There are companies, like Apple, that present every new thing they do as a revolution. Others, like Google and Facebook, that introduce things more quietly, with a whisper, changing, a little bit at a time, they way we work and communicate. Facebook has been promoting on pages and profiles for a while now a function that seems nearly as old as the Internet: RSS feeds. If you’re interested in a…
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“Professor Savater, what is the future?” So began, without preamble, my conversation with one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. Fernando Savater, 63 years old, has a Spanish passport but a Basque heart. He was born in San Sebastian at the end of the Second World War and is one of the greatest living philosophers. Since the day I met him, I like to think of him as…
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Serge Latouche is a Frenchman in his middle age, sure of himself, who by the way in which he carries himself reminds one a bit of Sean Connery. He’s well-loved in Italy and in South America, but is seen in the United States as something of an inconvenient radical. A friend of Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini and Massimo Cacciari, he is considered the standard-bearer of those who wish for the…
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Orhan Pamuk’s study, one of the most important of contemporary novelists, is the materialization of the dream of every aspiring writer. Four big walls, three of which are covered with books. The fourth, made entirely of glass, looks out onto the Bosphorus. And beyond the glass stands an imposing mosque, seagulls floating on the wind and great ships lumbering back and forth, between East and West. He moved there this year, leaving his old family home shortly after finishing his last novel, The Museum of Innocence, which like many of his works (such as My Name Is Red, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006) tells a story of differences that attract. Melancholic and beautiful novels, all set, without exception, in Turkey.
Since 2005 when he was put on trial and threatened with death due to his statements about the extermination of the Armenians, Pamuk lives between New York, where he is Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and his Istanbul, where I met him.
Is it possible that someone with 50 thousand followers on Twitter is actually unsocial? It most certainly is. This answer is what thrust Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a social researcher and professor at Harvard University, into the media spotlight last year. For in his view, online social networks have almost nothing to do with true, intimate and lasting social relationships. According to Christakis, Facebook resembles the soap operas of the past: with the difference that the stories into which we can immerse ourselves are no longer played out by unknown actors, but by people we actually know in real life. In his Harvard office Christakis responded to my questions with passion, launching right into the topics most familiar to him and reflecting a bit before answering more unusual questions. Here’s a synthesis of our conversation.
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Jared Diamond, author of many best seller including Collapse, teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a professor of geography. It’s a discipline that’s hardly fashionable in an age in which many of us are convinced we know our planet as well as we need to. It takes only a few minutes for this conviction to disappear when talking to the 72 year old professor, who’s spent years studying the reasons for the collapses of past civilizations to try to find a way to avoid that of our own. A collapse which, as he explains, is a quite a concrete possibility.
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How can one cut state spending by 20% while at the same time improving public services? In Great Britain, where conservative prime minister David Cameron has recently announced a traumatic plan for relaunching the economy and avoiding a financial collapse like the one that happened in Greece, and it’s all people are talking about. His critics accuse him of allarmism, recklessness and utopism. But he and his supporters are convinced…
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Why is it so difficult for us to leave the oil economy behind?
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No words
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Humanity is pulsing and extraordinarily creative organism, which vibrates in unison when it receives common stimuli
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