, the polymath has become an endangered species. For an accompanying table, we set about identifying living examples. We asked around the office, inviting nominations from the staff of Intelligent Life and The Economist. The names that came in were highly varied, overwhelmingly male, mostly Anglophone and all over the age of 45.

In the end we included only those who were reckoned to excel in diverse fields; among the scientists, we limited our choice to those, such as Roger Penrose, whose writing has attracted wide acclaim. Here is a selection of the most persuasive candidates, plus the odd wild card. We have listed their principal activities and put them in order of the number of strings they have to their bow. Don't agree with our choices? Feel free to add your own.

5 STRINGS

Nathan Myhrvold: American, 51.
Computer scientist, physicist, entrepreneur, photographer, chef

Richard Posner: American, 70.
Judge, literary critic, economist, political theorist, philosopher

Jared Diamond: American, 71.
Anthropologist, geographer, physiologist, author, ornithologist

Brian Eno: British, 61.
Musician, record producer, visual artist, political activist, diarist

Bruce Dickinson: British, 51.
Singer, TV presenter, pilot, TV presenter, record producer, fencer

4 STRINGS

Noam Chomsky: American, 80.  read more »