In this second issue of ZRAlt! we give the floor to the “greatest poet of all time”, Albert Einstein, who on his part, continues to enlighten us about the productive relationship between crisis and creativity, perfectly in line with the inspiring philosophy of our magazine:

“Let’s not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same. A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, to any nation. For all crises bring progress. Creativity is born from anguish, just like the day is born form the dark night. It’s in crisis that inventiveness is born, as well as discoveries made and big strategies.  He who overcomes crisis, overcomes himself, without getting overcome. (…) There’s no challenge without a crisis. Without challenges, life becomes a routine, a slow […]

Images from a Tuareg refugee camp in Burkina Faso

Pino Bertelli

to all the children died in wars, because of the hunger and the rapaciousness of a gang of arrivistes …

“The present social system provides no means of action other than machines for crushing humanity; whatever may be the intentions of those who use them, these machines crush and will continue to crush as long as they exist. With the industrial convict prisons constituted by the big factories, one can only produce slaves and not free workers, still less workers who would form a dominant class.  […]

Peace marching alone like the Buddhist monk Toyoshige Sekiguchi, praying and beating a small drum to bring his campaign for nuclear disarmament and to support Harmony between religions

Toyoshige Sekiguchi and Pina Calì

As we observe the increasing power of catastrophic natural disasters over the recent years, we should not be satisfied with patched preparation for them. We need to be aware that these casualties which we never experienced before are preceding signs of a coming greater disaster, the war. We must stop the war.  […]

The recovery of Beauty to earthquake-stricken L’Aquila

Walter Tortoreto

During a meeting organized by the publishing house One Group and held in the restored Oratorio di San Giuseppe (Oratory of St. Joseph) in L’Aquila, among the other guests, was the Venetian philosopher Massimo Cacciari, an intellectual immersed into the social and political realities also due to his current role of Mayor of his hometown, after Mr. Ugo Bergamo and before Mr. Paolo Costa, and “laureate politician”, as few years ago Bucharest University conferred him a honorary degree in Political Sciences.  […]

People and politics on the Internet: from the aesthetics to the “feeling” through the CT  (Catastrophe Theory ”) – Part two

Giuseppe Siano

Jacques Derrida assigns a personal measure to “touch” and “sight”; though divided into different categories of perception, touch and sight let emerge, due to their organic cross-relation with respect to the observer, some messages and feelings that radiate outward towards multiple directions in a sensorial environment. […]

The living people in the ghost town

Stefano Ianni and Francesco Paolucci

“L’Aquila – The abandoned, quite and deserted town for many years now, gains back its voice and sends rarefied messages to those who still have the strength, the persistence and the devotion to visit it, to explore its wounds and to search for the answers.

Footsteps of living people, not of ghosts, echo in the empty alleys  […]

When imagination tries to reproduce the “embittered reality”

Gabriele Lucci

“If I were fire, I would consume the world …….”.

Don’t worry about that! The volcanic eruptions, the global warming, the several tsunamis and the insane nuclear experiments will do the job for you. And, should we be in a tight spot, we can still hope for alien invasions.

Is there a better way other than resorting to the nice genre of disaster movies to dispel our fears about the uncertain future, the uncertainty of our common end? […]

Culture as a lever to reason, thought, utopia and change

Anna Maria Giancarli

In the historical transition of our times, Italian culture looks like an old, shiny downward curve, among degenerative political and social processes, destructions of critical thinking and widespread uncritical acceptance of the current intellectual and cultural degeneration […]