Author Archives

  • Su un treno italiano

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    Come si era potuti arrivare a tanto? pensavo mentre guardavo la ragazza. Sui trent’anni, rossa di capelli & ben piazzata, stava telefonando. Lei un controllore di biglietti su un treno regionale della tratta Roma-Firenze: telefonava ma nessuno rispondeva. Io in… Read More ›

  • Big Data and AI strategies

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    We live in the so-called dataquake: ‘A few thousands of years ago, you needed to be a god or goddess if you wanted to be painted, be sculpted, or have your story remembered and told. A thousands years ago you… Read More ›

  • J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

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    Cimino, The Deer Hunter

    “Our elegy is a sociological one” says J.D.Vance at some point in his spellbinding book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”1. Elegy was the funeral chant in ancient Greece – a place to mourn the… Read More ›

  • Art in Fractured Times

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    In Madrid, at the Reina Sofia Museum of Contemporary Art, a special exhibition charts this year the artistic travail Picasso had to endure to realize Guernica for the World Exhibition held in Paris, 1937. Surely that was the most famous of… Read More ›

  • Relentless pace of automation

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    It must have felt slightly odd when, at the Morreeb Dunes Festival 2017, United Arabs Emirates, robots substituted human jockeys in the camel race. In his farewell speech, in Chicago, Obama explicitly said: The next wave of economic dislocations won’t… Read More ›

  • Pankaj: Age of Anger

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    In 1862, Dostoevsky visited London for the World Exhibition. The Crystal Palace transfixed his mind. He penned the following perceptive remarks: “You  sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not… Read More ›

  • Burleigh: Small wars, Far away places

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    This splendid book by Michael Burleigh “Small Wars, Faraway Places”1 is an intellectual delight which surely deserves to be read time and again.  The faraway places under scrutiny are, among others, Korea, Middle East, Malaya & Philippines, Indocina, Algeria, Kenya &… Read More ›

  • Una nota di Pier Paolo Pasolini

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    Apparsa sul Il Reporter del 19 gennaio 1960, col titolo “La comicità di Sordi, gli stranieri non ridono”, questa interessante nota di Pier Paolo Pasolini sembra, al solito, capace di una penetrazione psicologica straordinaria. Riproduco qui sotto la nota per intero,  a… Read More ›

  • Chua-Rubenfeld: The Triple Package

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    Historical inaccuracy aside, the ads for a variety of butter you could see in London few months ago was truly great – it stressed a point deeply at variance with the liberal consensus. Of course ‘building empires’ is not exactly… Read More ›

  • Edward Wilson: ‘On Human Nature’

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    The book “On Human Nature” 1 by Harvard myrmecologist Edmund O. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize (1979) in consideration of the deep questions it poses and the preliminary answers it tries to furnish. It revolves essentially around the idea of… Read More ›