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A recent article in the New York Times explored a trend guaranteed to disconcert freelancers and professional loiterers: the practice of banning laptops in coffee shops (something our colleagues at Babbage have considered as well). "By doing away with the comfy seats, roomy tables and working outlets that many customers now seem to believe are included in the price of a macchiato," observed the article's author, Oliver Strand, "the new coffee bars challenge the archetypal American cafe."

While the practice of tossing back an espresso at a counter does have a certain Continental appeal, the archetypal American cafe—whatever that is—couldn't have accounted for laptops. “Tables create a feeling of territorialism,” explained one coffee-shop owner quoted in the article. Another claimed to find it annoying when customers complained about the WiFi at his joint. New Yorkers seeking a clean, well-lighted place to park their computers are finding fewer and fewer options to satisfy their needs.  read more »

Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”, Iranians jam to Django Reinhardt, and Indonesian teenagers favour the post-punk stylings of British cult classic Wire. Who knew? Richard Poplak, for one. Poplak is the author of “The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World”, a tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture, from cheesy reality television to Metallica. The chapters are organised by country—Libya, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, etc—with each section prefaced by religious statistics and venerated local pop-culture icons. The result is packed with surprises, five of which More Intelligent Life has chosen to highlight.

On heavy metal:

Egyptian heavy-metal fans call themselves Metaliens and, like America’s native metalheads, they prefer long hair and black T-shirts. On January 22nd 1997, Egyptian police conducted a series of raids on the homes of Metaliens, confiscating metal posters, CDs and instruments, interrogating about 100 suspects (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?” “Do you spit on graves?”) and jailing many of them for weeks. “Metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world,” Poplak points out, citing the massive Dubai Desert Rock Festival.

On video games as propaganda:  read more »

Though history tells us that Islam and Christianity were both borne out of a small sliver of the middle east, the world's largest population of Muslims today is in Indonesia. In her new book, "The Tenth Parallel", Eliza Griswold, an award-winning journalist and poet, turns her eye towards Indonesia, as well as Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Malaysia and the Philippines, countries where the war between Islam and Christianity is being waged in full force. These countries all lie along the titular tenth parallel, a latitudinal line 700 miles north of the equator. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along this line, as well as 60% of the world's 2 billion Christians.

Griswold spent seven years travelling through the war-torn cities, drought-ravaged fields and the near-empty deserts between the tenth parallel and the equator, encountering poverty, inequality and violent conflict at nearly every turn (indeed, from what she recounts, it seems a miracle she lived to tell the tale). The book is a compilation of painstaking interviews as she parsed, person by person, the conflicts over land, resources and souls. The daughter of a prominent liberal Episcopalian Bishop, Griswold brings to her story a remarkable humility and a deep understanding of the power of faith. Despite the audaciousness of her exploits, Griswold is careful to train the lens of her book on the amazing people she meets along the way. Ultimately, each country presents its own set of tangled problems and predicaments, with no easy answers.  read more »

Last year, in a basement club in East London, California's Flying Lotus showed local dubstep fans how elastic the electronic music genre can be. As Flying Lotus subverted its two-step, dub and breakbeat elements with strange space-like noises, abrupt beat shifts and subtle, meditative melodies and samples, the crowd didn't always know how to react.

Back in London recently, this time with Infinity, his touring six-piece band, Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, performed aggressively expansive interpretations of songs from his 2010 album "Cosmogramma". This so-called "space opera" of an album has been described by critics as brilliant but aimless, unique but complicated, scene-defining but hyperactive. These seemingly contradictory descriptions carry some weight: "Cosmogramma" is indeed ambitious and somewhat inaccessible.

Performed with a roster of musicians including Ravi Coltrane (Ellison's cousin, who was signed by Blue Note Records this year), the show in London could be described in similar terms. Bass solos from Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner occasionally veered into fast and slappy territory. Once or twice, Gerry Gibbs's live drumming simplified some of the album's more interesting electronic beats in a way that robbed some songs of their original, glitchy flow. Moments could have passed for jam-band material, which thrilled some audience members and provoked raised eyebrows among others.  read more »

The Economist has created an elegant tribute to New Orleans—its devastation following Hurricane Katrina, its struggle now with the oil spill and its unique spirit, which remains strong despite these grand-scale catastrophes.

In light of this five-year anniversary, now would be a good time to see "Trouble the Water", a remarkable documentary of the flooding that came out in 2008.

IF YOU happen to be in New York some time during the next three weeks, and you happen to have a penchant for the kind of theatre that comes on with the simplicity of a shaker chair, but then takes this chair and wallops you in the gut with it, then please go see "Our Town" at the Barrow Street Theatre. It is for good reason that this acclaimed off-Broadway production, directed with bracing minimalism by David Cromer (who returns to the role of the Stage Manager for the final weeks; pictured), has become the longest-running version of Thornton Wilder's classic. By stripping away the period costumes of this 72-year-old play, and setting it on a bare stage in the round, Mr Cromer has heightened its timelessness.  read more »

My colleague over at Johnson raises an amusing point on the nature of film titles in foreign languages—one that lends itself quite readily to some lazy, armchair anthropology (ie, dinner-party trivia):

Puns, to be fair, are usually impossible to translate faithfully. But even simple titles sometimes undergo big changes—especially, it seems, in China, where "Free Willy" is known as “A very powerful whale runs to heaven”. ("Boogie Nights", wonderfully, is “His great device makes him famous”.)...

Often, though, one has no idea that the title one knows and loves has been dreamed up by a translator. When I arrived in Mexico I wanted something easy to practice my Spanish, so I went looking for “La chica con el tatuaje del dragón”, as I assumed Stieg Larsson’s thriller might be known. It isn’t: the title here is “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” (“The men who didn’t love women”).

What a rubbish name, I thought: why couldn’t Mexicans be given a direct translation? In fact, it’s English-speakers who have been duped: the original, in Swedish, is simply “Men who hate women”. (“It was considered too scary for foreign audiences, while just hitting the politically-correct spot in Sweden,” reckons my neighbourhood Swede.)

One can't help but speculate how poorly a book called "Men who hate women" would've done at American airports. Such a title is a clear liability when trying to get lucky while looking literary at an airport bar.  read more »

"Step right up for your photo in Ancient Egypt," an usher says, positioning visitors in front of a green screen at the Discovery Times Square Exposition. Snap. We receive a ticket for the photo, available in the gift shop for a fee.

This is a fair introduction to a massive new exhibition about Tutankhamun at the heart of Times Square. "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" assembles possessions from the young king's tomb alongside artefacts relating to his family and contemporaries. The show, which opened in April and will run to January 2011, mingles Disneyland theatrics with a flood of beautifully presented artefacts and prudently edited information. Omar Sharif, an Arab Egyptian Hollywood star, narrates the introductory video.

Children, naturally, are everywhere. "Did they actually dig this stuff UP?" one boy exclaimed on a recent weekday, hopping from relic to relic. "Stop asking questions and read," his mother replied.  read more »

“World Enough” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maureen McLane’s second poetry collection, is a vacation unto itself. Her poems immerse readers in languid summer nights in the country and Parisian days. It is a treatise of sorts on the idea of "place": the mental, physical, visual and  emotional spaces we inhabit.

The forms of McLane's poems travel too; some are modelled after British romantic ballads, others the French rondeau, a few take inspiration from the haiku and some come in free verse. This exploration, sometimes playful, sometimes academic, grants these poems lives of their own.

McLane is a professor of English at New York University, a frequent essayist and winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Nona Nalakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In keeping with the travel theme, Maureen McLane answered More Intelligent Life's questions about criticism, form and the visual aspects of writing from “a remote region of the American north-east”.

More Intelligent Life: "World Enough" seems to encompass many worlds, emotional, temporal, natural. Why the title, "World Enough"?

Maureen McLane: The phrase “world enough” surfaced more or less organically in my poem, “Passage I":

I thought I had all the time
and world enough to discover what I should
when it was over

The phrase itself comes from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”—

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.  read more »

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Picasso had the Midas touch and knew it. He also knew it meant not only riches but trouble. “If the things I really love—water, the sun, love—could be bought, I’d have been ruined long ago,” he once said.

Even from the grave he still has it. In May his painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter sold for more than $106m—the highest price ever for an auctioned art work. Midas is still making trouble. All the carrying on about Picasso's colossal prices feeds the belief that everything he touched reveals his genius. As a result, it gets harder and harder to look at one of his works and actually see it.

In early summer when I heard that “Picasso: the Mediterranean Years (1945—1962)” was about to open, I decided to skip it. I didn’t feel like trekking across London to King’s Cross to see a parade of glittering “masterpieces” worth multiple millions. Yes, his biographer, John Richardson, was curating and the site was the glamorous Gagosian gallery. But, no, I’d had enough. Fortunately, my husband, who is not a cheerleader by temperament, or even the artist’s greatest fan, did go and kept asking, “Have you seen the Picasso yet?” This week I finally went. If you are within striking distance, don’t miss it. The show, on until August 28th, is a joy.  read more »