October Culture and Society

Read the articles selected in October 2016

Bringing light to the grey economy

Source: The Economist, 15 October

The transition from an informal to a formal economy is a challenge for many countries, the key to growth and fight against poverty all over the world. To reduce informality, governments have to cut bureaucracy, reduce the burden of taxation, combine structural reform and technological incentives.

When a bubble is not a bubble

Source: The Economist, 15 October

Chinese real estate market is in a bubble, with prices of properties climbed frenetically nationwide. The past years have shown the impact of China’s housing market on the global economy. Particularly worrying is the increase in the price of property mortgages.

Insanely virtual

Source: The Economist, 15 October

China is the world’s most important VR market, more by commercial than by private use. Property firms, in particular, are using VR to sell properties overseas or not yet built. Furthermore, VR software and hardware are being used in the schools.

Presentazione del libro di Pietro Bartolo “Lacrime di sale”

Source: www.pietrograsso.org, 13 October

The President of Italian Senate, like also our university, has met Pietro Bartolo, the physician who has welcomed in Lampedusa 300.000 migrants and thousands of deads. Lampedusa experience shows that, if this challenge is not taken on, Europe forgetting its roots risks a cultural, moral and geopolitical decline.

Bob Dylan wins a Nobel prize

Source: The Economist, 13 October

The literary Nobel has been awarded to the singer that influenced generations of songwriters with his verses, written to be performed with instruments as ancient Greeks used to do, transforming an intellectual thought about politics, protest, and humanity in music and poetry.

Weapons of crass construction

Source: The Economist, 8 October

Every language has its swearwords, whose inspirational fields are universal: religion, sex, bodily wastes, and slurs. States defend their spaces with fines against these improper weapons, that have effects worthy of being studied because shed light on the obscurity of human nature.

Fifty Shades, Sahel-style

Source: The Economist, 8 October

In the markets selling grain and in roadside stands of Muslim Nigeria circulates a “love literature”, that along the thread of virtuous, exemplary novels about housewifery in Cinderella style, tells about child marriage and polygamy, and gives a voice to the women’ oppression.

How one company is defying Italy’s opera curse

Source: The Economist, 10 October

Italian opera is in financial trouble, and only three famous opera houses – La Scala, Turin’s Teatro Regio, and Venice’s La Fenice- are solvent. As public fundings are diminishing, Teatro Regio’s music director has taken the initiative for a fundraising in the industrial district of the city, and its theatre has thrived.

A tale of two ethics

Source: The Economist, 1 October

Many speeches on politics use the Weberian antithesis between “ethic of conviction” and “ethic of responsibility”, ascribed respectively to leftists, and to conservatives. In the contemporary Europe “welcome culture” the two positions lose their traditional political belonging.

Global Citizen Festival: a mash-up of music fans, bands and prime ministers

Source: The Economist, 1 October

Each September in New York takes place a music festival consecrated to the extreme poverty in the world. Tickets are bought through online petitions about vaccines, education and clean water access in the Third World, and world leader are compelled to answer and act.

The low-rate world

Source: The Economist, 24 September

Today the biggest debate in macroeconomics is on the usefulness and responsibility of the policy to keep interest rates slow, which central banks carried out during the financial crisis to prop up a weak economy and which savers had to bear. Now it is governments turn to change things.

10 October European Day against death penalty

Source: http://www.coe.int/en/web/portal

The European Day against the death penalty, on 10 October, has been declared by the European Council in 2007, ten years after that Europe has become a pioneer in the abolition process of death-sentences and the avantgarde zone of human rights.

Remembering the swinging, sit-in Sixties

Source: The Economist, 21 September

A new important show in London takes us back the 60s, years of counterculture and music, the youth’s binding force tied to political movements and the protest, that owe their mythical aura to fashion and the glamour of a system of life become more and more consumeristic.

Rediscovery

Source: The Economist, 24 September

The most important galleries in the world are hosting exhibitions of black artists, and Afro-American art is a material undervalued that the market is eating up. While we wonder how it is, that some artists were ever forgotten because black, we are offered a different version of Western art and one other America.

Hidden in plain sight

Source: The Economist, 24 September

The humane language ability includes a deep knowledge of our mother-tongue so that we know the grammar rules even if we think we don’t know them. The task of the linguists is not to ban the misuse of these hidden rules, but to understand how the human mind works through language.

The story of Shakespeare and Company, a purveyor and part of literary history

Source: The Economist, 26 September

A book tells the history of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, that has been a literary institution since she was founded in 1919, hosting physically the greatest living writers and editing sometimes their works, with its two reviews. The empire of Internet and computers is not a place for bookstores, nor for some literature.

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

October Culture and Society

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