A contemporary city is usually seen as a civil, secular and profane space that contrasts with its religious and ritualised rural counterpart. However, the bonds between urban space and the phenomenon of religion were of great importance historically, and still today remain active in our ways of living city life. In the text that follows, Jörg Rüpke, a German university lecturer, vice-director of the Max Weber Centre, a religious studies specialist, and author of various publications on these topics, explains that ‘the relationship between city and religion is one full of tension’.

The map of media land has been redrawn by online providers. Immediate response is now the rule, and the consequences have been profound. Jacinto Godinho, investigative journalist, in-depth reporter for Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) and lecturer in journalism, writes about the necessary relationship between journalism and fiction, and the many pitfalls this can create.

Once in circulation, there are certain words can seem strange to anyone who is literate. Some come to stay and settle. Others flit about but never roost, and sooner or later take flight and are gone. When it comes to words borrowed from other languages, there are those that invoke the mysterious nemesis we call ‘the nature of the language’ – its identity. Perhaps the best approach is to be practical. Such words can come in handy; that is all. It is even possible that the ‘nature of the language’ may have something to do with it.

Calls for the restitution of artworks and ‘important pieces’ to their countries or communities of origin are extremely complex as the terms of the issue itself are problematic. I do not believe it is possible to formulate a universally valid general principle. Only a subtle case-by-case analysis is possible.

The first question is: what is to be returned?

Robert Musil’s essays, recently translated into Portuguese under the title Ensaios [Essays], are the perfect embodiment of an era of which we have only recently perhaps been able to make sense. Nélio Conceição, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at NOVA University Lisbon, sheds light on their wide scope.

With his book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published in 2005, the American historian Roger Ekirch changed many ideas about past and present sleeping habits. He showed, for example, how the Industrial Revolution radically transformed both the time and the way in which people slept, especially in the cities, passing from a biphasic sleep to a consolidated eight-hour sleep, which he classifies as ‘a modern invention’. Sleep and insomnia are matters of growing concern in contemporary societies. All these topics are addressed by the professor of the University of Virginia Tech in an interview conducted by Diogo Vaz Pinto.

Éric Marty, the editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, traces in this essay the history, effect and declinations of that famous text entitled The Death of the Author. He shows how this was inscribed in an ideological puritanism of the time and a theoretical position in favour of the maximum autonomy of the work, thus demanding the invisibility of the author's image. It was Roland Barthes himself who, in a sophisticated way, dismantled this dogma.

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.

In conversation with design critic and curator Frederico Duarte, Dutch graphic designer, researcher and professor Ruben Pater talks about his books and his conception of design as a practice of citizenship. This ‘Metropolitan’ is about bringing design closer to the subjects which help us better understand our place and our role in the city (or in the polis).

At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

On the other hand, after visiting Rui Chafe's exhibition in Paris, the poet, Manuel de Freitas, wrote the artist a letter. The starting point for the letter is a quotation from Alberto Giacometti that speaks of the imperfection, the virulence and the violence of poetry, painting, and sculpture. The poet talks to us about the darkness, the silence, the abyss and the night that are so palpable in this exhibition. And, as always happens with Manuel de Freitas, he talks to us about death.