This essay focuses on the story “Uno spirito in un lampone” to highlight I. U. Tarchetti’s contribution to the fantastic as a means of exploring the nightmares that haunt modern progress. Adopting a method of inquiry inspired by ecocritical principles and aimed at grounding the text in its own complex context, the author addresses two main questions: What are the cultural and social productions, conditions, and issues that inspire Tarchetti’s work? And how does his writing—in particular, his reflections on and emplotment of the relationship between reality and the imagination—contribute to the development of the fantastic mode? Through close textual analysis and wide-ranging contextual exploration, the essay shows how Tarchetti’s story puts into question the natural order and, by pointing to a connection between the treatment of women and the treatment of nature, exposes imbalances and abuses in the established order of social structures and institutions.

We investigate the existence of the principal-agent (PA) problem in non-government, non-mall commercial buildings in the U.S. in 2003. The analysis concentrates on space heating and cooling energy consumed by centrally installed equipment in order to verify whether a market failure caused by the PA problem might have prevented the installation of energy-efficient devices in non-owner-occupied buildings (efficiency problem) and/or the efficient operation of space-conditioning equipment in these buildings (usage problem). Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) 2003 data for single-owner, single-tenant and multi-tenant occupied buildings were used for conducting this evaluation. These are the building subsets with the appropriate conditions for assessing both the efficiency and the usage problems. Together, these three building types represent 51.9percent of the total floor space of all buildings with space heating and 59.4percent of the total end-use energy consumption of such buildings; similarly, for space cooling, they represent 52.7percent of floor space and 51.6percent of energy consumption. Our statistical analysis shows that there is a usage PA problem. In space heating it applies only to buildings with a small floor area (<_50,000 sq. ft.). We estimate that in 2003 it accounts for additional site energy consumption of 12.3 (+ 10.5 ) TBtu (primary energy consumption of 14.6 [+- 12.4] TBtu), corresponding to 24.0percent (+- 20.5percent) of space heating and 10.2percent (+- 8.7percent) of total site energy consumed in those buildings. In space cooling, however, the analysis shows that the PA market failure affects the complete set of studied buildings. We estimate that it accounts for a higher site energy consumption of 8.3 (+-4.0) TBtu (primary energy consumption of 25.5 [+- 12.2] TBtu), which corresponds to 26.5percent (+- 12.7percent) of space cooling and 2.7percent (+- 1.3percent) of total site energy consumed in those buildings.

Catalyst-free formation of isocoumarins and α-pyrones from the corresponding alkynyl esters is realized. The resulting γ- and δ-lactones are isolated as the pinacolboronic esters, boronic acids or potassium trifluoroborate salts, which provide a variety of methods for downstream functionalization of the newly formed B−C σ bond. Reaction conditions have been optimized and a substrate table has been constructed to show tolerance of various functional groups incompatible with other borylation techniques. A mechanism has been proposed as a result of mechanistic studies and downstream functionalization is in progress to show the versatility of the methodology.