on «la Lettura» Chile 50 years after the coup – Corriere.it

A season of utopia that lasted less than three years, but which cultivated, among other things, the dream of a socialist, humanist, democratic «artificial intelligence».. With an extensive report on the “Cybersyn project” born in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the new issue of “La Lettura” opens, #608, on Saturday 22 in the App and Sunday 23 on the newsstand.

The report that opens the issue, by Alessia Rastelli and the contemporary historian Gianni La Bella, tells and shows with a rich iconographic apparatus and renderings, the almost novel idea that had as protagonists the Chilean engineer Fernando Flores and the cybernetics guru Stafford Beer, British, to create with Cybersyn a “bottom-up” management of the companies nationalized by Allende. He dedicated a podcast in 9 episodes to the project (The Santiago Boys) Evgeny Morozov, interviewed in the service. An adventure that ended 50 years ago, on 11 September 1973, together with the Allende presidency, crushed in the blood by Pinochet: the articles by Andrea Mulas and Cecilia Bressanelli are dedicated to various aspects of the story.

In addition to the most recent number of the insert previewed already on Saturdays, the «la Lettura» App for smartphones and tablets also offers the archive of all the issues released since 2011 and every day a digital-only extra focus, the Theme of the Day. Subscribing to the App costs €3.99 a month or €39.99 a year, with one week free. The subscription can also be subscribed from the desktop starting from this page. For subscribers, the contents are also visible from PCs and Macs starting from their Profile page

Returning to the supplement, there are many themes. Relaunched from an anthology of short stories (Omenana, Fantastic tales from the African continentBlack), regains strength the Afrofuturist literary strand, in which African cultural traditions, technology and social themes (migrations and colonial exploitation) merge: Matteo Trevisani writes about it. And on the threatened body of black people, from slavery to today, Igiaba Scego reflects, starting from the essay by the scholar Simone Browne dark matters. Dark Matters (Meltemi).

Two great literary returns tell the story of today’s America and England: the new novel by the twice Pulitzer Colson Whitehead (Crook Manifesto
, double day; on August 29 in Italy for Mondadori) is reviewed by Marco Bruna, while Matteo Persivale law The Fraud by Zadie Smith (from 5 September for Hamish Hamilton in the UK and for Penguin in the USA; in the autumn in Italy for Mondadori).

To the artist’s trip to Italy Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) and its surreal stairways is dedicated to the graphic novel by Giuliano Piccininno: an insight into Escher, by Pierluigi Panza, is today’s Theme of the Day in the «La Lettura» App.

The issue closes with a discovery: the coach of the national football team who won two World Cups and an Olympics, Victor Pozzo, had always been considered a fascist. Forgotten documents show that he, on the other hand, actively joined the Resistance: the story and the archival papers are in the article by Alessandro Fulloni.