Based on an essentially anecdotal episode that occurred in the world of pop music and reality show celebrities, the philosopher Laurent de Sutter defines the key attributes of fame, looking back to the Roman world, the idea of ‘reputation’, and to the Middle Ages to establish the roots of the contemporary sense of the word ‘famous’.

Laurent de Sutter is professor of legal theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and managing editor of the series Perspectives Critiques (PUF – Presses universitaires de France). Here he develops a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, accepts accelerationism – i.e. the perspective that advocates reformulating and not sabotaging or damping down the means and the infrastructure that we have inherited from modernity.

Curiosity is one of the key words of modernity, as it is through curiosity that man has come to science. In 1973, the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote about ‘the process of theoretical curiosity’. This came after a long, drawn-out chapter in a second, extended edition of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit), which described and analysed this process and showed how curiosity had been removed from the medieval catalogue of vices and was now on the honour roll of virtues.

Georg Franck, the author of a pioneering book that has become a fundamental reference for reflections on the economy of attention, develops, in this article, his theses on the theoretical bases of this concept and on the specificity of the economic regime that characterises the economy of attention under the condition of the mass media.

The problem is not just that the book is over thirty years old and there is not a single Portuguese translation available. This case is not unique, but it is harder to understand that even in such an intellectually dynamic country as Brazil, the book is not for sale in some niche publisher or university press. As I was saying, the problem is that this thesis, published by the economist Edward S. Herman and the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1988, that the media depends on a political economy that strives to manufacture consent, is the last great critical contribution to a topic where criticism runs rampant.

Havana is celebrating the quincentenary of its foundation. For many, the city represents easy enjoyment, a flight from time, a mirage in the sea, music that never ends. The Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a regular contributor to newspapers such as The New York Times and El Pais lives outside Cuba. For him, when he went back to his city to enjoy himself, Havana had returned to being ‘a city full of untethered sadnesses’. He says, in addition, ‘The day in Cuba is still communist, but the night is ever more neoliberal. ’The evocation of Havana that he creates here is pervaded by an exuberant and melancholy memory and permeated by a wind that disperses the waves breaking against the Malecón seawall.

The Italian historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at Cornell University, is the author of important books on the Holocaust and on twentieth-century political ideas. In this text, he describes and analyses a transition that, from his point of view, marks the end of the twentieth century: the utopias gave place to the cult of memory, which led to the proliferation of ‘remembrance’ and set the melancholy tone that characterises the spirit of our times.

The television genre which goes by the name of reality TV is a manifestation of the entertainment industry strongly marked by social and cultural codes of taste. Rodrigo Pereira, a researcher at NOVA University of Lisbon, writes about this type of show.

Pedro Ignacio Alonso, architect and professor of Architectural Theory at the Catholic University of Chile, writes about the validity of the city-‑countryside dichotomy and the problems this raises at a time when the world has contracted through speed. Consequently, cities, no matter how distant they are from one another, form a single metropolitan area.

Vasco M. Barreto, a scientist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Universidade Nova, Lisbon, discusses ‘speciesism’, a key concept for the animal rights movements. He demonstrates that it is based on fallacies, contradictions and lacunae, of which the work of the controversial Australian philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, is an example.