The average rate of multiple births is around 1% on a global scale, but there are many exceptions. Linha Sao Pedro, a small village in Brazil, reaches an abnormal 10%, enough to give rise to conspiracy theories, based on assumed experiments performed by the Nazis… Kodinji and Mohammadpur Umri, in India, have a 4,5% rate, more or less the same of Igbo-Ora, Nigeria, which gained the epithet of “home of twins”, with a welcome billboard as celebration…
Kissinger, diplomacy and sport: from ping pong to USA ’94
From the famous “ping pong diplomacy” to the soccer world cup USA ’94, Henry Kissinger understood before many others the importance of sport in international balance. If the first event changed the relationships between United States and China (and the Cold War), the second one gave birth to a new (but not better) concept of world cup…
New tango in Paris
Tango was inscribed in 2009 on the Represantative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It’s commonly considered Argentinian, but we need to clarify a few things. It’s actually platense, from the mouth of Rio de la Plata, region shared between Argentina and Uruguay; it was born as a fusion of different sounds, rhythms and traditions from South America, Caribbean, Africa and even Europe; as a matter of fact, the current variations of this dance had been “cleaned up” by the Old Continent parlors – especially Paris…
Peak TV, saturation of the shows
We are living in a peak TV era. John Landgraf, president and general manager of FX Network, came up with this definition in 2015, when the United States had 421 shows on air. Now they are more than 500…
We Women: beautiful, dirty and bad
The first change for the “feminine condition” concerns women, precisely, and not men. Men will not help the preconditions, but if the woman first considers herself as a little creature given to sex, motherhood and domestic care, and if she first attacks those women who try to get out of their stereotypes that cage them, please, then don’t complain of male chauvinism. The most serious male chauvinism is that of women…
The role of fear in society
At a social level, fear is a tool of political and religious control. It’s used to build a society which may respond to our concerns about safety and security, guaranteeing a community life. In a present-oriented society, fear prevents from the lost of significance of the daily routine, creating consensus and legitimacy, keeping an unstable order just to avoid to consider new social forms…
If you don’t want terrorism, think about animals
There is a type of person who always complains, when he has the impression that others (organisms, groups or individuals) are taking care of important aspects of human life, but they (seem) do not concern him/her. Then they can’t stand animalists because they only think about animals; environmentalists, because they only think about the environment; volunteers who deal with refugees, because they only think about “saving terrorists”…
Women rights and gender equality: the case of Switzerland
Switzerland is considered one of the best examples of advanced country: neutral in wars, often turning to the main tool of direct democracy (the referendum), civil rights such as euthanasia, headquarter of the Red Cross and host of international treats like the Geneva Conventions. But they have their contradictions as well, banks who accepted tax evaders or Nazis money, a pinch of intolerance and, last but not least, an incredible delay in giving women equal rights. Perhaps not everyone knows that Swiss women got the right to vote only in 1971…
It was a dark and stormy night. And it brought counsel
The night always had a double significance. It was feared, because of the dangers that can hide in the darkness; but also expected to rest and refresh the body and the spirit and being inspiring. Despite the similarity between sleep and death, that was the right time to forget troubles and worries of the day. We also say that night brings counsel, scientific studies confirm popular wisdom…
Roma reacts by telling itself
Reaction Roma is a social movie about the Italian capital city from a suburban point of view, so I went where they would explain the project, in the Renato Nicolini library And this is my suburban trip in Roma…