Martin Jay is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His extensive work, which spans several disciplines, encompasses the fields of critical cultural theory, philosophy, sociology and visual culture. He is the author of a book on the use of lies in politics, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, and it is precisely this subject that this article deals with.

Bárbara Reis, a renowned journalist for Público newspaper, where she was once editor, brings together two impressive testimonies from Brazilian women who tell us what they went through from the moment they found themselves persecuted by ‘digital militias’ that spread lies about them and made death threats.

Daisy Dixon, lecturer at Cardiff University, author of essays and academic articles in the field of the philosophy of art, herself an artist, writes on a complex issue: how can we talk about lies with regards to artistic images? The starting point for this reflection is a staged photograph that purports to be documentary.

It was on the notion of post-truth, which the Oxford Dictionary chose as ‘word of the year’ in 2016, that Myriam Revault d'Allonnes wrote her book entitled The Fragile Truth. In this article, the French philosopher, professor emeritus at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, revisits her reflection on this concept to show that it cannot be confused with the traditional lie and to consider its relationship with regards to both democracy and totalitarian regimes.

Peter Hill, Scottish-Australian artist, curator and professor at the University of Melbourne, author of Encyclopaedia of Superfictions, presents here, selected by a certain Fernão Mentes Minto, extracts from The Encyclopaedia of Lies which forms part of his ‘superfictions’.

The lines separating truth from lies are subject to breaks imposed by certain factors, which the writer, psychiatrist and ethologist António Bracinha Vieira describes and analyses, beginning with the example of the social intelligence of primates, which we have inherited through our natural phylogenetic history.

Ever since her childhood and throughout her near century-long life, the great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe turned the way she dressed her body into an affirmation of herself, both as a woman and a modern artist. She used the same originality and stylistic imagination to create her wardrobe as she used to create her paintings, leaving us a corpus of dresses of her own design or choice. A knowledge of these is fundamental to understanding the artist in her various dimensions, and her time in its various transformations and ruptures. ‘Her meticulous choice of clothes and the way she posed prove that she clearly knew the image she wanted to project and immortalise’ says the author of this essay, Anabela Becho, fashion historian, curator and researcher.

Simon Critchley, one of the most prolific and popular philosophers of the last decades, talks to Electra about some of the varied topics that have been guiding his work, from the role of philosophy in contemporary society to the disillusionment with liberal democracy, the cultural importance of football, and the challenges of autobiographical writing.

A provocative statement by the famous Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos, often referred to as ‘the most feared critic’, is commented on here by Alexandra Prado Coelho, a journalist who specialises in the areas of food and gastronomy, and also by Gianfranco Marrone, professor and director of the International Center for Semiotic Sciences in Urbino and author of works on the semiology of taste and flavour.

The statement I propose to discuss here is based, it would seem, on an ambiguity that Rafael García Santos himself later attempts to clarify when he states: ‘Suppose you eat at McDonald’s; while I can’t say it’s gastronomy, it’s the future.’ Why? Because, the Spanish food critic argues, ‘it is aimed at the young and connects with new customers,’ ‘gets rid of waiters and cooks’ and, lastly, ‘uses artificial intelligence’.