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.

A book on the moral discourse of merchandise, on commodities as ‘goods’, presented by its translator, who was also its co-editor.

You hear it and you immediately want to sing along. You want to sing even though you’re tone deaf and you’re not singing out loud: just silently and to yourself. The Catalogue Aria and the opera in which it features – Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte – are high points in the history of the musical theatre genre, which first appeared in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Even in the present day there are numerous variations that surprise and delight.

Catherine Millet is a writer, a curator and the editor of the magazine Art Press, of which she was the founder. In 1968, she began as an art critic for the cultural weekly Lettres Françaises, under the editorship of Louis Aragon. It is one of this writer’s passages that Millet has selected for comment, making it a lever with which she raises her world. On the basis of the quotation from Aragon, whose lack of verbal propriety causes an erotic thrill, Millet – the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the book that made her name among the general public – provocatively declares her infallibly controversial ideas on women and their relationship with men. In her commentary, Millet carries on a controversy marked by violent anathemas and virulent accusations, with echoes that are still present.

Marcos Cardão, historian and researcher of mass and popular culture phenomena, writes about the significance of the National Pantheon honours granted to Eusébio, one year after his death, which immortalised him in this temple of national memory.

Taking as her starting point the exhibition Earthkeeping/Earthshaking – Arte, feminismos e ecologia, shown at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon, the curator and researcher Margarida Mendes writes about the cultural themes and ethics it deals with artistically and which lie at the heart of contemporary debates.

One of the characteristics of our time, which can be observed in many domains and from different perspectives, is the tendency (or trend) – and this word is already part of the complex – to cultivate and give the greatest privileges to everything that presents itself as new, that conforms to the general regime of newness as a social and cultural imperative. In this regime, the new is not that which interrupts the course of the world and time (as were the phenomena that followed the revolution model; the artistic avantgardes, for example), but that which perfectly adapts itself to the spirit of the epoch, the futility of the time, the prevailing ‘neopathy’. Therefore, the attitude that promotes the new as a great imperative which forms on the surface of actuality is not incompatible with a conservative position. The new as a commandment fully satisfies the desires of homogenisation that inevitably inhabit culture, at a time when even heritagisation and museumification are trying to invent factors of novelty.