This architect and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at Universidade do Porto believes that the huge effects of tourism on contemporary cities can be measured with the instruments of a critical theory of political economy to reveal the image and logic of the neoliberal city.

The city centre faces a time of accelerated transformations and sudden ruptures. The geographer Álvaro Domingues reflects on the subject, against the backdrop of a long-standing politics/city binomial.

Rio de Janeiro, the wonderful city, as it is called, has been revisited in its past and present by the pianist Gilda Oswaldo Cruz, who was born there and lived there for many years. The stunning natural surroundings between the sea and the hills, the violent social contrasts, and life in the favelas (slums) have all contributed to the effervescence of the city’s popular culture, of which samba and the Carnival are the most outstanding manifestations.

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.