When companies face financial hardship, they are often tempted to merge, splitting their costs and combining their customers. Couples do the opposite. The weight of unpaid bills and overdue loans can break a relationship: the unspoken vow that haunts...

The study of laughter has entered mainstream psychology. Anthony Gottlieb reads the reports--and a new book on the history of jokes--and finds much to chuckle over ...

Ah, pop-culture canons, how you’ve grown! In the1970s cinema scholars had the Sight & Sound polls, rock critics had the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. By the 1980s, it seemed that every periodical had its end-of-year lists for not just film and music...

In a narrow space on Manhattan's Upper East side, Hauser & Wirth's new New York outpost seems ready to assert itself. The contemporary art gallery has just unveiled "White Snow", a new show of work by Paul McCarthy, a controversial American artist. On...

Before the heyday of the first-person shooter, gaming graphics typically involved two dimensions. Think of the original "Super Mario Brothers": Mario could move left, right or on top of an enemy, but he couldn't pass behind or in front of one. Once...

At Cambridge over the summer, many students were taking pills to help their concentration. Ed Cumming was among them ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009 One evening this summer, in our final term at Cambridge, my roommate Katie threw a...

When "Araya" made its debut at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, the fictionalised documentary stunned critics with its sober beauty. The film chronicles the lives of three families working in Araya, Venezuela's barren salt marshes, where locals endure a...