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Umberto Eco has died

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Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions.....

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.

(from here: http://jowett.web.cern.ch/jowett/EcoMACDOS.htm )

Did he ever say something about Linux?

Let's go with Mormons.

Anciently, there was the UNIX. But the UNIX was held close by those who had received it, and the world trembled in darkness, because there was no UNIX to light the way. But then came Linus Torvalds, attempting to discover which of the systems was true, and, as he reviewed the ancient operating systems, discovered wisdom enough to seek the UNIX.

And BEHOLD, as Linus went forth to meditate on which operating system was best, he was visited by the UNIX in a pillar of Code. The UNIX told him that all operating systems had departed from the best way, and informed Linus where he must go to seek a restoration of the true ways of UNIX.

And Linus was led to the side of the hill Codemorah, wherein he discovered golden algorithms and clear glass compilers. And will the clear glass compilers, he translated the golden algorithms into this: the Linux operating system. It is evidence of his prophesional calling, and any who use it can attest the Linus was truly shown the best way, through the Spirit and Power of UNIX.

(I will show myself out now :) )

Paganistic druids without the priestly shroud, revealing all sources of revelation to man, existence its barest form, for all to extend, rewrite, and revise for the solitary path of revelation must bear the unique fingerprint of the journeyman.

Buddhism. Leading you towards the path of enlightenment!

Good luck understanding the terminology unless you get it from the source.

I was thinking more of SmallTalk for Zen (Enso)

or TempleOS?

For those interested the the full text of the essay this passage is from:

http://cliffarnold.com/macvdos.pdf

The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS

Published in Espresso on September 30th, 1994

Umberto Eco

What an utterly gratuitous comparison; that kind of thing could be said about almost anything (beef meat is Catholic, horse meat is Protestant! Reddit is Catholic, HN is Protestant! etc.)

That is sort of the joke.

Eco's journalistic pieces are quite short and he tends to take an everyday thing and run with it making its absurdity show up more with each paragraph.

There are collections in English of the newspaper articles available. Each piece can be quite entertaining but the books of collected articles were not intended to be read from beginning to end.

So with the advent of OSX, i.e. GUI+Unix, the Mac combined Catholicism and Protestantism again in one ecumenic world church of operating systems? ;)

This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language.

That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and a not-too-well-simulated, ironic distance, makes him a top artist by any standard.

There's an internet subculture that might appeal to you: people who write elaborate, thoroughly scathing reviews on Amazon for widely admired masterpieces.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2010/04/03/mean_amazon_reviews_open2010...

If that quote shows how overrated he is, I should read more of his stuff.

Interesting. Mind recommending someone else we ought to read instead?

I always recommend Italo Calvino. An underrated Italian writer IMHO. The Baron In The Trees or the Invisible Cities are a good start.

I remember that my teacher of Italian in high school asked us to read: "The Path to the Nest of Spiders".

That's Calvino's first novel, and it has a completely different style - and is much more boring as far as I remember- from everything he wrote afterwards. I think it was often chosen in Italian high schools for political reasons - it's a story about the Italian resistenza, the fight of partisans against fascists from which the modern Italian republic was born.

His subsequent novels and collections of short stories depart completely from that neo-realistic style. The way to describe them is possibly "a literary Bach" - his stories seem to develop fantastic themes in an endlessly imaginative way, exploring all the possibilities afforded by the theme, (loose) internal consistency and language. My favourites are "Cosmicomics" and "The invisible cities" .

Calvino is one of the most well know Italian writer abroad. Not underrated at all.

Incidentally translated into English by the same man that translated most of Umberto Eco's work, the late great William Weaver.

While Calvino is great, I wouldn't call someone who won a Nobel prize for literature underrated.

Calvino did not win the Nobel. The latest Italian to win it was Dario Fo.

I have read all of Eco's novels and enjoy his work very much. Other authors I like are Borges, Calvino, and Mulisch.

I love Eco, Borges, and Calvino—but have never heard of Mulisch. I'll have to check him out—thanks!

You might also like Neal Stephenson's In the beginning... was the command line (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html)

One remarkable thing about The Name of the Rose is that the characters in it don't think and talk like modern people who happen to have been transported into the Middle Ages. They seem to think differently -- about what's possible, what people can expect from life, how you know things, what counts as an argument...

Possibly my favorite part:

"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you say it?"

"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?"

"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."

The "mystic from your land" was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that in his Tractatus 591 years after that conversation was set, in modern rather than medieval German ("Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist") - "he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it".

Umber Eco was one of the greatest scholars of Middle Age's philosophy. It is a great delight for all of us that he decided to share his knowledge in the form of a Novel. I don't think you can find any other writer capable of translating the thinking of ordinary men from Middle Ages into a book like he did.

To be able to translate that into novels that are as accessible as his novels are is a rare gift.

Most would describe Eco's work as 'challenging' rather than accessible.

I really doubt we know very much about how people thought back then. There are many filters between what was thought, who knew how to write it down, the form people used to express thought in written form, what happened to be copied or survive.

Ex: People don't actually believe in Santa Clause, but if you randomly chose 10,000 pages to represent US thought from 1800 to now. Them handed them to scholars in the future there is a solid chance you they would assume it was the major religion.

I suspect sea monsters may simply be a similar tall tail and we lost context.

PS: Ok, we can reasonably assume people got hungry :D

Is it not true that Santa Claus is the major religion? Many don't believe, but nearly all worship just the same.

There is no God but The Dollar, and Santa Claus is his prophet.

Santa Claus is a false prophet, an imposter. Sinterklaas [0] is the original, the real deal.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

That reminds me of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, on thanksgiving:

Anya: I love a ritual sacrifice.

Buffy: Not really a one of those.

Anya: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.

It's funny how we consider certain cultural behaviors to be wildly different when they're "ours" versus "theirs" even if they're pretty similar if you can step back and observe them objectively.

"If you used historical techniques on us, you'd get completely the wrong idea!" Maybe. Or maybe you'd finally get the right idea.

I'd love to write more, but I've finished ingesting the stimulants that allow me to tolerate my oppressive culture (drinking coffee), and I'm going to take a short trip to worship the revered dead (visit the National Mall).

Imagine trying to explain to an ancient Greek philosopher how Christianity is monotheistic.

So, you have one God, but also a demigod, who is his son. There's a god of the underworld you call satan, and a number of divine or demonic creatures called angels and demons. Ok, throw in some ancestor worship in the form of saints.

This monotheistic pantheon would have sounded reassuringly familiar your ancient Greek interlocutor.

It is true that we can never know this completely, but that is true about anything else in history. You would be amazed, however, to see what can be learned from reading the original languages, researching their homes, household utensils, popular art, etc.

For much of history, religion and culture were one and the same. As Santa Claus is a cultural icon, future scholars wouldn't be too far from the mark.

You'd be surprised. Read Baudilino by Eco, which speaks to this precise point.

I just pulled Baudolino back off the shelf this morning, going to try to make it through this time. I love the idea of the untrustworthy narrator, and the writing is excellent, though dense. like Foucault's Pendulum, I find Baudolino hard to read straight through, though I'm sure it will ultimately be just as rewarding.

It is. You have to give this book some time, but it is just Eco's way to present though provoking ideas.

Historians are not machine learning algorithms, they are capable of deriving much more complex inferences. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't believe Santa Claus was a major religion.

It's not medieval philosophy, with "years after that conversation was set", the poster you're replying to means 600 years. The book should not be seen as an historic work.

That's one of many modern references in the book (to Borges, Sherlock Holmes, the conventions of the whodunnit, etc) but I think it's clear that some effort is being made by Eco to exhibit the thought processes and preoccupations of the medieval mind.

Anachronistic quotations happened quite often in ancient and medieval writing, so Eco was just having a bit of fun.

I agree that the Name of the Rose is not an historic work (incidentally so did Eco), but plenty of medievalists think that it is good enough to be a useful teaching tool:

http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/fall-2009/postscr...

Do you know how medievalists view the Accursed Kings series of Maurice Druon?

This reminds me of the philosopher whose name I can't recall now who claimed that consciousness came into being some 3,000 years ago

Probably Julian Jaynes/Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of thr Bicameral Mind?

Neal Stephenson also picked up that idea in Snow Crash

Because books speak of books, as with the manuscript, which is a letter about a book about a book about another book, until at the lowest level the story speaks of even more lost works, whose ideas survive through the hand of a scribe who does not understand them. And the burning of the library becomes a burning bush, releasing not destroying knowledge, for it is the light that matters.

It is my favourite of his as well. And thank you for sharing the joke about Wittgenstein. :)

Foucault's Pendulum was maybe the most transformative book I've ever read - it changed how I think about literature (and of course the Knights Templar). Ah well, guess it's time to reread it. :(

It took me four months to get through that thing, what with its weird random digressions. One chapter would be talking about the Knights Templar building treasure-tunnels under France, and suddenly the next chapter would open with a paragraph explaining why a woman's physiology is better suited for playing pinball than a man's.

A compelling read, but I was never quite sure what facts would end up being important to the plot.

(FWIW, the pinball fact was not)

>A compelling read, but I was never quite sure what facts would end up being important to the plot.

The plot is seldom the main point in literature, especially good literature -- it's mostly a vehicle to convey thoughts and observations about life, the universe and everything as opposed to the end goal (as in a (common) detective story or a pulp thriller).

I wish writers (and readers) really understood that. It is so boring to open a book that reads just like a Hollywood movie script and has no depth to justify reading.

Well, yeah. Foucault's Pendulum is to me what Finnegan's Wake is apparently to many others - certainly not a casual read; more something to pick apart slowly and ponder the subtle mysteries of. But even underneath all the digressions and metaphysics, I still find the core story enjoyable as well.

Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see.

"Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see."

How does it compare on that score to The Illuminatus Trilogy[1], written more than a decade before Eco's book?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus

The Illuminatus Trilogy is a couple of guys getting stoned and screwing around with various goofy ideas. Like a lot of postmodern stuff, it doesn't take much of anything, especially its subject seriously.

Foucault's Pendulum is a very smart guy who knows a lot, pointing out that, if you peel an onion you won't find anything in the center.

Illuminatus! is a work of satire, so it not taking itself seriously is part of the point. If you want to really get something out of it you have look beyond the psychedelic sillyness, and read up one some of the countless philosophical/occult concepts and historical oddities referenced in the story.

I think there's rather more to the Illuminatus trilogy than that. And I say that as big fan of Eco who has enjoyed his deeply obscure stuff as well as his more well-known works.

Conspiracy thinking is a cancer: it will destroy you.

It's perfect to read them one right after the other.

Another layer to the book is that there were plenty of real conspiracies in Italian politics during the period in which it is set. It was published at around the time that information on Gladio [1] became public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

I also suggest Baudolino. It is a fantastic story exploring the world of war and religion in the Middle Ages.

Also it's freaking hilarious.

I also suggest Baudolino. It is a fantastic story exploring the meaning of truth and lies in a timeless manner.

That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.

Which is the direst critique one can address to any book! It's the book's (and author's) failure, not your own, to be incomprehensible and pedantic.

God bless this way of thinking has come to its end place in the greatest work of American writing ever made: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/.

Naa, I was just not the intended audience, and maybe a few decades too young.

If a child cannot understand the scope and themes of, say, Montaigne's Essais, is this a fault of Montaigne's? The Pendulum is similarly loaded with concepts and ideas.

Montaigne isn't pedantic and doesn't use fancy words.

It is a reason for not reading it and worthwhile information.

Your comment however was arrogant and uncalled for.

I guess it's a matter of perspective, but my first read was similar, and it made me feel smart.

I actually listed all the words I had to look up on a 3x5 index card and used it for a bookmark. I no longer have it but I definitely remember "numinous" was on there, along with many others.

I don't know which translation have you read. The fact is that translators rarely understand all the subtleties of Eco's original, translate it incorrectly and thus the translations are much more confusing than they should be.

English readers were very fortunate to have William Weaver as the translator. Umberto Eco himself said --only half in jest-- that Weaver's translation of the Name of the Rose was better than the original.

For me it was the only book ever where, once I'd put it down, I couldn't remember where I had been when I picked it up again (after some time had passed).

That's because it keeps jumping from subject to subject, revisiting some, and sometimes even repeating the same information in different ways. I was completely lost after a while, but I didn't have the heart to start from the beginning. It's a very big book.

I did enjoy it though, in a way because I got so lost in it, that after a while it didn't make any difference where I was and what I'd read. It was a bit like floating into someone's dreams.

Also, it put me off my New Age books for ever - you know the ones, Alistair Crowley, Dion Fortune and the like. I'm much happier with technology than magic, thank you. Thank you professor Eco, that is.

I didn't read any of his novels (yet), but this I consider one of the most important documents I'm aware of.

http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini's fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Normally I tell everyone to read The Name of the Rose first and be happy, but for you I think you should start with The Mysterious Flame of queen Loana, even though it's one of his less accessible works. Much of it is a fictionalized memoir on how fascism became embedded in the fabric of daily life during Mussolini's reign, although this concern with mass movements and the dangers they pose to thinking individuals is a consistent theme in his work.

Oh, thank you so much! I will be sure to check it out.

Read it last year, it was really a much enjoyable read.

> Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.

He wrote a whole book about this: The Prague Cemetery.

I started reading Numero Zero for the first time a few days ago, and decided to stop, because I had a feeling he might be dying soon. It's the last book of his I have left to read, and I wanted to make sure I had something to read of his after he passed. Sorry I don't have to wait.

RIP -- Mr. Eco. Your books instilled in me the love of reading when no one else could. I will always owe you one.

It's sad to lose such a great thinker.

For those who haven't read anything by Eco but want something more digestible on a Friday evening than a novel, I highly recommend his essay Ur-Fascism. Eco was brilliant and had a clear-eyed view on the lasting impact of the Middle Ages into today... and it's pretty clear how growing up in a fascist society impacted his views.

http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

His reflections on fascism remain as important as ever.

Harper Lee and Umberto Eco in the same day. It's like when Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day.

A search engine tells me that Cervantes died on April 22nd and Shakespeare died on the 23rd (1616).

It's even worse than that... According to Wikipedia:

"Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, but England was still using the Julian calendar. Shakespeare's death on 23 April 1616 (Julian) was equivalent to 3 May 1616 (Gregorian). This was 10 days after Cervantes was buried and 11 days after he died."

It's still an astonishing near-coincidence and I'm glad that you mentioned it.

To paraphrase Borges, they should have died on the same day.

forgive my ignorance, but what is the Borges' sentence being rephrased?

One of Shakespeare's lost works, a collaboration with John Fletcher, was the History of Cardenio which is believed to have been based on a section of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote was quite popular in English so it's kind of exciting to think of Shakespeare reading Don Quixote.

You gotta admit, that's better than the other way 'round.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died the same day.

The 4th of July, 50 years after 1776.

"Is it the Fourth?" - Jefferson's last words.

Adams' were 'Thomas Jefferson still survives', even though Jefferson had died hours before.

I smell a replacement for the birthday problem in introductory probability courses.

A problem to prepare talented probability students for the realities of the kinds of probabilities actuaries actually calculate for a living...

Absolutely. A century has around 36500 days. If you compose a list of 100 people who died on that century, your chances of hitting the same day more than once are estimated at almost 13%. As a matter of fact, even 28 people will get you over the 1%.

I'm going to re-read The Name of the Rose this weekend and raise a glass in thanks to all the pleasure that this wonderful writer has added to my life.

Great book!

"The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possesed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 491.

In addition to literary works, Umberto Eco also had a hand in designing a card game. The game used custom designed cards to represent characters and verbs which the players would use to tell a story. Some information (and photos) are available at Board Game Geek:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104411/fabula-il-gio...

Thanks. The idea reminds me of another great Italian novelist, Italo Calvino, and his 1973 novel "The Castle of Crossed Destinies". From Wikipedia:

"Its narrative details a meeting among travellers who are inexplicably unable to speak after travelling through a forest. The characters in the novel recount their tales via Tarot cards, which are reconstructed by the narrator." (that is, the narrator observes the sequence of cards chosen and reconstructs the stories after them).

The concept of the anti-library definitely shaped my approach to knowledge a lot.

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...

It's 1:45 am here in Italy and this news is a true shock.

We read Name of the Rose in my 10th grade English class and it was a tome that challenged us all for the couple of weeks that we pored over it. I love that book. I've read it one other time since then and it's amazing the number of layers that continue to appear when you read it a second (and, presumably, a third) time. When you spend so much time dissecting somebody's work, you develop a sort of relationship with them, one that forms easily when you have a teacher that distills a deep appreciation for the work you're knee deep in trying to understand.

Mr. Eco you will be missed.

I had kind of that experience with the Aeneid, and my friend had kind of that experience with the Divine Comedy. There's a lot of it out there to be had when people are lucky enough to get into the right situation with the right people!

After the 10th or 11th reading of Rose I had internalized the book well enough that I wasn't finding anything new and could recall whole pages of it from memory, but I keep rereading it every year or so because of the sheer sensual pleasure it evokes. I must be up to about 25 readings now and I was just thinking it was time for another.

It's probably worth mentioning that very recently Eco, along with other writers such as Hanif Kureishi and Tahar Ben Jelloun, decided to leave his long-time publisher, Bompiani, and start a new publishing house, named "La nave di Teseo" (Theseus' vessel). It did that at 83, investing 2 millions euros in the process. Remarkable.

Foucault's Pendulum is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. He'll be missed.

I can't believe how many legendary people have died in the last few months. I still remember reading Foucault's Pendulum when it came out in English - I was too young to really dig the story at the time, but I can recall struggling to get my head around some his prose because he was just on a whole different level from the other books I had been reading back then.

I read Baudolino some years ago, but didn't come away from it with the same sense of awe that I got from reading Name of the Rose, or Foucault's Pendulum.

Hearing the news I couldn't help but think about the first game I've ever played, "La Abadia del Crimen", a version of "The Name of the Rose", for Amstrad CPC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Abad%C3%ADa_del_Crimen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDBDAVxwIxo

I liked the book, The Name of the Rose. Got me hooked on historical fiction books after such as Sarum among others.

Not a bad film too with Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

- This story claims it's a hoax:

http://en.mediamass.net/people/umberto-eco/deathhoax.html

"On Friday (February 19) the author's reps officially confirmed that Umberto Eco is not dead. “He joins the long list of celebrities who have been victimized by this hoax. He's still alive and well, stop believing what you see on the Internet,” they said."

- Wikipedia reverted the notice of his death, saying it was a false rumor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Umberto_Eco&actio...

Edit: Now Wikipedia is saying that he's dead.

Edit2: Now the BBC is reporting his death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11137855

From: http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2016/02/20/news/morto_lo_sc...

> La conferma della scomparsa dell'autore de "Il nome della Rosa" e de "Il pendolo di Focault" è stata data dalla famiglia a Repubblica. La morte è avvenuta alle 22.30 di ieri sera nella sua abitazione.

Which says that his family has confirmed it to La Repubblica, which is a respected Italian newspaper.

I almost feel how this is how he would have wanted to go - with conflicting reports from contemporary sources.

I thought exactly the same thing. I can imagine the author smiling at this.

<quote>What is true?</quote> he would say.

Mediamass is a terrible website. They flood their site with "X dying is a hoax", so they build high pagerank on that phrase, and when someone actually dies, they are first.

So like content farms, only with deaths.

Mediamass is a parody site, similar to The Onion but not as funny. If you look on any of their articles, they contain a disclaimer, "UPDATE: This story appears to be false," which links to a page[1] explaining that everything is made up.

[1]: http://en.mediamass.net/blog/mediamass-project

Not really funny, more like fake articles to get pagerank that tries to pass as a satire.

I trust that dang et al will replace the link with one in English when it becomes available.

(Which he/they have, transporting/merging the comments with this story... that was kind of weird)

http://www.euronews.com/2016/02/20/italian-author-and-intell...

Frigging 2016. The hecatomb year.

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