Rosi Braidotti is a philosopher and feminist. Along her philosophical path, this Italian-Australian woman passed through some of the fundamental stages of contemporary feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir, but then went down her own road. It is a road that is somewhat distant from known accounts of the theory of gender (such as those by Judith Butler) and the criticism of identity fixations. Her voice therefore sounds rather unconventional, as we can see in this interview.

Bernardo Carvalho, a writer from Rio de Janeiro, ventures into the city of São Paulo and studies its less obvious side. Sometimes, he examines it through the strong lenses of a Lévi-Strauss; at others he sketches a psychological portrait of it on the basis of certain symptoms.

After decades of uneasy silence, the past year or so has thrown up a series of unconnected episodes that feed into an ongoing debate about racism and the colonial legacy: speaking from a former slaving station (in Senegal), the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, felt it was relevant to point to the abolition of slavery under the Marquis of Pombal; a group of skinheads kept watch over a statue of Padre António Vieira, seen by many as a proponent of “selective slavery”; the Public Prosecution Service accused a number of police officers of racist abuse and violence against young people in Cova da Moura; the controversy over what to call the “Discoveries Museum” showed that the evolution over time of a single word is enough to paint a psychoanalytical portrait of a people. The USA has also seen a resurgence in the latent racial tensions that Obama preferred to let lie: the country now has a racist president in the White House and identity politics are on the up. Although I run the risk of being called untrue to my roots, or worse, these seemingly disparate events have prompted me to look again at the controversy concerning the intelligence of different ethnic groups. Why? Because this is the last vexata quaestio.

On 18 January 1892 the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Gazeta de Notícias included a Literary Supplement, which was launched with an introductory article by Eça de Queirós. The text bears the eye-catching title “Europe in a nutshell. Our supplement” and is primarily directed at readers who the author knew were inclined to accept the information coming from Europe with few reservations. What is not immediately clear is the purpose with which the Portuguese writer, who presumably wrote the text in Paris, decided to launch a literary supplement with a description of the social situation in Europe in his day.

Rui Chafes, a sculptor, writes especially beautifully about the work of Manuel Rosa, another sculptor, on the subject of an anthological exhibition entitled Clareira, which marked the artist's return to public shows. Chafes says that his work is not of this fast, hurried world made of meteoric successions of superficial images and information that make us confound beauty with fleeting attraction, a pulse with a death rattle.

David Lynch himself classified the third Twin Peaks series as an 18-hour film. In the current circumstances of the film industry this classification has a substantial reach on the level of theory and programmes.

Furious, unexpected, satirical: Karl Kraus's aphorisms are an exemplary manifestation of early 20th century Viennese culture.

Contemporary design culture and criticism in a book of essays with a title that serves as a programme.

‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ Bernard Baruch once said. ‘If all you have is a phone with an internet connection, everything looks like a web,’ we could say in an echo, in a chorus (or through loudspeakers). From the small light of a multicoloured screen, the world is becoming increasingly similar, not like a supermarket shelf from which we select objects for purchasing, but like a rhizome of data and relationships that we can access, almost instantly, with a click.

Beginnings still exist. Electra began a year ago and since then we have published five issues of this magazine dedicated to thought, art, literature, science and cul-tural criticism. Each one is a stroke that gradually draws the full face. This face is moveable and mutable, made of positions and oppositions, juxtapositions and superimpositions. It reveals itself in plural planes and variable geometries. It has diverse and complementary points of view. The more it changes and moves, the more it defines and affirms itself.