Raffaello Cortina Editore

Stories from a distant past that talk about us. As Sallust wrote: “Myths are things that never happened, but always are.” Medea’s jealousy, Antigone’s mercy, Phaedra’s destructive passion, Hector’s generosity: myths are able to recount all human emotions, collecting an endless source of symbols and tales. By analyzing Greek mythology, we can find the fundamentals of mankind’s psychic structure and a series of examples that represent all the main challenges that humanity could face during its existence. Despite being told for the first time thousands of years ago, these myths can still evoke strong emotions. Because no one is insensitive to a well told story.

Being mothers without forgetting we are women too. Is there a way to hold together these two realities without letting the maternal instinct prevails? Recently we are used to take more care to mothers than to women. While being a mother is an evidencebased fact, being a woman is a far more complex business, almost an enigma. The author here tries to analyze the complexity of being a woman, in order to then understand maternity in a different way: without idealizations and starting from the woman behind every mother. To avoid a society that idolizes the mother while forgets the woman. A counter-intuitive refl ection on maternity and on the maternal function.

 How can we tell if someone is innocent or guilty of a crime?How can we tell if someone is innocent or guilty of a crime?Every story can be analyzed by using mathematical techniques and statistics. Looking at reports, paradoxes and contradictions, we can try to untangle narration from probabilities, to understand how much a narration can be probable and then take the best possible decision on whether to believe it or not. Following the ideas that Edgar Allan Poe expressed in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, the author explains why the theory of probability is a fundamental tool to compare different versions of a story, evaluate relevance and reliability of the evidence and decide in light of the obtained evidence. A well-researched and entertaining essay on reasonable doubt, that mixes literary quotes, logical paradoxes and references to international true crimes: the O. J. Simpson trial, the R v Adams case, the death of Mary Rogers and many more!

Digital and new technologies are really the reasons for our anxiety, stress and loneliness? Are all adolescences’ problems really connected to social media and smartphones? During the history of humankind, the development of new widespread technologies has always been seen as something threatening. That was the case of photography, cinema, TV and then the internet. Every techno-scientific revolution saw the raising of many heralds of doom who said that machines would have brought disaster on man and society. Today the situation is not different, especially against what is considered to be the most dangerous digital creation of these last decades: the smartphone. In fact, it is a common thought that what it is probably the most feared and the most used technology is also cause for anxiety, inattention and social isolation. In face of these beliefs, can permissions to a limited use or prohibitions be the solution? This is the authors’ starting point: unmasking false ideologies and pointless ways, they explain what neuroscience research can tell us about this matter and what are and will be the real challenges of a digital society.

A new book about teenagers in search of identity.In Call Me Adult, Matteo Lancini takes us on a profound journey into the complex world of adolescents. From family dynamics to school, from social media to psychotherapy sessions, from friendship to couple relationships, the author explores how young people build their connections in an ever-changing world. Building on topics such as the uncertainty about the future and the fragility of adults, Lancini offers a powerful reflection: to truly connect with young people, we must know how to listen and respond with empathy.A book that ptovides parents, teachers, and psychologists with the tools to move beyond the rush of doing and rediscover the power of truly being present in relationships.

The complex and fascinating world of space ventures.Earth is our world, while space is a hostile and merciless environment. To explore it, we have to completely reinvent our technology: vehicles other than those on Earth, artificial environments within the spacecraft to protect our life and physiological balance. The challenge of space exploration lies precisely in this: pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology to push us farther and farther. Paolo Ferri, who led the European Space Agency's operations department for years, takes us into the behind-the-scenes of the space missions, revealing us the difficulties, the dead ends, and the unexpected triumphs. The result is a unique adventure to the edge of the universe, and a profound reflection on the potential and the limits of our scientific knowledge.

A great psychoanalyst's reflection on anorexia, pathological addictions and psychosis.This collection of short essays explores, through a psychoanalytic perspective, pathologies such as anorexia, addictions, and psychosis, highlighting the central role of the void, which manifests in different but always determining ways. Substance abuse, social masks, everyday madness, deadly narcissism, self-destructive use of the body, and social segregation are all expressions of the void. What emerges is the replacement of the human partner with an inhuman one: food, drugs, obsession for the body image, etc. This kind of substitutions would be meant to guarantee a final remedy for the anguish but leads life toward death instead.

Few words to tell the story of a culture.We all know that the origins of our culture lie there, in that sunny, windswept peninsula, and in the countless islands that populate the Aegean Sea. It was there that the oldest words in living memory began to be used, and some of them continue to be spoken after more than three thousand years.Giulio Guidorizzi has chosen thirty of them to lead us to the origin of some ideas that are still essential for our culture. Democracy, beauty, violence, law, friendship. Each of these words shows a way of coming up with reality as the Greeks did it, and is intended to bring to life their extraordinary world exploring specific concepts that are still relevant today.

From persecutor to Apostle of Christ. The personal and ideal world of Christianity's "enfant terrible".While he was on a journey approaching Damascus, Paul was "grasped, clasped, conquered" by Christ. From that moment, a few days after the death of Jesus, Paul became the most passionate Christian missionary.The gospel he proclaims is not just a theory, it is also a way of being. That's what his Epistles are: an interwaving of words and life. The theological dissertation is always receptive to the ethical pastoral, existential implication. This journey through the personal and ideal world of the "Apostle par excellence" is an invitation to bring Paul out of its hagiographic pages and into out secularized world.

What kind of world would we have if evolution had taken different paths? And why, instead, did things turned out this way?In his outstanding short story "The Library of Babel", Jorge Luis Borges imagines a seemingly endless place where all the books of the world are collected; those already written and those existing only potentially. Just as a writer can imagine books that have never been written, a scientist in the laboratory can create enzymes that evolution has never created, which are extremely powerful and can do wonderful things. Proteins, DNA, genomes are also some kind of books: they are sequences formed by codes and therefore, in some way, alphabets. Here a literary idea becomes a scientific metaphor. Telmo Pievani teases our imagination, always assisted by scientific evidence, sharing with the reader hypotheses of historical crossroads, parallel universes, potential lives.

The discovery of mirror neurons was a huge revolution not only for the neurological and biological studies, but also for humanities. Anthropological and sociological research is highlighting the paradox of considering ourselves as expressions of the relationships and contexts in which we live.Science, in fact, shows us that intersubjectivity sets its roots in the prenatal stage, throughout the relationship between the fetus and the mother, within wich multisensory connections are developed and are destinated to leave a trace in postnatal memory.Two distinguished scholars of our time draw attention to the importance of recognizing ourselves as sharers, rather than individuals, in order to understand what it means to be human nowadays through an interdisciplinary essay that starts with a scientific discovery and comes to embrace all that underlies the world and the life of our species.