A chemist’s book changed John Barnett’s life.
The graphic artist’s Carbon illustrates an element’s journey from a star to his brain We are delighted to repost a review of John Barnett’s beautifully conceived visual meditation on the…
Essays
Aldo Braibanti: The Scandal of the Imagination
A modern anarchist outlines a new ecological horizon where man renounces the idea of primacy over other living beings. Imagination is his main instrument: when he puts it to…
The State, the Church, and the Constitution.
Piero Calamandrei’s statement at the Constitutional Assembly, March 1947 Two years after the liberation of Italy, April 25th, 1945, the Constitutional Assembly discussed how to define the relation between Church…
A Memory of Le Murate
I was released from Le Murate three days ago. In my section, there was an inmate from Prato – the nicest man, who had been “in” for the past fourteen…
Memorial Stones
The complex and often elusive workings of memory (including the memory and memorialization of the Shoah) have been often explored also by literature, from the immediate post-war period to the…
Where are sociologists when we need them?
We are facing a new world: in recent months, the pandemic, the shortcomings of our political system, the unrestrained use of social media, the crisis of traditional journalism, ideological polarization,…
Legitimizing Fascism Through the Holocaust?
The reception of the TV miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano in Italy. As the Holocaust becomes increasingly present in the political discourse in the US, Europe and Israel, this reflection by…
Images of Rebirth and the DP Camps in Southern Puglia
The section of the UNRRA archive about refugees in Italy is filled with hundreds of thousands of documents. They give us a glimpse of the men and women who worked in…
A Note From a Refugee of 75 Years Ago
While browsing the files of the UNRRA archive looking for data on the DP camps at Santa Maria di Leuca, I found this memo that a refugee named Ladislav Lang…
La Famiglia Rosselli – Una Tragedia Italiana
At first glance and especially from a certain distance, Amelia Rosselli, reclining in her rocker on the front porch of the little house at 9 Clark Court in Larchmont, seemed…