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

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, February 22nd 2012

Your head weighs 10 pounds—give or take—so it needs the right pillow to support it at night, particularly as the years march on. But what constitutes the right pillow is a complex matter. It depends mostly on what position you sleep in: if you are a sidesleeper, you need a higher, firmer pillow than if you are a backsleeper—the objective is to keep your spine, neck, and head in alignment. For disorganised types who move around as they sleep, there are orthopaedic pillows, dented in the middle and higher at the sides. I have several, all now in a cupboard.  

Steven, who works in the bed department of Selfridges, told me that choosing a mattress is easy compared with finding the right pillow. This is supported (so to speak) by the vast quantity of advice that exists on the web, not just from bed- and pillow-selling companies but from medical and health sources. There's every pillow imaginable, from the ones made of memory foam that mould to your head to the ones that are meant to stop snoring—the latter with a "cervical roll that keeps airways open".    read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 27th 2012

In a blog post last week we noted how Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, was giving mothers-in-law a good name. An example of the opposite can be seen at the movies. Listen to the New Yorker on Vanessa Redgrave's performance as Volumnia in "Coriolanus": "Every mother-in-law joke you've ever heard, along with every Oedipal fantasy, is distilled into this formidable figure..."

Critics have called Vanessa Redgrave's performance "magnificent" and "one of the best of her career", yet she hasn't been nominated for either an Oscar or a Bafta. Volumnia's great scene occurs in Act 5 of the play. It's one of those moments (described in our current Notes on a Voice on Shakespeare) when the playwright pulls off a favourite trick: the 180-degree turn. Redgrave manages to persuade Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus to change his mind and not to sack the city of Rome, even though—if he draws back at this stage—it will probably lead to his own death. Late in the movie, Redgrave plays on Fiennes's mind with great delicacy and force.  read more »

In June 2012 a new airport will open in Berlin called “Willy Brandt”, after the former German Chancellor. The airport it replaces, Tegel “Otto Lilienthal”, will close, taking with it the German capital’s most obvious reminder of the father of aviation, its namesake. 

Two hours north-west of the site of the new airport is the 109-metre high Gollenberg hill in Stölln, a small village in Berlin’s neighbouring state of Brandenburg. It was from here that Lilienthal made his most successful gliding flights between 1893 and 1896, launching himself up to 250 metres from the top of the hill. His designs for gliders owed much to the lessons in aerodynamics he learned from studying birds, particularly Brandenburg’s storks, which he chronicled in his 1889 book, “Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation”. His so-called “Normal Glider”, which he built in 1894, even had flapping wings. When he died in a gliding crash in August 1896, Lilienthal left behind a legacy of experiments that helped inform the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the American brothers who made the first powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. “He was, without doubt, the greatest of the precursors,” Wilbur Wright said in 1912.   read more »

It’s very Nineties, this story of attractive, educated young people sharing a house and falling in love. Friends and lovers, lovers and friends, students and interns. It’s as much a staple of the middle-class youth experience in the West as gap year. The lucky end of middle-class, granted, but still widely identified with, and—as screen fiction—universally watched.

The on-off story of Prince William and Kate Middleton, set against delicious, isolated St Andrews and Anglesey, is very Richard Curtis. His friends, her friends, their friends, in all their twenty-something configurations. His nights out, their nights in, snow and roaring log fires. The absolute certainty that the prince has seen Miss Middleton in her nightie.

All this is a long way from the weirdness of previous royal matings, and from the Euro-royal style, whereby the princesses’ PT-instructor boyfriends get promoted to princes overnight and then dragged into that Hello! magazine Ruritanian fantasy of massed sash-wearing. If the couple’s back-story allows the rom-com audience to identify with them (and what a shrewd deal with the press it was that allowed the affair to develop in private), they’ve started well. But since, apparently, one in ten St Andrews students marry each other, there’s something we need to know: what happened to the other pair in that house? 

The royal wedding  Westminster Abbey, London, April 29th, and live on a news channel near you. 

~ PETER YORK

Nothing says you're a wholesome good-time girl like big ol' smile over a bowl of lettuce. "Women Laughing Alone with Salad" is the name of an otherwise unannotated array of stock photos of women having a fantastic time with their low-cal meals, curated for our amusement over at the Hairpin (thanks to Art Fag City for the link). The salads, the smiles and the realistic beauty all add up to an easy shorthand: these women are empowered yet unintimidating. They are taking matters of health and beauty into their own hands, and you can too. (For oddly compelling videos of unempowered people taking their sadness out on food, see here.)

For a bit of fun, compare the salad images with those that come up when one enters "women + chocolate" in the Google image directory. Oh you naughty girls!

Minimalism tends to be seen as something that takes over your life—all of nothing. But if you have a creaky old house, full of the flotsam of family life, all is not an option. Round us, in north London, many families manage one minimal room: the kitchen.

We’ve been in our house long enough for our children, who are 16 and 12, to have spent their lives there. On the material front, my wife and I are a classic mismatch—one hoarder, one sorter, no winner. To look at my stuff, you’d never guess I was an editor. The house is nice, but it is Victorian and narrow. The kitchen we inherited was poky, so you either crashed into each other or lugged everything into the playroom. The house seemed to be saying: you can have kids, or guests, not both. 

So we found an architect (young and cheap) and a builder (neither young nor cheap), to knock out a wall and extend the kitchen out the back. Our daughter was a bookworm, so the architect turned a fireplace into a reading booth. Our son loved painting Warhammer figures, so she put in a cupboard with sliding drawers for his tiny warriors.

We made a makeshift kitchen upstairs, fled the basement, and joined the tedious ranks of people who choose to get builders in and then complain about them. The work sailed over budget and took five months, just long enough for our son to grow out of Warhammer. But we got our slice of minimalism: white walls and cupboards, glass worktops, stone floor, lashings of space and light.  read more »

America’s east coast is peppered with architectural behemoths better suited to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” than the leafy habitat of the tufted Maine Coon cat. Parts of northern New Jersey look like industrial-age Manchester, and the towering girded glass cubes of I.M. Pei's Jacob K. Javits convention centre in New York City could house a fighter jet. It's hardly the place one would expect to glimpse the spotted belly of a sprawling Egyptian Mau.

But enthusiasts came in droves to this year’s Cat Fanciers Association-American Kennel Foundation (CFA-AFK) Meet the Breeds cat and dog show at the Javits Centre. For two days beneath the cyberpunk ceiling, vendors, visitors and breeders of the 41 cat and 160 dog breeds on view created a community that was downright cosy.

It had to be the outfits. To promote breed awareness (not unlike brand awareness), participants donned costumes and decorated booths to match their pampered pets’ pedigrees. Norwegian forest cats inspired Viking ships and horned helmets; Russian Blues demanded the lavish robes and powdered wigs of Imperial Russia.  read more »

It's February, which means you have probably been negotiating your sweater collection for months now. Mary Fellowes offers some do's and don'ts:

Soft and fluid women’s cardigans and sweaters contrast well with a skinny patent-leather belt. Wear them long and unbuttoned, and don’t rule out borrowing your partner’s/father’s/brother’s rejects—Miuccia Prada pioneered this look years ago and it is still a classic.

Tight sleeves don’t flatter women’s upper arms, unless they are a size 10 or less; buying a size bigger also avoids bra outlines showing across your back.

Scooped or V-necks are best for more voluptuous figures, as their proportions balance out the body’s curves; puffed sleeves have the same effect. And asymmetric knitwear is often more flattering than more conventional shapes, as it breaks up the lines of the body.

Round-necked sweaters are the most flexible choice for men because of the symmetry of their outline; a V-neck sweater can easily be wrong if it is too tight (which looks camp) or too baggy (which looks studenty). In either case, avoid wearing shirts with large collars or prints with knitwear—the smaller and neater the better.

Men’s cardigans can be surprisingly stylish. Wear one unbuttoned over a narrow shirt (but perhaps leave the horn-rim glasses at home).  read more »

Among the reasons I have to feel grateful that I did not come of age in the 1970s, the "buttered bun" and the "grope suit" rank high on the list. Both of these terms are explained in the first edition of the "Joy of Sex", published in 1972 by Dr Alex Comfort, an English gerontologist who, according to a piece in today's New York Times, "practised his own joy of sex by ditching his wife and moving to a free love commune in California." His book, with its "hairy man" illustrations and titter-provoking subject matter, was a huge success, with 343 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and on night-tables everywhere.  read more »