Smarter Movie
Margin Call
Myriad Pictures
If the
Wall Street sequel was a guilty pleasure,
Margin Call is its intellectual corollary. Premiering at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the indie financial thriller stars Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons as employees of an investment bank during the firm's final 24 hours as it imploded—along with the world economy—in a puff of derivatives. The film is a raucous history lesson, and made the top 10 of 2010's Black List, an annual compendium of the best unproduced screenplays, compiled by Overbrook Entertainment exec Franklin Leonard.
Smarter Reading
Zero-Sum Future by Gideon Rachman
Why the West Rules—for Now by Ian Morris
Each day brings new stories of trade deficits, natural disasters, and looming conflict. How to make sense of it all? Two new books,
Gideon Rachman's
Zero-Sum Future and
Ian Morris'
Why the West Rules— for Now, give you an eagle-eye view of the trends and macro movements governing the world. Of course, the news isn't all good—Rachman says we're in for a major economic and political struggle between the U.S. and China while Europe founders. Morris looks back to explain how the West dominated for so long, but his sharp analysis will teach you as much about the present. You may not feel relieved, but at least you'll better understand the source of your anxiety.
Smarter App
Intelligent Life
The Economist's quarterly lifestyle and culture magazine, Intelligent Life, just got smarter: You can now get the
iPad edition (free for the moment) of the London-based glossy, previously only available by subscription in the U.S. Expanding its parent magazine's purview to arts, travel, food, sports, and fashion, it's something of an undiscovered gem in this country. The
inaugural iPad edition includes a cover story about actor Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut, a look at the curious trend of turning nouns into verbs, and a gorgeous photo essay about surfing in Sweden.
Smarter Dressing
Wear Red
AP Photo
Women are more attracted to men wearing red than to men wearing other colors, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. "Red is an aphrodisiac for women," said the study's lead author, University of Rochester psychology professor Andrew Elliot. "They view a guy in red as high in status." Women also might want to invest in a scarlet number: Elliot found that men want to spend the most money on red-clad ladies.
Smarter College Saving
The Net Price Calculator
A cool online tool makes it easier than ever for families to estimate the costs of college—and make smart choices about where to apply.
The Net Price Calculator, created by The College Board, a national academic nonprofit, assesses a student's eligibility for financial aid at specific schools based on their individual circumstances—and then offers a ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to attend for a year, including everything from textbooks to food. Students can input their details even before they apply to comparison shop. The federal government has mandated that the calculator be installed on most college websites by the end of this year.
Smarter Electronics
PlayStation 3
This videogame console is a smart buy even for those with no interest in Grand Theft Auto IV. The $300 game system consolidates nearly every conceivable form of entertainment into a single unit: a videogame system, Blu-ray DVD player, Netflix streamer, karaoke machine, and virtual fitness coach. Its built-in WiFi eliminates the need for plugs and cords, and its true stereoscopic 3-D videogames create livelier-than-life effects.
Smarter Driving
Ditch Your GPS
Mark Humphrey / AP Photo
It's been a while since road trips involved hard-to-fold maps and old-fashioned guesswork, but new research indicates that embracing your own natural navigation skills could benefit your brain. University College London researchers found that London taxi drivers have enlarged posterior hippocampi, and concluded that spatial navigation and mental mapmaking bulked them up. "The hippocampus is a phylogenetically old part of the brain, with an intrinsic circuitry that may have evolved to deal with navigation," reads the report. Hippocampal atrophy has been linked to Alzheimer's disease.
Smarter Theater
Arcadia
Coming to Broadway in the spring of 2011, Tom Stoppard's 1993 masterwork
Arcadia cross-cuts deftly between the realms of 19th-century teen (and amateur chaos theorist) Thomasina Coverly and present-day scholar Hannah Jarvis, who studies hermits. Romanticism, determinism, entropy, mathematical biology, Newtonian geometry, Fermat's Last Theorem, and a curiously elusive Lord Byron figure into the hyper-intellectual interplay between order and randomness, nature and machinery, present and past.
Smarter Getting Around
The Purpose-Driven Walk
Maybe that parking space half a mile from the mall's entrance is a blessing in disguise. A study published this year in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience provided evidence that aerobic fitness can keep aging brains healthy. "Even modest amounts of walking, 40 minutes three times a week, can engender substantial improvements in memory, decision-making, and other cognitive processes," said the study's lead author, University of Illinois psychology professor Art Kramer. His research showed that walking increases the connectivity between regions of the brain that perform executive, creative, and other crucial functions.
Smarter Note-Taking
Livescribe Smartpens
This
cigar-shaped smartpen is changing how we chronicle our lives. As you write, the pen records everything you hear—then later, when you tap the pen on a particular note on your pad, it replays the audio from that exact moment in the recording. The pens hold promise for students, both freeing them to listen more intently during class and enabling them to carry entire lectures home with them.
Smarter Art
Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914
MoMA
Pablo Picasso may be one of the world's best-known artists, but his three-dimensional work has seen relatively little glory—until now. Inspired by his gift of two multimedia guitar sculptures to the Museum of Modern Art, one made of paper and the other of sheet metal, the museum will be showcasing around 70 of the artist's "closely connected collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs," all
created in the years right before World War I.The exhibit sheds new light on Picasso's evolution—and a new dimension (pardon the pun) to your understanding of modern art. See it from February 13 to June 6 in New York City.
Smarter Weight Loss
Imagine Junk Food
ImageStock
Think about chocolate and your mouth starts watering. Think about it dozens of times in a row, however, and it's suddenly less appealing. That's the idea behind a study recently published in the journal Science. The researchers found that a group of subjects who had just imagined eating 30 M&Ms was less likely to then eat the real candy when presented with a bowl of it. It's called habituation—a decreased response to a stimulus after repeated exposure—and it's the same reason you feel rich right after you get a raise, but before long, hardly notice the extra money anymore.
Smarter DVD
Sins of My Father
America's drug war stretches far beyond the U.S. border. Learn about a major player in it with Nicolas Entel's riveting documentary
Sins of My Father.The story of the late Pablo Escobar, former head of the Medellín drug cartel, is told from the perspective of his son, as well as the sons of two of the notorious drug lord's most high-profile victims: Colombia's former justice minister and its 1989 anti-cartel presidential candidate. The DVD hits shelves January 18.
Smarter Shopping
Foursquare
What you sacrifice in privacy, you make up for in discounts. Join Foursquare, the GPS-based social-networking site that alerts your friends to your location whenever you "
check in" using a smartphone. The popular site is forging growing partnerships with businesses: Just for "checking in" at a particular shop you can receive coupons to that retailer instantly on your phone. Loyal customers are often granted special rewards. Similar sites, including Facebook Places, are also beginning to offer financial incentives.
Smarter Blog
Rough Type by Nicholas G. Carr
For thought-provoking dispatches on personal tech, check out Nicholas G. Carr's blog,
Rough Type. The bestselling author of
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, and most recently,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, has established himself as a trusted, if controversial, interpreter of the Information Era. Recent posts include a look at why interactive storytelling will always fail, and Amazon's role as modern-day printing press in light of its fraught relationship with WikiLeaks. Read it regularly, and rethink your daily habits.
Smarter Religion
Patheos
Patheos.com is a religion website even an atheist could love. On its homepage, you'll
find a tool that lets you compare up to three religions or even religious sects. Plug in a couple of groups you're curious about, and you get a side-by-side breakdown of the dates the groups were founded, who the founders were, and how followers are adapting to the modern world. Dig a little deeper and you'll find portals devoted to each religious group that are packed with extended reading, book reviews, and serious commentary about news, politics and religious issues. Patheos channels regularly hold online symposiums on subjects like the
future of Catholicism and the
intersection of Christianity and patriotism.
Smarter TV
American Masters
The PBS documentary series may be entering its 25th season, but
American Masters is no less or relevant than when it launched. Helmed by creator and executive producer Susan Lacy, hailed as a gifted auteur, each film offers an intimate, original portrait of the artists who have shaped our culture, from John Lennon to Jeff Bridges, both profiled this season. The program's commitment to including little-seen archival footage is a particular highlight.
Smarter Partying
Rent the Runway
Whether you're on the wedding circuit or running the holiday party gauntlet, for women, buying new cocktail and evening dresses for every individual occasion adds up. (And in our era of instant Facebook "publicity," it's tougher to get away with recycling last season's frock again and again.) Enter
Rent the Runway, an innovative online service in which women across the country can borrow designer dresses, Netflix-style, at recession-friendly prices. Rental prices start at $50, and they even ship two sizes of your chosen item to make sure you get just the right fit.
