Eighty years ago, on 19 April, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the first intentional psychedelic trip with LSD. This discovery-trip had radical effects on culture and art (literature, visual arts, music, dance, cinema), becoming a symbol – both deified and demonised – of counterculture and the hippie movement. An author of works on this subject, Marcelo Leite is an award-winning journalist and columnist for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, where he regularly writes about science and the environment. In this essay, he discusses the research that has been going on since the 1990s with a view to the pharmacological and therapeutic use of psychedelics, especially in neurology and psychiatry.

In this article, the author of Etica dei resti [The Ethics of Remnants], Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, develops a philosophy of waste and an analysis of rubbish and refuse as the dark and recalcitrant side of our consumer civilisation.

This ‘Metropolitan’ takes Neom as its theme, a colossal urban architectural project currently being constructed in the remote deserts of Saudi Arabia, causing fiction to imitate reality. Due to its bold objectives (‘to build a city to “reset” urban living’) and the financial and technological resources it mobilises, this complex project is subject to both great aspirations and controversies, raising fundamental questions which have important ethical, cultural, social and political implications. The author, João Bravo da Costa, is an architect with a recognised international career which began in the studios of three Pritzker Prize winners: Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Knowing this region of the world well, he combines personal experience with innovative theoretical reflection in this essay written for Electra.

I can’t quite explain how I’ve been feeling lately without turning back to one night, six years ago. I was still living in the United States then, in Providence, midway through my PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. On that November night in 2016, I watched the election returns at the home of Brazilianist and historian James Green. There were beer, snacks, and a guest of honor: Jean Wyllys, then Brazil’s only openly gay congressman.

It was as if speed, which was the subject that had been planned and announced long ago for this edition, had morphed into the image of our perplexity and blended into the measure of our distance from things. This edition of Electra was ready to go to print when life changed completely. Suddenly spaces closed and time turned about face, pulling tomorrow into today and slowly leading today into tomorrow.

Jovan Mrvaljevic was born in Montenegro but lives in Paris. His contribution to this dossier is an article about the art world’s relationship with the luxury industry and the star system, creating an environment marked by the programmes of large institutions.

For the last two decades, at least, we have got used to listening to a chorus of pessimistic voices, to which we attribute an ever increasing value of truth, which tell us about the ‘crisis of democracy’, ‘the unease in/of democracy’, the ailing ‘state of democracy’ and even the need to categorise it as ‘post’ to suggest that it has become necessary to update it conceptually.

It is said that while in Madrid to open an exhibition of his work they took him to the Prado Museum, which he had never visited before. He passed through the vast rooms with fleeting steps and set gestures, where from the walls the works of Velázquez and Goya, Fra Angelico and Rafael, Bosch and Dürer, van der Weyden and Caravaggio cast their forms and colours, lines and lights. This swift visit was barely enough for a distracted, distant glance at the masterpieces that time has selected to show us. It took no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. At the end of this whirlwind-visit, he went into the museum-shop and looked around for more than half an hour. With keen attention, care and curiosity, he examined, among other products and gadgets, the reproductions and replicas, posters and prints of the works whose originals he could not be bothered with. Such was Andy Warhol ...

Abjection, with its violent effects on the viewer, has become the matrix of a trend in contemporary cinema. It includes forms of representation that, in their excess, work as instruments of torture. And that excess raises problems, which are not only aesthetic but also ethical and political.

The French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie explores in this article why the object of his intellectual investment was never literature, but theory. This personal taste of his has provided him with a reason to analyse the attraction of theory, both in terms of knowledge and of libido.