Toxic people, toxic environments, toxic whatnot – you know the spiel. Really toxic language, however, is the aftermath of an idea, and words come with a predefined format, as if they were not speech at all, but set in stone. And that stone is carried by the crowd that was schooled in how to be stupid according to a new infallible method.

A person reaches their destination after a long journey and comes across an obstacle. Standing exactly between this person and their becoming, an enormous rock mass, heavy as lead, a skyscraper. It is unsurpassable. The only way to overcome is to summon the prefix trans-, the one that catapults, ignores borders and penetrates into obstacles. The harbinger of metamorphoses.

There is no transparency without light and the association of light with knowledge exists from time immemorial. As the quintessential transparent solid, glass too is connected with knowledge. Galileo polished lenses to study the stars, as did Leeuwenhoek to show us the microscopic world. Spinoza himself was a lens maker, a fact always stressed in his biographies, though we do not know for sure how metaphysics behaves when it hits glass. Nonetheless, we should not forget that the transparent object does not always preserve the image that traverses it. Look no further than Newton’s prism, which decomposes white light into the colours of the rainbow, or the ‘diaphanous mantle of fantasy’ used by Eça to cover ‘truth’s harsh nakedness’.

Trieste, a border city and cultural crossroads, a port in Habsburgian Mitteleuropa, and the cradle of an extraordinarily rich cultural and literary environment, is revisited here by someone intimately familiar with its brilliant arts scene.

The friendship between sociologist Gilberto Freyre and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda found a correlation in the books in which each attempted to idealise a Brazil based on the notion of the tropics and Portuguese exceptionalism: Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) and Raízes do Brasil (1936), respectively. At a later date, however, the latter completely departs from that approach to the Brazilian space and, with the notion of border, enters an enduring rivalry with his friend. It is to this divergence of views that we owe two distinct visions of Brazil, which are analysed and contrasted here by Luiz Feldman, a Brazilian diplomat.

David Lynch himself classified the third Twin Peaks series as an 18-hour film. In the current circumstances of the film industry this classification has a substantial reach on the level of theory and programmes.

The relationship between crisis and journalism, as explored by the author in this article, is an issue that goes to the heart of modern society and the age of “uncertainty”, stretching beyond our immediate predicament and concerns. The issue of the crisis in journalism is much thornier than we usually imagine, argues Barbie Zelizer, a leading figure in journalism studies and author of important research into the relationship between journalism and historical and cultural memory.

This issue’s dossier addresses a theme that is almost the very essence of archetypal differences: the city- countryside dichotomy. Almost like a warning to the incautious, however, it must be said at the very outset that this dichotomy, while retaining its expressive and symbolic value crystallised by our binary representations, is no longer as relevant or operative as it once was. This polarisation still exists in our imagination and even corresponds to an ideal, but in many respects it no longer coincides with its true original meaning: the countryside increasingly resembles the city or, at least, is increasingly home to more urban working habits and lifestyles. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas wrote over a decade ago, in an essay entitled Countryside, even ‘husbandry of the land is now a digital practice’.

Great books are not loved. Their authors even less so. Great writers are not loved. Their books even less so. The former are always tainted by the suspicion that they are too free. The latter are suspected of allowing themselves this freedom. In either case, this freedom will never be enough for books and their authors. Enough to exhaust the possibilities of freedom itself. This is what gives rise to fear (provoking ‘hostility’, according to Bernhard). In this, they would not like their readers to be more self-sufficient than they are, which is more frightening still.

Under this title, Jay Pather, a choreographer, curator, and associate professor at the University of Cape Town, opens the way for a visit to the city – ‘topographically this was where apartheid was created’ – where ‘hauntings, irony and paradox abound everywhere’. From the initial exhilaration of the Mandela era to its melting away, an effort is now being made to use art as a form of energy for the ‘wresting of these hauntings’.