Some years ago I went to a conference that had the CEO of a well-known Italian fashion house as the main speaker. A tall, athletic man with short hair, who on the occasion wore a light-colored three piece. It suited him perfectly. I gave him less than fifty years, only to discover later that he had overtaken them for some time. He told us that towards the end of last year he had found himself looking for a new creative director for the company. The previous one had left office suddenly (and not voluntarily, if one listened to rumors), but…
In the worst days of the lockdown, I read a tweet from a mom who had heard her six-year-old son tell the family’s virtual assistant, “Alexa, I miss my friends.” Alexa replied, “I understand, it’s a bad time, isn’t it?”. The boy had immediately calmed down, demonstrating that, according to the mom, Alexa was infused with an emotional intelligence superior to most humans.
Many on Twitter commented that Alexa’s sentence was a shabby cliché and that they preferred human intelligence, with all its defects and failures, to the automatic generation of trivia.
I tend to agree with the mom. At…
A few days ago, HBO Max announced that it has temporarily removed from its catalog “Gone With the Wind”, due to the anti-racist protests following the assassination of George Floyd. The movie — which depicts benevolent white masters and black slaves who are happy of their condition — was a “product of its time”, a spokesperson said. HBO Max will put the film back on schedule soon, accompanied by a historical introduction to inform viewers about the real conditions of American slaves before the secession war.
HBO Max angered commenters and politicians who claimed — I report the most frequent…
This popular Italian cocktail does not really need a presentation. It is super-easy to prepare: do not listen to amateurs, or self-important bartenders, who tell you that only an exact proportion of carefully chosen ingredients will make a perfect Spritz. A Spritz is always perfect. The real purpose of a Spritz is to make you want to drink another immediately after you finished it, and then another, and another, until the dinner arrives or you decide that you do not need to have dinner after all. This exercise is what the Milanese call “aperocena” (aperitif-dinner), which occasionally involves some sort…
Nicola Misani
Works at Bocconi University. Received his PhD from Radboud University. An economist with a lifelong interest in philosophy and writing.
