Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of a workshop which originated from a discussion with Professor A Zichichi in March 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to celebrate two developments at Brookhaven that, in both cases, are the outcome of more than a decade of preparation: the new muon g-2 measurement and the flood of data that started pouring out of RHIC. Bringing together people from these very different fields was an interesting challenge. But, at the time, when a small community of heavy ion physicists was beginning to define a program of electromagnetic interactions at RHIC and LHC, it seemed logical. The result is the white paper “Hot Topics in Ultra-peripheral Collisions”.On Fermi's centennial, his original paper, developing for the first time the equivalent photon approximation, seemed to merit renewed attention. The paper has been translated into English from the Italian and included in the proceedings.