Barry King is a researcher at the Auckland University of Technology whose most recent work has focused on the mechanisms by which someone gains the status of ‘icon’. He starts this essay by looking at the concept of fame and the conditions which produce it, and then moves on to trace the historic trajectory of the three factors of celebrity, fame and prestige, while also taking a moment to examine the concepts of renown, reputation and charisma. He thus creates a constellation of concepts that have acquired huge importance in the society of mass communication.

Moisés Puente, the Spanish author and publisher, analyses a phenomenon of our times, a phenomenon of great importance that has not always been acknowledged: ‘contrary to that which was championed by figures such as Peter Eisenman during the 1990s, architecture is no longer read as a text but is presented as an image’. This change had many effects, such as the transfer of authorship of images from the architect to the photographer of architecture. Puente quotes the example of the well-known Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. When presenting their work at the Fifth Venice Biennale, they decided to exhibit nothing but photographs by four photographic artists. In this brave new world, images of the city and the city of images are the same and appear in representations that are becoming more and more abstract and closer to non-places.

Curiosity as an intellectual faculty is a decisive factor in the human capacity for creativity. Although it is often associated with artistic creation, it also plays an important role in scientific research. It is precisely this theme of creativity as a driver of both science and art that the Portuguese astronomer Pedro Russo, professor at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, discusses in this article.

This work corresponds to the last eleven days of the (official) lockdown. It is part of a larger undertaking entitled Os dias estão numerados/The Days are Numbered, covering the period from 24 April to 4 May 2020.

Down the ages, human animals have looked to other animals to confirm their own superiority or inferiority, to vindicate or vilify themselves, and to establish their own identity and otherness, by examining what sets them apart and what they have in common. Humans have either exalted or condemned animals, casting them as gods or demons, sovereigns or slaves, tormentors or victims, free or captive, living beings with their own dignity or merely disposable objects.

Paul Morland, a renowned expert in demographic science and a former associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and senior member of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, reviews the incorrect predictions of Thomas Malthus. He explains here how the law of excess and scarcity works in the history of demography and why almost the entire world has entered a downward trajectory.

In 1938, at the age of 31 years and with a remarkable future scientific career ahead of him, physicist Ettore Majorana, a disciple of Physics Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi – who considered Majorana a genius –, disappeared at a time when Italy was going through turbulent political confrontation. To this day, no one really knows what happened. Since then, the mystery of Majorana's disappearance has never ceased to intrigue, causing rivers of ink to flow and generating strange hypotheses and theories. Among others, the acclaimed author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated a book to him: La Scomparsa di Majorana [The Disappearance of Marjorana]. It is this enigmatic case that mathematician Umberto Bartocci, formerly a professor at the University of Perugia, revisits in his essay for Electra, not shying away from advancing his theories on this dramatic, radical disappearance.

The phenomena of speed and acceleration determine every aspect of our reality, from cultural and social life to the economy. The coercive force that imposed an increasingly fast pace to human activity, in a crescendo that presupposes limitless resources (with enormous ecological consequences, including for the ecology of time and space) demands a dynamics that cannot slow down since it is the only guarantee of stability. Therefore, abruptly halting this system, hitting the brakes on an ultra-accelerated world, is not the deceleration defended by those who advocate ‘de-growth’. It is not the realisation of a utopia, but a colossal disaster. That is the globalised disaster that we are witnessing, caused by a viral pandemic.

The tourism sector, with its global dimension including all the fields of the production of wealth, has undergone incomparable expansion. All the figures are astronomical and the impacts are huge in the economics of tourism. Álvaro Matias, an economist, researcher and author of studies on tourism published in scientific journals, analyses them as positive achievements and essential benefits.

Often, we think of the Acropolis in Athens as though it had always been the way it is now, or rather as if losing something of its original splendour had been a slow process, just the result of time passing. In the face of recurring claims by Greek governments for the return of the marbles that Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon to London (now in the British Museum) there are many who think that this was the only – or the most significant – sudden diminution of the perfect beauty of the Acropolis that Pericles built. This is not so. Throughout the centuries, the Acropolis has been assembled and disassembled like a cat’s cradle. It was Christianity that changed its appearance radically, turning the Parthenon into a church and installing the bishop in the Propylaea. The Parthenon was then much modified: the imposing ivory and gold statue of Athena was removed, the eastern main entrance was closed up and another one opened on the opposite side; an apse was constructed inside the cella and a wall was built to connect the external columns (something similar can still be seen today in Syracuse Cathedral, a temple contemporaneous with the Parthenon).