The Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was back at it again this week, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew – or George W. Bush's last convention where GOP operatives passed out "Purple Heart Band-Aids" to mock John Kerry's war wounds. After a slow start because of Hurricane Gustav, the convention in St. Paul, Minn., has turned into an anti-Obama hate-fest with a nearly all-white gathering laughing at and mocking the nation's first African-American presidential nominee of a major party.

NEAL ASCHERSON | September 4th 2008
AlbySpace/flickr
An expert on eastern Europe, Neal Ascherson mourns the delicious pleasure of smoking at the cinema in the afternoon ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI | September 3rd
Harry Malt
We continue with our series on freedoms lost and gained, 60 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

A HEADY ANNIVERSARY | September 2nd 2008
Harry Malt
Sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, liberties are being taken with your liberties. Intelligent Life magazine asks 11 people which freedom lost, and gained, means the most to them. We start with Richard Dawkins ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

INTELLIGENT LIFE ON NEWSSTANDS | September 2nd 2008
OUR LATEST COVER STAR: PRINCE CHARLES

On the cover of the new Intelligent Life magazine is the Prince of Wales, who is about to turn 60.

"Whatever else you may say about Prince Charles," says the editor of the magazine, Tim de Lisle, "he leads an intelligent life." The cover story, by the novelist and Economist writer J.M. Ledgard, looks at Charles the working man, at his causes and hobbyhorses and what he has done with the unique set of cards he has been dealt, as the only Prince of Wales of the media age. Of his wives, there is barely a mention. The cover image shows Charles as a young man, expressing the fact that the piece comes at him afresh.

SLEEPLESS IN ST PAUL | September 1st

steveb_ohio/flickr
Exhausted from one convention and now headlong into another, The Economist's international correspondent is grateful for what can't be predicted in the coming week ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

In the autumn of 1998, when Karl Rove was contriving to make Governor George W. Bush President and to build a lasting Republican majority, he came upon “The Catholic Voter Project,” a study of voting behavior in national elections since the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960. Catholics make up more . . .

NOTES ON AN EXUBERANT POET | August 31st 2008
National Archives

There was a time when Ryan Ruby would've taken a punch for broody, gloomy T.S. Eliot. But years in the thrum of New York City have encouraged a taste for something more jazzy and irreverent ...  

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years old, and of its author, George W. Bush. He . . .

A COLLECTOR WINNOWS AND SHARPENS | August 30th 2008

Sotheby's
How Jeffrey E. Horvitz's magnificent collection of drawings made him a custodian of "part of the cultural patrimony of the world" ...

From ECONOMIST.COM