Paolo Giordano and Sheila Jasanoff on «la Lettura»- Corriere.it

The present time, with its unprecedented scenarios, reveals new questions: the interaction between health, research and democracy, the relationship between art and science or between morality and new technologies. Many of these themes are addressed by thinkers, artists, writers in the new issue of «la Lettura», #596, previewed on Saturday 29 April, on the App and Sunday 30 on the newsstand.

In addition to the most recent number of the insert in preview already on Saturday, the «la Lettura» App for smartphones and tablets (downloadable from the App Store and Google Play) also offers subscribers the weekly newsletter and access to the archive of all the releases since 2011. And every day also a digital-only extra in-depth analysis: the Theme of the Day. Subscribe
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The new issue of «la Lettura», #569, opens with the interview-dialogue of the writer (and physicist by training) Paul Jordan with an Indo-American scholar, Sheila Jasanoff, who will be among the guests of the Scienza e Virgola festival in Trieste (May 4-9) of which Giordano is artistic director. The interview with the scientist, a winner of the Holberg Prize for her studies on the interaction between science, society and politics, starts with how societies have navigated the pandemic and reflects on the degree of citizens’ trust in science and governments . And he gets to think about the gap between technical and moral progress, about the crisis of the “Silicon Valley model”, about what we expect (and what is instead possible to obtain) from artificial intelligence, to the point of wondering if it is not time for a new Enlightenment, more humane. The rediscovered closeness between humanistic and scientific disciplines animates various experiences, in addition to the Trieste festival. In the conversation curated by Stefano Bucci, the scientist is confronted Ariane Koek, founder of Arts at Cern, the first program dedicated to the relationship between art and technology at Cern in Geneva, and the artist Goshka Macuga, who together curate a panel on the subject on May 25 in Florence, at Palazzo Strozzi. And in the App of «la Lettura», in the Topics section, you can read an overview, edited by Bucci himself, on the artists who brought together science and art, with names like Picasso, Mondrian, Fontana among others.

The Israeli writer has also always reflected on frontiers and borders Amos Oz, disappeared in 2018: his text arrives in the bookstore There is still so much to say (Feltrinelli, from 2 May), of which Cristina Taglietti writes. An intellectual testament in which Oz reiterates the need for two distinct states for Jews and Palestinians: “the Reading” proposes a preview of an excerpt from the book. The historian David Reynolds also writes about the struggles for borders, reflecting on the “cost of geography” and territorial conflicts. Frontier writer, right down to the pseudonym by which we know him, he was also Swabian Italian (his name was Aron Hector Schmitz), the Trieste writer who published a hundred years ago Zeno’s conscience with the publisher Cappelli: a reflection of Mauro Covacich underlines the karst path of linguistic and cultural crossings in Swabian.

It’s hard to beat the volume published in 2021 by the artist in terms of crossings and variety Maurizio Cattelan, Index (Marsilio), 123 interviews with international artists, including Madonna, Jeff Koons, Francis Bacon, Emilio Isgrò (the 123 faces are all visible in a collage in the issue): the artist talks about it with Vincenzo Trione in view of the signing he will propose at Palazzo Strozzi on May 5, on the sidelines of the exhibition Reaching for the Stars. And in the App in the Themes section, an extra focus on Trione himself retraces Cattelan’s journey. Another artist who brings together writing and music, the musician Federico Dragogna tells about his first album Where to be born (from May 5) and shares his vision of the song and the writing.

The issue closes with the extensive intervention by Marco Missiroli on the almost ninety-year-old novel Cormac McCarthy, The passenger (Einaudi, like his other novels): the story of an escape, a disappearance and a reflection on time, which arrives in Italy 17 years after La strada, the book that earned the great American master the Pulitzer Prize.