Search Results (24)

This article investigates the intricate interplay between ressentiment—as social emotion—social love, and solidarity in democratic societies, focusing on the urban environment as the primary stage where these processes materialize. Far from being a marginal emotion, ressentiment is deeply intertwined with democratic life, arising from the gap between proclaimed values and lived conditions. It represents an affective reaction to the perceived betrayal of the promise of equality inscribed in democratic ideals. The discussion explores how perceptions of injustice can fracture trust and intensify divisions, but also how they, under certain conditions, can be redirected toward political engagement and common action. The city, characterized by density, diversity, and the continuous negotiation of difference, can serve as a privileged arena for this transformation. Urban space does not merely reflect inequalities; it actively shapes social processes and provides the infrastructure through which collective sentiments are articulated. In this context, “social love” is conceptualized not as a sentimental aspiration, but as a relational force capable of redirecting the moral indignation of ressentiment, far from strategies of grievance politics toward constructive forms of social and political belonging. Cities can function as laboratories of solidarity where grievances are reframed into collective projects that strengthen social cohesion. Mitigating the destructive potential of ressentiment requires addressing its structural roots through inclusive urban policies and dialogical spaces. An approach grounded in social love can counter fragmentation, mobilizing emotions in the service of substantive equality. In this perspective, the city can become a space and a laboratory for change, where resentment can be channeled as a generative force capable of sustaining widespread forms of social love and a sense of the common good. Full article

This article argues that journalism plays a structurally significant role in accountability within contemporary democratic governance and therefore warrants constitutional protection beyond traditional press-freedom guarantees. It develops the concept of the Quarta Politica as a constitutional order composed of four branches of democratic governance: legislative, executive, judicial, and ombudsman power. Within this framework, the Ombudsman Council constitutes the Fourth Branch of Power and safeguards the informational, participatory, deliberative, and corrective conditions necessary for democratic legitimacy. The article conceptualizes journalism not as a privileged profession or sovereign authority but as part of the informational infrastructure through which democratic systems monitor and contest the exercise of power. Particular attention is given to a Chamber for the Protection of Journalistic Independence within the Ombudsman Council, designed to protect editorial independence, media pluralism, and informational accountability. The analysis further examines how digital transformation, platform dominance, algorithmic amplification, ownership concentration, and fragmented communication environments undermine the institutional conditions necessary for independent journalism. Situating the framework within theories of horizontal accountability, monitory democracy, and digital constitutionalism, the article concludes that safeguarding the informational foundations of democratic accountability has become a central constitutional challenge of contemporary governance. Full article

This paper examines the influence of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision—particularly Brave New World—on Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, arguing that Smith’s post-Brexit novels can be read as contemporary, politically embedded responses to the dystopian tradition Huxley helped establish. While Smith’s fiction is rarely labelled dystopian in genre, the Quartet is deeply informed by a dystopic sense of cultural, ecological, and political decay in 21st-century Britain. I propose that Smith adopts and adapts key dystopian motifs from Huxley but repurposes them through a radical humanist lens that privileges relationality, art, and memory as sources of resistance and repair. The paper will be structured in three sections. The first outlines Huxley’s dystopian framework, with a focus on Brave New World’s criticism of technological control, emotional appeasement, and the suppression of dissent through pleasure. The second analyzes Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a world not governed by totalitarian regimes but by apathy, misinformation, and ideological fragmentation. The final section traces Smith’s divergence from Huxley: where Huxley’s world often excludes hope in favor of bleak satire, Smith inserts gestures of resistance, particularly through intergenerational friendships, the presence of art and literature, and the recurrence of seasonal cycles as metaphors for renewal. Although Autumn explicitly references Huxley’s Brave New World, sustained critical comparisons between the two authors remain relatively rare. Most scholarship approaches Huxley through the tradition of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, while Smith’s Quartet is typically discussed within the context of Brexit literature and contemporary narrative experimentation. Reading the Quartet alongside Huxley, therefore, reveals an unexpected dialogue between early twentieth-century dystopian critique and twenty-first-century literary responses to political crisis. Full article

In this paper, by means of a comprehensive analysis of the statutory and non-statutory documents that govern its preschool provision, we examine how early childhood education and care (ECEC), particularly in relation to mathematics, is conceptualised by the English educational authorities. Situated within international debates about economic (school-readiness, accountability-driven) versus social (holistic, play-based, rights-oriented) models of ECEC, the study explores how curriculum expectations, assessment practices and didactical guidance collectively frame young children’s learning opportunities. Drawing on a document-based analytic approach, and guided by six literature-derived questions, the analysis reveals significant inconsistencies both within and between documents, including conflicting messages about the purpose of preschool, an uneven emphasis on school readiness, and ambivalent statements regarding the role of play, instruction and practitioner agency, as well as contradictory and shifting expectations surrounding the scope, status and pedagogical treatment of early mathematics. While statutory materials frequently privilege school readiness and narrowly defined number outcomes, non-statutory guidance promotes broader mathematical thinking, exploratory play and child-initiated reasoning. Overall, the findings demonstrate limited coherence across the English authorities’ ECEC expectations and highlight the interpretive and professional challenges faced by practitioners expected to implement this fragmented early years mathematics policy landscape. Full article

Tetrahydrocarbazole (THCz) is a privileged scaffold validated by clinically approved drugs such as ondansetron, frovatriptan, and ramatroban and exhibits diverse bioactivities including antimicrobial, antitumor, antidiabetic, and neuroprotective effects. Despite extensive structure–activity relationship (SAR) studies, a systematic integration of findings across different therapeutic targets has been lacking. This review provides a comprehensive SAR dissection of THCz derivatives across key targets (bacterial sliding clamp, BTK, HDAC, AMPK, etc.), analyzing how modifications at key positions of the core scaffold (N-9, C-1, and C-6) influence potency and selectivity. Notably, we highlight four emerging design paradigms: pharmacophore hybridization, conformational constraint, cross-target SAR decoding, and precision intervention. By consolidating fragmented knowledge into a practical cross-target SAR matrix, this review offers a strategic framework for the rational design of next-generation THCz-based therapeutics. Full article

Through a series of over 100 bilingual interviews with Hispanic San Antonians, the COVID-19 Oral Historias Project documents the Latino/a/e community’s experiences through the pandemic by sharing individual stories, amplifying local voices, and creating compassion in a fragmented time. The present article documents the project itself, contextualizing its creation, detailing its methodology, highlighting the most common themes across interviews, and pointing out its novel contributions. While the interviewees’ experiences are inarguably diverse, narrative threads were found throughout the corpus, united by the duality of the narrators’ experiences; throughout this period, they simultaneously negotiated community norms and official health directives, local and international anxieties, and hopelessness and hope. The project is unique in (1) its language use, privileging minoritized ways of speaking (Spanish and Spanglish); (2) its size, with over 100 interviews; and (3) its clearly delimited scope, with all respondents living in San Antonio. This massive, unified resource creates a public collection of bilingual stories, highlighting non-hegemonic voices that are of value to the community itself, as well as to the recorded history of the pandemic, filling in historical gaps and providing real, lived accounts of this period that might otherwise be lost over time. Full article

Agriculture stands at a pivotal juncture in the twenty-first century, confronting the converging crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and rising food demand, even as it is increasingly recognised as part of the solution. This paper assesses the transformative potential of integrating three emerging paradigms—digital agriculture, regenerative agriculture and decommoditised agriculture—into a unified approach capable of delivering productivity, ecological restoration and economic viability. Digital agriculture deploys artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) networks and remote sensing to optimise inputs and sharpen decision-making. Regenerative agriculture seeks to rebuild soil function, enhance biodiversity and restore ecosystem processes through holistic, adaptive management. Decommoditised agriculture reorients value chains from bulk markets towards quality-differentiated systems that privilege direct producer–consumer relationships, value-added processing and regional market development, enabling price premiums and community resilience. We examine their convergence through the “3N” lens—net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, nature-positive outcomes and nutrition-balanced food systems. Integration creates clear complementarities: digital tools monitor, verify and optimise regenerative practices; regenerative systems provide the ecological foundation for sustainable intensification; and decommoditised models supply economic incentives that reward stewardship and nutritional quality. Persistent barriers include the digital divide, data governance, technical complexity and fragmented policy settings. Realising the benefits will require technology democratisation, interdisciplinary research, enabling regulation and farmer-centred innovation processes. We conclude that converging digital, regenerative and decommoditised approaches offers a credible and necessary pathway to resilient, sustainable and equitable agri-food systems. Full article

The rise of social media platforms has fundamentally reshaped the global information ecosystem, fostering the spread of disinformation. Beyond the circulation of false content, this article frames disinformation as an aesthetic crisis of public communication: an algorithmic reorganization of sensory experience that privileges performative virality over shared intelligibility, fragmenting public discourse and undermining democratic deliberation. Drawing on John Dewey’s philosophy of aesthetic experience and critical theory (Adorno, Benjamin, Fuchs, Han), we argue that journalism, understood as a form of public art rather than mere fact-transmission, can counteract this crisis by cultivating critical attention, narrative depth, and democratic engagement. We introduce the concept of aesthetic literacy as an extension of media literacy, equipping citizens to discern between seductive but superficial forms and genuinely transformative experiences. Empirical examples from Portugal (Expresso, Público, Mensagem de Lisboa) illustrate how multimodal journalism—through paced narratives, interactivity, and community dialogue—can reconstruct Deweyan “integrated experience” and resist algorithmic disinformation. We propose three axes of intervention: (1) public education oriented to aesthetic sensibility; (2) journalistic practices prioritizing ambiguity and depth; and (3) algorithmic transparency. Defending journalism as a public art of experience is thus crucial for democratic regeneration in the era of sensory capitalism, offering a framework to address the structural inequalities embedded in global information flows. Full article

This study uses generative AI to investigate the influence of building façade geometry on human physiological and psychological health. Employing Christopher Alexander’s fifteen fundamental properties of living geometry and a set of ten emotional descriptors {beauty, calmness, coherence, comfort, empathy, intimacy, reassurance, relaxation, visual pleasure, well-being} in separate tests, ChatGPT 4.5 evaluates simple, contrasting window designs. AI analyses strongly and consistently prefer traditional window geometries, characterized by symmetrical arrangements and coherent visual structure, over fragmented or minimalist–modernist alternatives. These results suggest human cognitive–emotional responses to architectural forms are hardwired through evolution, privileging specific geometric patterns. Finally, ChatGPT o3 formulates ten detailed geometric rules for empathetic window design and composition. It then applies these criteria to select contemporary window typologies that generate the highest anxiety. The seven most anxiety-inducing designs are the most favored today worldwide. The findings challenge contemporary architectural preferences and standard window archetypes by emphasizing the significance of empathetic and health-promoting façade designs. Given the general suspicion among many readers of the frequently manipulative and unreliable use of AI, its use in this experiment is not to validate design decisions directly, which would put into question what the AI is trained with, but to prove a correlation between two established methodologies for evaluating a design. AI is used as an analytical tool to show that Alexander’s geometric rules (the guidelines proposed beforehand) closely match emotional reactions (the desirable outcomes observed afterward). This novel use of AI suggests integrating neurodesign principles into architectural education and practice to prioritize urban vitality through psychological well-being. Full article

The phenyl(piperidin-4-yl)methanone fragment (here referred to as the benzoylpiperidine fragment) is a privileged structure in the development of new drugs considering its presence in many bioactive small molecules with both therapeutic (such as anti-cancer, anti-psychotic, anti-thrombotic, anti-arrhythmic, anti-tubercular, anti-parasitic, anti-diabetic, and neuroprotective agents) and diagnostic properties. The benzoylpiperidine fragment is metabolically stable, and it is also considered a potential bioisostere of the piperazine ring, thus making it a feasible and reliable chemical frame to be exploited in drug design. Herein, we discuss the main therapeutic and diagnostic agents presenting the benzoylpiperidine motif in their structure, covering articles reported in the literature since 2000. A specific section is focused on the synthetic strategies adopted to obtain this versatile chemical portion. Full article

The biological activity of compounds directly depends on the three-dimensional arrangement of affinity fragments since a high degree of pharmacophore compliance with the binding site is required. 3-Benzylidene oxindoles are privileged structures due to their wide spectrum of biological activity, synthetic availability, and ease of modification. In particular, both kinase inhibitors and kinase activators can be found among 3-benzylidene oxindoles. In this work, we studied model compounds obtained via oxindole condensation with aldehydes and alkylphenones. These condensation products can exist in the form of E- and Z-isomers and also undergo isomerization in solutions. The factors causing isomeric transformation of these compounds were established. Comparative kinetic studies to obtain quantitative characteristics of UV-driven isomerization were first performed. The results obtained indicate dramatic differences in two subclasses, which should be considered when developing biologically active molecules. Full article

Acetylcholine (ACh) neurotransmitter of the cholinergic system in the brain is involved in learning, memory, stress responses, and cognitive functioning. It is hydrolyzed into choline and acetic acid by two key cholinesterase enzymes, viz., acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE). A loss or degeneration of cholinergic neurons that leads to a reduction in ACh levels is considered a significant contributing factor in the development of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Numerous studies have shown that cholinesterase inhibitors can raise the level of ACh and, therefore, enhance people’s quality of life, and, at the very least, it can temporarily lessen the symptoms of NDs. 1,2,3-triazole, a five-membered heterocyclic ring, is a privileged moiety, that is, a central scaffold, and is capable of interacting with a variety of receptors and enzymes to exhibit a broad range of important biological activities. Recently, it has been clubbed with other pharmacophoric fragments/molecules in hope of obtaining potent and selective AChE and/or BuChE inhibitors. The present updated review succinctly summarizes the different synthetic strategies used to synthesize the 1,2,3-triazole moiety. It also highlights the anticholinesterase potential of various 1,2,3-triazole di/trihybrids reported in the past seven years (2015–2022), including a rationale for hybridization and with an emphasis on their structural features for the development and optimization of cholinesterase inhibitors to treat NDs. Full article

This article seeks to shed light on the doctrinal meanings of the closed garden included in some Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation. To justify the iconographic interpretations that we will give of these paintings, we will base them on the analysis of many medieval liturgical hymns that poetically designate the Virgin Mary through the metaphorical expression hortus conclusus (closed garden) with which the Husband or Bridegroom requisites the Wife or Bride in the Song of Songs. We will divide our article into two parts as a strategy for analysis. First, we will analyze an extensive series of fragments of liturgical hymns that repeatedly praise Mary through this biblical metaphor. In the second part, we will examine some artistic representations of the Annunciation that, in the Italian Renaissance, depict a closed garden in the scene. From this double comparative analysis, textual and iconic, we will conclude that, in direct and essential correlation, those hymnic texts and those paintings clearly illustrate that the hortus conclusus is an eloquent symbol of the virginal divine motherhood of Mary and her perpetual virginity, as well as the excellence and fullness of her supernatural virtues and privileges. Full article

Four new series of aromatic sulfamates were synthesized and investigated for the inhibition of four human (h) isoforms of zinc enzyme carbonic anhydrase, hCA I, II, IX, and XII. The reported derivatives, obtained through the sulfamoylation reaction of the corresponding phenolic precursors, bear 3,5-diarylpyrazoline moieties as spacers between the benzenesulfamate fragment, which binds the zinc ion from the active site as well as from the tail of the inhibitor. Pyrazolines are biologically privileged scaffolds, endowed with a versatile biological activity, such as an anti-proliferative action. The derivatives were tested for the inhibition of the cytosolic in the hCA I and II (off-target isoforms) and the transmembrane, as well as in the tumor-associated hCA IX and XII enzymes (anticancer drug targets). Generally, the hCA I was not effectively inhibited, whereas many low nanomolar inhibitors were evident in the hCA II (KIs in the range of 0.42–90.1 nM), IX (KIs in the range of 0.72–63.6 nM), and XII (KIs in the range of 0.88–85.2 nM). The best substitution fragments at the pyrazoline ring included: for the CA II, a 4-sulfamic group on the 3-aryl, the halogens on the 5-aryl, a methoxy group on the 3-aryl, and a 4-sulfamate group on the 5-aryl; for the CA IX and the CA XII, they included the sulfamic group on the 3- or 4-position of the 5-aryl and an electron-withdrawing group on the 4-postion of the 3-aryl ring. Full article

In recent decades, molecular hybridization has proven to be an efficient tool for obtaining new synthetic molecules to treat different diseases. Based on the core idea of covalently combining at least two pharmacophore fragments present in different drugs and/or bioactive molecules, the new hybrids have shown advantages when compared with the compounds of origin. Hybridization could be successfully applied to anticancer drug discovery, where efforts are underway to develop novel therapeutics which are safer and more effective than those currently in use. Molecules presenting naphthoquinone moieties are involved in redox processes and in other molecular mechanisms affecting cancer cells. Naphthoquinones have been shown to inhibit cancer cell growth and are considered privileged structures and useful templates in the design of hybrids. The present work aims at summarizing the current knowledge on antitumor hybrids built using 1,4- and 1,2-naphthoquinone (present in natural compounds as lawsone, napabucasin, plumbagin, lapachol, α-lapachone, and β -lapachone), and the related quinolone- and isoquinolinedione scaffolds reported in the literature up to 2021. In detail, the design and synthetic approaches adopted to produce the reported compounds are highlighted, the structural fragments considered in hybridization and their biological activities are described, and the structure–activity relationships and the computational analyses applied are underlined. Full article