From Water to Air: The Po Valley's 3,000-Year Environmental Reckoning

Why one of Europe's wealthiest regions is choking on its own success — and what history tells us about the way out.

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There is a stretch of land in northern Italy where civilisations have risen and fallen with the rhythms of a single, restless river. The Po Valley, cradled between the Alps to the north and the Apennines to the south, has been one of Europe's most consequential landscapes for over three millennia. It has nurtured Bronze Age glass artisans, Etruscan merchant princes, Venetian hydraulic engineers, and Fascist-era land reformers. Each generation faced the same fundamental challenge: how to master the water that gave the valley its extraordinary fertility, giving rise to highly productive agricuture, and innovative industries, while threatening to swallow its settlements whole.

Today, the Po Valley faces a new environmental crisis — not of water, but of air. The same bowl-shaped topography that once funnelled trade routes from the Baltic to the Mediterranean now traps atmospheric pollutants with devastating efficiency. Fine particulate matter regularly exceeds both European Union limits and World Health Organization guidelines, and the region endures some of the worst air quality on the continent. The question posed in this article is as simple as it is uncomfortable: if historical republics and authoritarian regimes alike could summon the political will to conquer water, why can't modern Europe conquer the air?

When a Canal Changed Everything: Lessons from the Suez Revolution of 1869

How a 19th-century infrastructure project reshuffled the winners and losers of global trade and what it tells us about our own age of disruption

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In November 1869, the world witnessed the inauguration of one of humanity's most ambitious engineering feats. The Suez Canal, cutting through 120 miles of Egyptian desert, promised to revolutionize global commerce by eliminating the treacherous voyage around Africa. Ships traveling from London to Bombay would save nearly 4,400 miles - roughly 40 percent of their previous journey.

But as a fascinating new draft research paper by Albert Schram demonstrates, the canal did far more than simply shorten distances. It fundamentally reordered the commercial geography of an entire region, creating unexpected winners, surprising losers, and patterns that would persist for generations. The parallels to our own era of technological disruption and geopolitical upheaval are striking.

The Filter and the Fire: A Tale of Two Assessments

Introduction

The silence in my 8:00 AM "Business Management" class was deafening. Just forty-eight hours earlier, I had sat in my home office, scrolling through student submissions that were—to put it bluntly—miraculous. The prose was crisp, the data analysis was "McKinsey-tier," and the strategic recommendations were flawless.

But as I stood at the front of the lecture hall and asked a simple question about why a specific A/B testing metric was chosen, thirty-six pairs of eyes suddenly found the floor very interesting.

The "LLM-pocalypse" hadn't just arrived; it had moved in and started redecorating. We were stuck in a game of "Credential Theater," where students outsourced their thinking to an LLM, and I was expected to grade a machine’s homework.

The Signal is Fading: Why AI Demands a Radical Resurrection of the Liberal Arts Degree

 

Introduction

We have long romanticized the university as a sanctuary of pure learning, but economists understand it functions largely as an expensive sorting mechanism. This is the "Signaling Theory" of education: a degree is valuable not merely for the specific facts memorized, but because it proves to the labor market that a candidate possesses the cognitive ability and conscientiousness to complete complex tasks.

However, as author and columnist Megan McArdle argued in a recent discussion with Coleman Hughes, Artificial Intelligence is systematically dismantling this signal. We are witnessing a crisis where the "Sheepskin Effect"—the premium placed on a completed degree—is being rendered obsolete by technology that mimics the very skills the humanities claim to teach.

The "Dirty Secret" of the Academy

The immediate threat is obvious: ChatGPT can write the essay. However, the institutional reaction reveals a deeper structural failure. McArdle exposes a "dirty little secret" in academia: professors have almost zero incentive to win the war on cheating (Hughes, 2025).

The Solomon Islands’ Bold Education Overhaul: Leading the Pacific’s Post-TES Transformation

Executive Summary

Since the 2022 Transforming Education Summit (TES), the 12 Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) have moved from a phase of high-level political mobilization to one of concrete legislative and budgetary institutionalization. This report examines the regional transformation between 2022 and 2025, highlighting how a "common language" of reform and common goals have emerged around digital education, climate resilience, and teacher professionalization.

Anne Parry: The English Teacher Who Became a Voice for Peace and Human Rights in Italy

Introduction

The sudden demise of Anne Parry, the Secretary of the European Federalist Movement of Valpolicella has affected many people, not only people from Verona. 

A generous and principled woman, who after retirement as an English teacher discovered a talent as a community organizer and promoter of  grass-roots, participatory politics, informed and aware of the great challenges of these days. First Brexit, then Ukraine: many got involved these causes, because of her commitment to carry forward towards enhanced understanding and peace.

Here is the link to the original article in Italian: https://www.heraldo.it/2025/12/30/anne-parry-in-ricordo-di-una-cittadina-europea/

Here is the link to the memorial page with possiblity to donate https://annienonna.muchloved.com/

Below the English translation of the article by Fabiana Bussola in the Heraldo:

Italy's Education Revolution: From Brain Drain to Skills Engine by 2026

Introduction

(Italian version at the end) For decades, Italy's education system has been synonymous with a peculiar contradiction. A country that produced Renaissance masters and scientific pioneers somehow became trapped in an academic time warp, churning out art history PhDs while its factories desperately sought engineers. Gone were the days where electricity was understood (Galvani¹, Volta²), and radiowave communication ultimately leading to WiFi was invented (Marconi³).

Recent statistics were damning: Italian universities graduated more archaeologists than software developers, more philosophy majors than data scientists. Meanwhile, the country's brightest STEM talents packed their bags for Munich, Boston, and Singapore, creating one of Europe's most severe brain drain crises.