~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, March 14th 2013
Today we launch The Photo Album, a special tablet edition of Intelligent Life, bringing together 75 of the best pictures from our first 25 issues. Most magazines are made up of words and pictures, yet it's strangely rare to find the two treated as equals. The glossies hurl money and energy into the pictures, while the more cerebral titles turn out dense grey pages as if it was still 1955. The newsstand ends up being rather like a bad party, with lots of models drifting around with nothing to say, and a few intellectuals standing in a corner in ill-fitting jackets, arguing with each other. Which makes it less fun for the real guests—the readers.
In 2007 Intelligent Life, under its then editor Edward Carr, came along and broke this mould. From the start, it was both beautiful and thoughtful, with a photo essay in every issue. The cover is always a portrait, for reasons both internal (we make a point of running long-form profiles) and external (our nearest neighbours on the shelves tend to go with impersonal forces and illustrations). The palette is subtle, because so many mainstream covers lean towards the lurid. The background is darkish, because our logo is white. Practical considerations meet creative preferences, and the consequence is a visual style that rings out as clearly as a tone of voice.
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~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, February 15th 2013
In journalism, the great reporter Phillip Knightley likes to say, no "no" is ever final. Our latest cover is a case in point. On landing in this seat five years ago, I had a few cover targets, led by Gustavo Dudamel (right), the conductor whose concerts are so exciting that he seems to be conducting electricity.
Dudamel was in his first flush of fame and the world had woken up to the success of El Sistema, the education programme that produced him and over which he now presides. He was hot, we were new, and the answer from his New York PR was "no". We tried again and then gave up (Knightley would not have approved), until one day last September an e-mail arrived from the broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill.
She hadn’t written for us, but her diverse CV—acting, writing a novel, playing the violin—included an internship on The Economist. She had got to know Dudamel through her work as a presenter and thought she could get access for a long-form profile of the kind we had run on Ralph Fiennes and Sergei Polunin. "I do think", she wrote, "this piece deserves the space and tone only offered by Intelligent Life." It was already becoming clear why her various careers were flourishing.
read more »COMMENTS: Comments | ADD NEW COMMENTClassical MusicCLASSICAL MUSICIntelligent LifeMarch/April 2013Music
~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 2nd 2012
From Boxing Day to New Year's Day, we have been republishing on the homepage the top 12 most-read articles from the last year. It's been a representative mix: short and long pieces, words and pictures, ideas and reporting, people and places—even a short blogpost. read more »COMMENTS: Comments | ADD NEW COMMENTintelligent lifeIntelligent Life
~ Posted by Kassia St Clair, July 4th 2012
It's not often that the cover of a culture and lifestyle magazine hinges on the outcome of a fight between two women in northern China. Especially when neither woman is being considered for the cover. But that is what happened with Intelligent Life's latest issue. read more »COMMENTS: Comments | ADD NEW COMMENTboxingIntelligent LifemagazinesolympicsSport
~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 25th 2012
If you download the new iPad edition of our May/June issue, and flick through Tim Flach's remarkable photo essay of animals, you can enjoy a feature that isn't available to readers of the magazine. Switch between landscape and portrait modes, and you'll see some of Flach's portraits—of the great grey owl, orangutan, capuchin monkey, giant panda, gorilla and others—in even greater detail. The iPad edition gives you a choice of perspective. read more »COMMENTS: Comments | ADD NEW COMMENTIntelligent LifeiPadISSUES & IDEAS
