In 2023, when Alea miraculously reached the end of its first editorial cycle, with six volumes published in Italian, we began, in the editorial office, to discuss the future of the journal. The last issue, dedicated to the late David Graeber, had intercepted a series of questions about the state of things which, far from finding definitive or comforting answers (we would gladly have spared ourselves this new chapter!), seemed to gesture toward a possible trail, tracks still fresh in a sinister, elusive present. This is how we reached the Lands Between: a territory brushed by eternal twilight, dotted with distorted, inhuman architectures, inhabited by a humanity that seems to have lost all spatial or temporal horizons capable of lending meaning to the real. A kingdom where the imagination and vitality that pulse through life’s biology and sociality are constantly frayed by the stagnant, worn, and corrupted power of an Empire that has devoured its own limbs.

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This issue inaugurates a new cycle for the magazine, now published annually in a fully bilingual Italian–English edition. The Long Goodbye is a journey into the Lands Between in which we seem to be trapped—caught between the ruins of a past that continues to haunt the present and the glimpses of alternative futures emerging within our collective imaginaries.