No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Lusitania sank in less than twenty minutes. The Lusitania that truly mattered never did. Most people remember Lusitania as the British ocean liner torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, a tragedy that helped reshape the course of the First World War. Long before it was the name of a ship, however, Lusitania was the name of a land – a civilization whose greatest voyages began not on the ocean, but in the mind. More
No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 This year, I spent Orthodox Easter several thousand kilometres away from home, in a corner of the world where the Christian calendar leaves barely a faint imprint on the public rhythm of life. My stay in Malaysia, at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, through an Erasmus+ mobility program – interrupted by a brief foray into Singapore, coinciding with the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night, when, instead of the candles of home, I found myself gazing at the surreal illuminations of Gardens by the Bay –, placed me in a world that seemed, at first glance, radically other. More
No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 The visit of Professor Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Ph.D., and Associate Professor Mihaela Iacob, Ph.D., under the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility for Teaching (STA) scheme, to Universiti Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, April 6-10), was conceived from the outset as an exercise meant to move beyond the constraints of mere comparability, highlighting instead the deeper scientific compatibility of the nowadays world. Beyond the inevitable need for mutual translation between distinct cultural and intellectual frameworks, what ultimately prevailed was a shared vein toward knowledge and critical inquiry – mediated by economics and empathy. In the lectures “Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Imagination: Rethinking the Cultural Economy of Industrial Revolutions” (Political Economy) and “The Market for Ideas amid Social Settings and Institutional Infrastructures: A Glimpse from Economics+” (Critical Thinking), layered meanings of the inescapable contemporary acronym “AI” – “artificial intelligence” and “artistic imagination”; “agoras of ideas” and “accelerated internationalization” – were revisited, across times and spaces, featuring as subtle junctions between technology and sensibility, as well as between sciences and consciences. More
No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 There is, in the way humanity names its grand projects, a form of allegorical memory that refuses to fade. The Apollo program was not merely a technological demonstration; it was an invocation of order, light, and reason amid the epic tensions of the Cold War. Today, Artemis brings onto the stage not another god, but a sister – a possible correction to “solarian” excesses. Artemis embodies rhythm, cyclicality, a return that is less triumphalist and more contemplative. NASA itself speaks, in recent communications, of “sustainable exploration,” suggesting that the epic is no longer about “reaching” the Moon, but about “settling” upon it. Myth does not disappear, it refines itself: from heroic gesture to ecosystemic one. In this sense, naming no longer legitimizes ambition alone, but responsibility as well – an ethics of human presence beyond Earth, in which mythological symbolism functions as a cultural compass within an increasingly “abstractly-technological” universe. More
No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 For several years now, the International Conference on Business Excellence has become more than a platform for presenting research – it is increasingly a space where disciplines intersect and where emerging ideas are tested against real-world complexity. The recent 2026 edition, hosted in Bucharest between March 26 and 28, reaffirmed this role by bringing together scholars exploring the evolving relationships between business, society, technology, and governance. More
No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 Davosian Man. These words do not express a consecrated anthropological concept; rather, it is an exploration. We are not speaking of a missing link from some prehistorical past, but rather of a relic of the future. This Man legitimizes himself, in a burst of ad hoc anthropology, as a resident of a suite of concentric worlds: the world of those who attend the plenipotentiary and masterminded environment of the World Economic Forum; then the world of those concerned with the purposes and mechanisms of the globe, including those situated at a greater distance than those who pay the minimum USD 25,000 “socializing fee” to attend the respectable conclave; finally, the whole world, which is ever born from the interplay of representations and resolutions produced by those who make the world revolve around their own axes. In this sense, we are all “Davosians,” even if we do not chat directly with the trendsetters but only with their ideas or, more passively, submit ourselves to them. More
No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 The year 2025 can be understood economically not only through its conjunctural indicators, but also through the fertile tension between “sense” and “sensibility”, remarkable, in their distilled, essentialized embodiments, as science and art. By the way, we just celebrated a quarter of a millennium since the birth of Jane Austen, the author-global-phenomenon, who treated and titled, in her debut novel (Sense and Sensibility), the intellect-affection duality, active in each of us and in all our societies. Beyond routine-becoming boom-bust cycles, there is an “exceptional economy”, in which value is not generated linearly, but through ruptures at the level of clichés and taboos. The process is not always happy – the “brain” conceives evil, and the “heart” does not thwart rage. However, science/Truth and art/Beauty – with a quasi-quantum shrewdness – converge in the compass of the Good. More
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 Academic disciplines, like nations, cultivate myths about their origins. Economics especially. Some say it was born from rational choice. Others swear by spontaneous order. Some invoke institutions, others values. Each camp writes its own genealogy; each believes the plot finds its resolution in itself. Yet if there is one lesson that social sciences should have learned by now, it is this: intellectual monocultures are lethal. A discipline does not collapse because it disagrees – it collapses because it stops disagreeing. More
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 There is no such thing as a closed science – the problem is not the (un)expected novelty, but the old, still unresolved epistemic conflicts. It is also the story of economics. From the classics and the revelation of price as a social compass, to the marginalists and the subjective revolution of utility; from the Keynesians, with their emphasis on aggregate demand and public policies, to the monetarists’ reply and then to the rigorous micro-foundations of the neoclassical “synthesis”; from the new macro- to the behavioural economics to be incorporated into fancy impact assessments (which no longer add apples to oranges, but make juice out of the both). Each stage wanted to have the “last word”, but the quarrel of the wise (among themselves and then with the world) continues unabated. The contemporary “synthesis” is not a stable temple, but a construction site. With plenty of scaffolding and sequelae. More
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Before we discuss artificial intelligence, let’s test a bit of human intel. When carefully scrutinizing Romania–Kazakhstan relations, we have in mind a case study of Europe–Asia ties — between two countries coming from geographical and historical paradigms that make them so deeply different, yet (who knows?) surprisingly compatible. More
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 “Armies of slaves to fight for freedom” – the twisted and torn morality of conscription cannot be too far away from such a trenchant verdict. Nationalist-patriotic speeches leaning into ardour and bombast may get the blood running, but reason is impaired for the blood rarely bypasses the bulging veins of the neck presaging epic bloodbaths. Somewhere, sometime, Prince Harry of the UK has called for the reintroduction of compulsory military service, giving as the supreme argument the fact that both he and the soldiers he commanded were helped in life by their military career. The newsfeed does not detail one aspect: help with what? What could the 30-year-old prince, the fifth heir to the crown [N.B.: meanwhile, self-“spared” from the royal line], have understood from the army to such an extent that his life experience would become a governmental duty for the rest of the people? “I dread to think where I’d be without the army”, the precocious sage said (serving it to the grunts: “Maybe in Las Vegas, at some naked party”). More
No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 “The light comes from the east” – a go-to byword spread in Eastern Europe in the dawn of the Communist rampage to come, hiding one of the most tragic optical illusions in history. However, the saying is, in fact, much older. “Ex oriente lux” marks the ultimate (“Eastern”) spiritual origin of our (“Western”) world: Indo>European populations, Greco>Roman syntheses, Judeo>Christian religions. All these, E>W. It would also be the other way around. “Ex occidente lex” shows us that the law and order of civilization flourished where an unmistakable chain reaction between various ideas and institutions occurred. The recipe, for Niall Ferguson, includes competition, science, private property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. This time, the arrow is W>E. While this explains the historical rise of the “West” over the “Rest”, it predicts a reversal of polarity too, amid Western degeneration under the cumulative burdens of intergenerational over-indebtedness, market over-regulation, legislation hypertrophy and civic atrophy. The “Rest” (Westernized or at least modernized) demands a reassessment of its share of participation within the production (and consumption) of “a better future”. With the East (aka Asia) at the forefront. More
