On April 15th 2012 join Intelligent Life, BMW and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts at The Savoy,  London for an exploration of human excellence.

What qualities do world-leading athletes share with a world-leading car?

Answer: world-class technology and innovation.

There are exceptional athletes—and there are Olympic and Paralympic gold medal winners. Making the step up from nation’s best to world’s best is a prime example of the law of diminishing returns. Reaching the highest pinnacles of athletic excellence demands a truly fearsome level of commitment.

Endless training is no longer enough: ultimate success depends on harnessing, honing and optimising an athlete’s energy and technique. That can only happen through the intensive application of expertise—and, increasingly, technology.

Electronic body-mapping helps calisthenics coaches to make minute changes to a discus thrower’s stance. Head-up display goggles give sailors the ability to assimilate data while performing other tasks. Bonded alloys add small but critically important degrees of power and flexibility to prosthetics.

Such individual changes may seem small and insignificant, but their cumulative effect is the differentiator between defeat and victory. Reducing track event times by milliseconds. Increasing field event distances by millimetres.

These are the differences between silver and gold.

The law of diminishing returns also applies in the automotive world. Conflicts will always exist: strength versus lightness, performance versus efficiency, functionality versus form. For BMW, the resolution of these classical conflicts is achieved by constantly evolving and refining its definition of excellence.

Small changes. Big impact.

In the new 3 Series BMW has turned this concept into reality.  read more »

The Reinvention of Luxury

Things have moved on since the ‘greed is good’ heyday of the 1980s. Today’s modern symbols of wealth have diminished in favour of the luxury ‘experience’: boosted in part de to the growth of experiential marketing strategies, where what you feel when using a product transcends the existence and price of the product itself.

This trend predates the global financial crisis: according to Bloomberg News, luxury goods purchases dropped 21% for each affluent consumer in the third quarter of 2007,while spending on buying and renting experiences gained 11%, according to Unity Marketing, a research firm in the US. Transumerism: the flight to experience The trend toward the purchase of an experience rather than a distinct product has been called Transumerism (trendspotting.com), and is driven by the shift in sources of wealth.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of wealthy individuals in Britain: 15 years ago, 75% of the Sunday Times Rich List had inherited their wealth and 25% were self-made. Today that ratio is reversed. This gives rise to a new power base of high net worth individual – one who is younger, typically (but not necessarily) self-made and socially conscious (Philanthropy UK).  read more »

FUENTES ON TIME AND SPACE

The great Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes has died aged 83. Two years ago, he wrote this piece for our series Authors on Museums. “Museums, like lovers," he said, "can lose their charms”, but when he returned to an old haunt in Xalapa, Mexico, he found he was smitten all over again...

SCENES FROM A LIFE

From a first visit to the Little Theatre, Bolton, to the role of chief theatre critic on the Times and beyond, few people have seen as many plays as Irving Wardle. In this memoir, he distils what he has learnt...

MAN OF MANY PARTS

Notes on a Voice: this year marks Charles Dickens's 200th anniversary. Emma Hogan tunes into a mind teeming with other people's thoughts...

RESCUING "ALIEN"

This Season: Nicholas Barber selects "Prometheus", Ridley Scott's bid to save the "Alien" franchise from its sequels... 

THE SHAPES WE'RE IN

Are you a leggy Edwardian? Or a nip-waisted New Look? With help from four actresses, Isabel Lloyd matches bodies to decades...

BED AND ABOARD

Quarter Finalists: Claire Wrathall straddles land and sea in five hotels that operate their own boats...

~ Posted by Tom Shone, May 8th 2012

Critics have been busy naming the various influences that have been stirred into the pot of "Girls", Lena Dunham’s bruised, brazen new comedy for HBO about the growing pains of a group of Williamsburg Millennials. In New York magazine, Emily Nussbaum compared Dunham’s candour to that of the stand-up comedian Louie CK: “They’re Mr Magoos of the dating world, stumbling into mortification, then exploiting it as material.” In Vulture Matt Zoller Seitz found the show “precise and aesthetically modest, like a female-centric cousin of movies by Whit Stillman...and late-seventies Woody Allen.” Halle Kiefer in Rolling Stone opted for "Seinfeld", while the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley went for "Sex and the City".

I would like to propose another antecedent: Charles M. Schulz. Where else have we encountered Dunham’s preoccupation with ill-matched couples, self-abasing love and self-basting humiliations than in "Peanuts"? Admittedly, Charlie Brown’s love for Little Red-haired Girl never got him as far as an actual date (“You know why that little red-haired girl never notices me? Because I’m nothing! How can she see someone who’s nothing!”) whereas Dunham’s Hannah achieves regular, monkeyish intercourse with an artsy Prospect Heights carpenter who likes to take her from behind on his dirty sofa. But the look on Dunham’s face as he does so, squished into the sofa so that she almost seems to be turning out to face the viewer, seems to cry out for a fluffy thought balloon above her head containing the words “Good grief”. Or better yet: *sigh*.  read more »

THE VOICE IS THE BEST

The Big Question: Edward Carr on the one musical instrument we all share...

NON COGITO, ERGO SUM

Sometimes thinking is a bad idea. Ian Leslie draws on Dylan, Djokovic and academic research to put the case for unthinking...

94 ELEMENTS COME TO LIFE

This Season: Samantha Weinberg's pick of the science events is "94 Elements", a series of short films which takes us out of the chemistry lab and into the real world... 

SOME LIKE IT VERY HOT

For years it was thought that life couldn’t exist below a certain depth or above a certain heat. Now those limits turn out not to be limits after all. Bryan Appleyard looks into extremophiles...

VERY AMERICAN BRITS

At the Cinema: Tom Shone details the latest qualities for a superhero—a super-agent, an accent coach and a British passport...

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 30th 2012

One more reason for watching the compelling Scandi noir series "The Bridge", now showing on Saturday nights on BBC4, is the comment thread it sets off in the Guardian. After the episode finishes at 11pm, the Guardian's TV editor posts her engagingly frank response and then the first of hundreds of comments appears. This weekend there were 700 in a day and a half, and some are remarkably alert to tiny plot details. The story itself may be full of callous murders (Saturday night's count: 10 homeless people are poisoned, one kidnapped victim bleeds to death, and one policeman is shot), but in the speedy exchange of views that follows on the thread, the crime that shocks the most is saying something that gives the plot away. Or, in fact, gives nearly any plot away.

There is a genuine risk of this. "The Bridge" has already aired in Sweden and Denmark, and Swedes and Danes join the thread to explain local details, such as how many minutes' walk it is from the blonde detective's home to the newspaper office, whether you can walk across the Öresund Bridge that connects Copenhagen to Malmö, and why it is the detective Martin doesn't pull the bedroom curtains at night (Swedes like privacy, someone explains, but they like sunlight even more). One heedless remark could spoil the whole series.  read more »

WHICH IS THE BEST MUSICAL INSTRUMENT?

The Big Question: There are 14 or 15 musical instruments in an orchestra, three or four in most rock bands. But which is the king? Richard Morrison launches our debate...

THE PIANO IS THE BEST

The Big Question: the composer Michael Berkeley argues that no other instrument is quite like the piano, which can conjure up sounds from birdsong to a sunken cathedral...

FACEBOOK: LIKE?

The chances are, you have a Facebook profile yourself: by July, a billion people will have one. But have you thought about what it’s doing to real life? Robert Lane Greene reports, starting with a visit to Facebook’s offices...

THE GUITAR IS THE BEST

The Big Question: Laura Barton argues that the reach of its six strings makes the guitar more articulate than any other instrument...

BANANA SKINS AND BILLIONAIRES

Lawrence Booth reflects on his trials as a long-time fan of Manchester City, who looked set to triumph this season, but now look more likely to choke...

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 17th 2012

There are eight works of art that have sold at auction houses for more than $80m and the list is a surprising one. Only one artist makes the list more than once and that's Picasso, and he gets in three times. Most people would probably guess that there's a Monet and a van Gogh in there and they'd be right. The other three are more eclectic: a Giacometti, a Klimt and a Francis Bacon. There may be other works of art—such as Cezanne's "The Card Players"—which went for more than $80m, but they were sold privately and the price remains a secret. 

On May 2nd, a work will be auctioned at Sotheby's in New York which has a good chance of joining that select group of eight. Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is one of the most widely reproduced images in art. It exists in four versions: two pastels and two paintings. One painting is in the National Gallery in Oslo, and one painting and one pastel in the Munch Museum in Oslo. The other pastel belongs to Petter Olsen, a member of the Norwegian shipping family, whose father was a neighbour and patron of Munch's. After the sale on May 2nd, the picture may disappear into a private collection. It's this version of "The Scream" that has been on view in London (for one more day only) and more than 4,000 people have gone to see it. After that, it travels to New York, where it will also be on view till the sale.  read more »

FROM THE EDITOR

LETTERS

THIS SEASON

The people making waves in the arts and science over the next two months, from Raphael at the Prado and the Louvre to the opera director David McVicar at Covent Garden and Ridley Scott in the cinema

INTELLIGENCE

THINKING... can be a bad idea. Ian Leslie explains why

A GAME, A GADGET AND AN APP
Tom Standage starts taking the phablets

FOOD
The Dads’ Club: eating out as male therapy

THE WINE-LIST INSPECTOR
Where pours reign: Tim Atkin in Burgundy 

STOVE NOTES
Simon Hopkinson on the chemistry of a Pavlova

SPORT
Happy ending? Lawrence Booth on supporting Man City
Patrick Barclay on race in football: why mention it? 

THE MUSIC OF SCIENCEOliver Morton on a gizmo Turing would have liked 

STYLE 

FASHION
What decade is your body? Isabel Lloyd asks five actresses

THE SCEPTICAL SHOPPER
Harrods – now entering a different world

THE LINE OF BEAUTY
Invisible ink: what the white shirt has to say

APPLIED FASHION
Rebecca Willis on shopping with your teenager

MAN IN A SUIT
A crisp look for a stew entrepreneur 

FEATURES 

SOME LIKE IT VERY HOT
Creatures that thrive in extreme heat, or live deep under the seabed, have become an exciting field of science. By Bryan Appleyard  read more »

In the fifth in our series of Big Questions, we invited five writers to decide which musical instrument they think is the best. Richard Morrison, the chief music critic at the Times, introduced the debate. While a standard orchestra has 14 or 15 instruments, the next edition of the "New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments" will list 20,000. Morrison wrote that "the biggest differences come in the social functions they fulfil", and that "the same instrument can fulfil totally different roles in different cultures or ages". So how do you decide between them?

Over the next couple of weeks we will be publishing the arguments of our five other contributors online. But voting starts now. Perhaps you will agree with the composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley, who went for the piano, an instrument that "opens up the whole world of music because, uniquely, it can translate into sound the full range of harmony of orchestral and choral scores." Laura Barton voted for the "extraordinary articulacy" of the guitar, while Richard Williams chose the "exultant" sound of the Hammond organ. Jasper Rees looked to the instrument he learnt as a child, the French horn, for the "profound, all but prelapsarian beauty of the sound". Finally Edward Carr argued for the instrument we all share, the voice.

Have your say by voting in the poll below. Or if you're inspired by the violin or the viola, the sitar or the sousaphone, please tell us why.