It is strange to compose a diary of what living in Queens during quarantine means. Everyone’s experience is atomized and enclosed by the walls of their apartment. These snippets of information become events that happen between the space of my phone screen and the window facing the street outside.

Economist, essayist and founder in 2000 of the French journal Multitudes, Yann Moulier-Boutang reflects on the imminent changes to the nature and organisation of work resulting from the structural crisis affecting it and laid bare by the pandemic-related lockdown, in particular due to the spotlight now focused on the massive informal sector that highlights the necessary distinction between activity, labour and employment.

All over the world, the preservation and nurture of cultural memory is becoming less and less important in terms of political priorities and public investment. Museums, monuments, archives and libraries are pitted against the vibrancy of constantly changing new technologies; and the conviction is spreading that planning for the future must be at the cost of a gradual marginalisation of the past, which is seen as a passive burden, rather than an active force, a reserve of cultural and moral energy to draw on.

Robert van Krieken, professor at the University of Sydney and author of Celebrity Society (2012), analyses and charts the genealogy of celebrity, identifying the historically changing social conditions and realities that make celebrity possible, while at the same showing that its history is interwoven with the history of the public realm.

More than a decade after the Great Earthquake of Fukushima (East Japan, 2011), Taro Igarashi analyses, in this essay, the impact on architecture and art of a catastrophe of this magnitude and the lessons provided by the demands of reconstruction. The author is a historian and critic of architecture and a professor at the University of Tohoku, Japan. He was curator of the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale, in 2008, and artistic director of the Aichi Triennale, in 2013. He is one of the authors of Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture (2009).

‘What words shall I use? What are the proper words?’ asks Electra, amid the tumult and the danger, the ravings, the revenge (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers). In naming this journal Electra, we are making her questions our own. In choosing a name that comes from Ancient Greece, where thought emerged in all its apotheoses and disasters, in all its harmonies and conflicts, we are stating our commitment to all liberties and all dangers. The best and the worst in us were born there.

The matrix of contemporary art, its «primitive scene» — Marcel Duchamp’s urinal — was the object of exclusion (from an exhibition) that allows reference to be made to one of the manifestations of stupidity: «stupefaction». The bewilderment many works of art have since been able to arouse in viewers makes the evocation of stupidity pertinent, and even necessary, both in critical reception and in the confrontation of the public with contemporary art.

As director of the Nieman Lab at the University of Harvard, Joshua Benton is uniquely placed to observe the contemporary press and the problems it faces in an age of innovation and expanding online platforms. The following interview with the journalist Cristina Margato shows that these problems carry significant political implications, as the election of Trump made clear, and they present democratic societies with a challenge.

There is a history of kissing in public places in the city that can be documented by iconography. It is this history and the different attitudes and reactions to the urban kiss, depending on geography and cultures, that the Catalan poet and essayist José Ángel Cilleruelo pursues in the article, which is also an evocation of the ethics and aesthetics of flânerie.

The life of writers, artists, philosophers and figures who perform public roles, or have become well-known for whatever reason, is not just the subject of erudite biographies. In our time, when the media reign supreme, the personalisation of every aspect of social, cultural and political life is everywhere. The relationship between life and work has become, in certain cases, an area that gives rise to scandals and controversies. This condition causes the work and actions of writers, artists, politicians and other public figures to be assessed through the filter of private morality. There is no dearth of recent cases that confirm this and we know the devastating effects that this can sometimes have. We need to understand that the factors that structure the public space today have generated a tendency towards the non-differentiation between the public and private, two spheres that had been separated by clear-cut borders since the Enlightenment. In the political realm, the exhibition of private life, personal gestures, idiosyncrasies and habits has become common, and sometimes obligatory, so as to satisfy tacit requirements. The people phenomenon, which used to be a territory circumscribed to gossip magazines, has expanded. And it has become commonplace to draw lines of overlap and conflict between life and work.