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.’

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.