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).

Peter Hill, Scottish-Australian artist, curator and professor at the University of Melbourne, author of Encyclopaedia of Superfictions, presents here, selected by a certain Fernão Mentes Minto, extracts from The Encyclopaedia of Lies which forms part of his ‘superfictions’.

When the end of one year is the beginning of the next, there is a hidden stoppage in this visible passage that makes time an intimate voice to remind us of what we have forgotten. This whispered voice is like that of the slow, mysterious songs that give a sun of light its moon of shadow. In every year that ends and surrenders to each year that begins, in a contiguous discontinuity, there is our will to measure, mark and change the time in us and us in time. This is how poets scan their verses so that the music leaps like a spark from a fire or a bird from a tree. There is an interval that we open only within ourselves to repeat the words of Paul Gauguin’s painting: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’. 

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the philosopher Déborah Danowski talked with Andrea Cavalletti about the book they co-authored, Há Mundo por Vir? Ensaio Sobre os Medos e os Fins [The Ends of the World]. An incursion into the imagery of the End, at a time when the fear of an ecological catastrophe has spread out.

Neil Kenny, professor of French literature and culture at Oxford University and author of the book The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, examines the key stages in the complex and interesting history of curiosity from Ancient Rome to the modern age – from a time when it was deemed a moral vice to one where it is seen as a virtue that lies at the root of all knowledge.

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.