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.

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.