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.

In one of his classes, Alexandre Alves Costa said the destruction of Cluny Abbey during the French Revolution – the paradigm of all the excesses and luxuries that characterised the Ancien Régime – represented an irreparable loss for architecture, but it was also the sign and affirmation of an irreproachable historical conquest. In fact, the history of architecture is nothing but the history of its permanent destruction, i.e. a long and endless list of burnt, plundered and imploded buildings.

American philosopher Avital Ronell, author of a book entitled Stupidity, continues here her attempt to understand and analyse the phenomenon and concept of stupidity, showing that, although situated in a space prior to speech, it can be appropriated by literature and by philosophy.

Raul Cerveira Lima, researcher in light pollution at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Science, University of Coimbra. This field of investigation has provided him with sufficient material and reasons for public interventions aimed at eliminating the factors that cause light pollution, a form of pollution that is rarely talked about. Night has been eliminated from the countryside by the imposition of the logic of urban life. This text is written in defence of the night.

For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra we have chosen a topic that is both universal and contemporary: lies. The various contributions trace routes with obligatory stops in politics (Martin Jay), art and images (Peter Hill and Daisy Dixon), the post-truth media regime (Myriam Revault d’Allonnes), the stages of phylogenetic natural history up to the hegemony of technology (António Bracinha Vieira), and the case studies of two Brazilian intellectuals persecuted and threatened by fake news (Bárbara Reis).

This journalistic article by the reporter João Pacheco takes us into the laboratory where the celebrities of mass culture are created, and it shows the mechanisms and technologies – particularly TV – that engender them. Three Portuguese examples are looked at: the football player Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and the television host Cristina Ferreira.

Every day, we read headlines in newspapers and magazines such as: Celebrities go on holiday to paradise destinations; Celebrity lets her hair down at wild party and reveals more than she meant to...; Celebrities organise charity event for children in need; Celebrity launches her own cosmetics brand. It is not the holidays or parties, charities or businesses that these headlines are about, but the celebrities involved. They are the point and purpose.

The current war in Ukraine, caused by the Russian invasion, is what prompts Viriato Soromenho-Marques to go back to another armed conflict, the First World War, in order to analyse the nationalist and euphoric wartime discourses cultivated in German cultural and intellectual circles.

In 1905, a young German Jew called Albert Einstein, then just a simple clerk in the Berne patents and intellectual property bureau, published five articles that shook the foundations of physics, making their author an icon of the twentieth century, the archetypal genius and model for the role of a scientist. The early studies and education (1895-1901) of this young man are the key to understanding the annus mirabilis of 1905 – and the years that followed. This period, less well known than others in his extraordinary life, is described and interpreted here by the science historian Christian Bracco, author of the recent book Quand Albert devient Einstein.

A renowned and award-winning essayist, fiction writer and journalist, Sergio del Molino is currently a columnist for the newspaper El País. His book La España Vacia [Empty Spain], published in 2016, sparked a national debate on depopulation and the country-city relationship and is now considered a reference work for understanding contemporary Spain. In this ‘View of Delft’, Molino writes about the city of Zaragoza, giving us a portrait in which time and space, history and geography, literature and art come together and accompany us on an unforgettable tour of this city ‘which sums up Europe in one of its main paradoxes: it is an extremely old city that is also very new.’