We live under the imperial rule of narratives. That is certainly not new. Homo sapiens have always been indistinguishable from homo fabulator, but in the post-truth era, narrative imperialism has grown and intensified (recall that ‘post truth’ was declared word of the year in 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries).

Natalia Ginzburg was not just an important Italian writer, but also an intellectual who came through times of war and tragedy with a political and cultural commitment and sense of responsibility common to other writers of her generation. The collection of essays in The Little Virtues (a 1962 book that has recently been translated into Portuguese and published by Relógio D'Água) on which Golgona Anghel writes, paints us a picture of the literary, political and family world in which Natalia Ginzburg played such an important role.

In this interview, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, author of Ce que n’est pas l’identité, defends ‘universalism’ against the specificities of identity. Her public opinions have involved her in huge controversies. They can be explained by the way in which these issues, which were regarded for a long time by French intellectuals as a nefarious product of studies by American universities, have recently ignited a veritable ‘civil war’.

The territory of modern and contemporary art today is dominated by institutions that engage in the symbolic transfer of a new ‘aura’ of art to luxury products and vice-versa. The result is the colossal circulation of money around the works and artists involved in speculation on inflated products.

Breaking down the identity programme that dominates the world, making the counter-current criticism of the identity beliefs and prejudices that exclude difference and rule out otherness – these are the ideas in this article by the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat, a lecturer in comparative literature at University of Winscon – Madison and author of L’ange noir de l’histoire – Cosmos et technique de l’afrofuturisme.

In this ‘View of Delft’, novelist and essayist Daniel Saldaña París writes about New York, the city where he currently lives, dividing himself between this city and his native Mexico City. In this account, there is at the same time both closeness and distance, coming from a gaze that travels from the outside, becoming interior and even intimate in the discovery he makes of this fascinating North American city, comparing it with other cities and evoking everything about it that he has read, seen and lived.

It just so happens that sometimes we can’t find the right words, despite knowing where they are: on the tip of the tongue. It seems easy enough to recover those concealed, as, in a manner of speaking, they’re relatively to hand, but uncovering their lair isn’t enough to untangle the knot of forgotten words that memory has left behind. As for me? In the mirror, I’ve watched myself repeating new-normal, truly a concept old enough to know better. I could, and should, ignore these facts of my inner life, and I will do just that. Especially because behind this printed text there is another one that is brighter, which will never see the light of ink on paper, the light of this time tunnel in which we find ourselves – derived from the Latin novum, in the case of something new or never seen before, and normalis, the state of normality, or uneventful routine.

At its origin, the world wide web gave rise to a naïve dream — the utopia of a digital public space that would fulfil all the promises implicit in the modern conception of public space. But the outcome today is clearly a different one; instead of the promised digital paradise, the winners have been chaos and the discourse of stupidity in its most violent and regressive forms, as the example of an image board called 4chan eloquently shows us.

Gregory Sholette, an American artist and art critic has devoted the lion’s share of his theoretical work to the relationship between art and politics. He writes very critically here about NFTs (non‑fungible tokens), a digital innovation that is undermining the art market and creating some strange phenomena.

Nick Cave sings: Goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil. With this, he seems to have put his life and his work into words.