July-August Culture and Society

Read the articles selected in July-August 2016

The resurrection of Federico Garcìa Lorca

Source: The Economist, 3 August

In London theatres, is reviving an interest in the works and life of Garcìa Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered by Franco’s Falangists for his verses too beautiful and simply antifascist. His poetry, so immersed in Andalusia and gypsy has some existential contents that arrive to us today everywhere.

Svetlana Alexievich’s monument to those left behind

Source: The Economist, 1 August

The stories of last year’s Nobel prize in literature, “polyphonic writings” of the voices lost in the collapsed Soviet Union, haven’t time and place and are universal. “Second-hand-time” is Svetlana Alechsievich’s latest book, translated from Russian.

Liberal blues

Source: The Economist, 30 July

Liberalism, whose cultural roots are deep in England in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, is a banner used by many politicians for their own convenience and with different meanings, far from the original sense of individual and economic freedom in a limited state.

Paul Greengrass, the shaky-cam, quick-cut director who redifined action

Source: The Economist, 27 July

The film director Paul Green Grass, known for his spy- thrillers starring Matt Damon and shot with a shaky hand-held camerawork and a breathtaking illusory technique, has developed much of his camerawork in his television documentaries on Beirut in the 1980s.

Responding to catastrophe with culture

Source: The Economist, 25 July

Music exceeds borders and bans of nationalities, dictatorships and terror. The BBC after the Nice attack has broadcast its scheduled series of classical concerts with the “Ode to Joy”, reaffirming Western culture and identity, that terrorism has targeted.

Star Treck: beyond strips politics from the universe

Source: The Economist, 22 July

The Federation, a civilization based on peace, unity, and research of unknown, is threatened by a bad guy, that the end of identities and conflicts of the old order has transformed in an alien invader, and is still called Krall, like an ordinary German back from the World War II.

The World Bank hires a famous contrarian

Fonte: The Economist, 18 July

The new World Bank head is Paul Romer, an economist of the New York university known for his theory of “endogenous growth”, about the importance of investment in research and knowledge for the whole economy.

Invasion of the bottle snatchers

Source: The Economist, 9 July

Small producers give trouble to the giants in consumer packaged goods, that don’t benefit more from the same advantages of the past times when the online market didn't exist yet, and small firms had no access to the advertisements and to distribution.

Industrious genius

Source: The Economist, 16 July

“The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times” of J.M.W. Turner is a biography of the world’s most famous landscape painter, who saw in Claude Lorrain an unattainable example, outshining him in his canvas which absorb the steam and the movement of the Industrial Revolution.

War of words

Source: The Economist, 16 July

The words said by female political leaders seem to have a bigger influence than the speeches pronounced by male colleagues, more taken for granted and are an object of greater attention, thus more easily labeled. Sometimes the most feminine and pleasable voices are also the most determined.

Why artificial intelligence is enjoying a renaissance

Source: The Economist, 15 July

The term “artificial intelligence”, coined in 1956with the promise of a better human life by robots and then put aside, is currently a popular buzzword whose meaning has switched to the deep learning systems characterizing our everyday technology .

Abbas Kiarostami’s long shadow

Source: The Economist, 18 July

Abbas Kiarostami’s death has left an inherit that will survive the regime censorship, which found inconvenient that he showed people micro lives continuing even under the dictatorship, and that any regime won’t be able to prevent anybody from tasting cherries or enjoying the sunset.

No Oscar fodder at this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival

Source: The Economist, 11 July

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, that launches in the world Central and Eastern European films, presents this year a series of beautiful stories settled far out of great tragical events and with no foreseeable Oskar success.

From “Don Juan” to “1989”: Why autobiographical art sells

Source: The Economist, 7 July

Poets since ever have been laying themselves as bare. In the pop-music making their private life, with its pain and miseries, a public brilliant success is believed not more a candid artistic instinct, but the result of a strategy millions of dollars worth.

“Pokémon Go” shows how the real and virtual worlds are merging.

Source: The Economist, 12 July

It is known that video games meld real and virtual, pushing players into the real world, where they can indifferently act with a criminal purpose. With Pokémon Go video games use the real world to impose their effects of augmented reality, with sometimes unforeseen consequences.

Darwin would have been a Pokémon Go Master

by Sarah Zang

Source: Wired, 12 July

As Darwin was a beetle collector, Pokémon’s inventor too was an insect collector, who created a virtual world to collect and catalog biodiversity in a fictional way. Although players usually recognize fictional Pokémon easier than natural creatures, sometimes Pokémon can make a players an entomologist.

The Italian job

Source: The Economist, 9 July

Italy’s bank crisis is dangerous for Europe. Savers risk without an injection of government, contrary to the European rule of bail-in. Forcing Italian citizens to take losses again would make lose confidence in the euro, and the single currency would not survive.

Big Pharma is so 2015. Welcome to the era of big software

by Gaurav Jain and Joe Flaherty

Source: Wired, 7 July

The biggest tech companies of today were once humble startups. Regulation and market dynamics made them dominators. Although plenty of big companies have failed, the era of big companies is not at the end.

For Philando Castile, social media was the only 911

by Issie Lapowsky

Source: Wired, 7 July

For a woman that was losing her Afro-American boyfriend shot by the police, Facebook has been the only possible recourse, while she was filming with her phone what was happening and crying for help to the audience. The video has gone viral and the audience has answered.

Social media helps Black Lives Matter fight the power.

by Bijan Stephen

Source: Wired, 21 October 2015

“Black lives matter” is the most potent civil rights movement in America, that continues sadly and with new media the ‘60s activism. The most difficult challenge of its fight will be to spread a common and not exclusive culture system that doesn’t kill people.

Have the etical questions surrounding cloning changed since Dolly?

by John Loike

Source: Scientific American, 5 July

Dolly cloning in 1997 sparked ethical concerns worldwide, and even the words clone and cloning were censured on scientific papers. Today the somatic cell nuclear transfer, although raising new ethical questions, is more accepted, since has reached a global medical improvement.

Info

Pubblicato il : 20/12/2017
Modificato il : 04/04/2019

July-August Culture and Society

Info

Condividi