The Naked Maja, by Francisco de Goya, was a groundbreaking painting from the late 18th century, both for the sensual attitude of the model depicted and because the artist dared to paint a female pubis. But behind this apparently naturalistic and brave image also lies a whole cultural and social framework that led Goya to portray a woman of canonical beauty, sufficiently exuberant yet also sufficiently domesticated, with that white, smooth skin, free of misplaced hairs. Ester Conesa, from the feminist collective Peliagudas, has drawn the missing hairs on an almost exact copy that can be seen in the new CCCB exhibition. Through time and multidisciplinary works of art —painting, photography, cinema, installation—, "The Cult of Beauty", which can be visited until November 8, explores precisely all the ugliness hidden in the pursuit of this ideal. Beauty is intangible and mutable depending on the era, morality, status, race, agenda, industry, etcetera, and it undoubtedly provokes as much pleasure, admiration, and desire as, by opposition, shame, pain, and marginalization for those who are left out.

One month after the explosive Sant Jordi day, the Booksellers Guild launches a campaign to warn about various irregular practices in the sector that "put the future of bookstores at risk". Specifically, they denounce practices that break the book chain, meaning they bypass bookstores as intermediaries and expert prescribers protected by the Book Law. The guild insists it is not raising its voice "against anyone," but specifically points to public purchases and direct sales to administrations, libraries, schools, and fairs.

A study by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) analyzing one hundred international research papers on healthcare with linguistic discordance confirms that "not guaranteeing healthcare in the patients' language can be detrimental to the accuracy of diagnoses, the trust between doctor and patient, and the quality of care." According to scientific evidence, this situation particularly affects migrated individuals who do not know the country's language, but the research places special emphasis on the impact it has on the native population with a minority or minoritized language, such as Catalan, for which there are still no specific scientific studies.

With a t-shirt that reads "Palestinians will be free" and two uppercase tattoos on his forearms that say "SILENCE IS COMPLICITY", the pharmaceutical group Ferrer businessman and patron of the Ferrer Foundations, Sergi Ferrer-Salat, presented this Friday with his kind anti-system vehemence an exceptional project in Barcelona: the only bookstore in the world dedicated to the Palestinian conflict and its ramifications. "The question shouldn't be why we are opening this bookstore, the question is why no one has opened it before —he begins—. The main reason is the lack of awareness of to what extent the cause of the Palestinian people condenses, like no other in terms of virulence, cruelty, cynicism, and dehumanization, the full contemporary validity of the fateful triangle of imperialcolonialism, capitalism, and racism that has led us to today's world, a world eaten away and devastated by an unsustainable and immoral degree of inequality and injustice.

A year has passed since the signing of the National Pact for Language, which was meant to mark a turning point in the language policies undertaken by the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the horizon of 2030. During this time, the main actors who were not present at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans meeting, such as Junts, the CUP, the USTEC, or the ANC, have not joined. However, municipal policy has been decisively activated, and over 200 town councils in the country have joined, taking on their role in revitalizing the language. A line of aid has been created so that they can offer Catalan courses. a line of aid so that they can offer Catalan courses.

A year has passed since the signing of the National Pact for Language, which was meant to mark a turning point in the linguistic policies undertaken by the Generalitat of Catalonia, with the horizon of 2030. In this time, the main agents who were not present at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans meeting, such as Junts, the CUP, USTEC, or the ANC, have not joined, but municipal policy has been decisively activated, and more than 200 town councils in the country have joined, assuming their role in promoting the language. A line of aid has been created so that they can offer Catalan courses.line of aid so that they can offer Catalan courses.

Llucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) arrived in Barcelona to study at university and here she has built her life, relationships, jobs, friendships. For years, until after she turned 40, she lived distressed by the ever-increasing rental contracts (she went from paying 240 to 750 euros) which meant she had to share a flat and move areas. Thirty years and ten moves later, she publishes Un metro cuadrado (non-fiction prize from Libros del Asteroide; in Catalan published by Anagrama), where she analyzes the housing crisis from her experience as a tenant in Barcelona. The essay incorporates journalistic headlines, figures, and expert positions that have addressed the issue in recent years, but also the intimate and emotional impact that the city's transformation has on its inhabitants.

The consumption of digital content in Catalan has skyrocketed: in 2025, views of posts in Catalan have grown by 72% compared to the previous year. Consumption is even growing more than production, which increased but much less, by 31%, according to a study by Accent Obert that ARA has had access to. "Such massive growth is due to the fact that we are in a development process that still has no ceiling. A digital industry in Catalan is being born, and it is in a very clear boom," points out Albert Lloreta, producer and expert at Accent Obert. There are 1,260 active projects in Catalan that have achieved a total of 25 million followers. The number of influencers has grown, but what has grown above all is the continuity and intensity of dedication to digital projects.

Barcelona will reach a record number of places for adult Catalan learning from the next academic year: 35,500 places, five thousand more than are currently offered. The City Council announced this Monday an increase in the contribution to the Consorci per a la Normalització Lingüística of 1.2 million euros in structural funding, so that the council will contribute a total of 3.1 million euros per year to the entity that organizes official Catalan courses for adults.

FIFA and Shakira have made public a fragment of what will be the new official anthem of the 2026 Football World Cup. The song is titled Dai dai and it stars the Colombian, sixteen years after her mythical Waka waka from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where she met who would be her partner for the next twelve years, Barça player Gerard Piqué. This year's World Cup will take place between June and July in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

The Guild of Booksellers of Catalonia confirmed this Wednesday, two weeks after Sant Jordi, the record figures that were advanced at the end of the celebration: 26.7 million euros were invoiced, a figure that represents a slight increase compared to the 26.1 million in 2025. For the celebration, 2 million copies were sold, corresponding to 71,000 different titles.

Roc Bernadí (Barcelona, 1997) has not yet reached 30 years of age and has already made a name for himself on the Catalan scene. As an actor, he has starred in large-format musicals, and as a musician, he is half of the duo , who will go on tour again this summer and will present a new album in 2027. We meet at Sala Beckett, a few streets from where he grew up. Until May 24th he will be performing his first monologue, Hold me until I fall asleep, an intimate and poetic coming of age written by Cesc Colomina and directed by Guillem Sánchez Garcia. Afterwards, he will be part of the dream team of The Threepenny Opera directed by Marta Pazos to premiere at the Grec Festival and inaugurate the Teatre Lliure season.Theatre lovers will know you from the roles in Groundhog Day and Blood Brothers. For Generation Z, you are half of Svetlana. Do you live dissociated between two very different facets?

I imagined that bookstores after Sant Jordi would be an oasis of peace and literature, and I find them to be a whirlwind of boxes and delivery notes. "For us, Sant Jordi ends in June," Xevi Cortacans, owner of La Muntanya de Llibres in Vic, tells me, a name that has a literal meaning these days. Sendak bookstore also has a pile of boxes ready to return to distributors, with the invented books from the festival. "We return as many books as we sold for Sant Jordi," says Èric del Arco, partner of Documenta and president of the Booksellers' Guild. He opens the spreadsheets. "We sold 3,251 books during the week and returned 3,200. We had to buy 6,400 books to sell half of them." Of course, they didn't just dispatch new releases, but mainly sold books from their backlist, which he estimates to be 13,000 copies. Of the three thousand books sold, two thousand were different titles. Only of 22 titles did they sell more than ten copies, so 95% are titles that do not appear in the rankings.

The fortieth edition of the Festival Peralada will continue to be a concentrated version of lyric and dance, but will also broaden its horizons with new creations and site-specific shows. As in recent years, the festival will take place from July 17 to August 9 in various spaces within the Peralada Castle grounds. The Reger Suqué family has announced that the younger generations will continue to support the festival, and in future editions, the event will once again be held in its iconic gardens, despite the fact that the large auditorium that was planned has not been built "for governance reasons," according to director Oriol Aguilà. "We are working on an alternative project," he announced, and celebrated the family's "generosity."

The queues for Sant Jordi once again served as a good thermometer to realize that the success of young adult literature is not only a reality but a growing phenomenon. Generation Z is rejuvenating the reading public. The figures from the Publishers' Guild confirm this year after year: 75% of young people between 14 and 24 years old read in their free time. And one of the most prominent names in Spanish romantic novels is that of Joana Marcús from Mallorca, who has just published Els ecos de la Jude (Montena), her first unpublished novel.

When she was 6 years old, teacher Maryam El Hamidi (Tangier, 1994) experienced firsthand the ordeal her students have recently gone through. With her mother and sister, they came to live in Castelló d’Empúries to reunite with her father in the year 2000. "In the schools where I have worked, they see me as a mirror. Especially women, they see a role model. Perhaps I haven't gone through the same circumstances as them, but I know their needs. I give them confidence and motivation. If the road is long, I make it shorter," assures El Hamidi.

Eight months ago, all this was unthinkable: publishing a novel, that it would have readers, that it would have so many readers that it has been on the bestseller list in the State for 34 weeks, discovering Sant Jordi and doing so as a writer who signs. Two months ago, Lucía Solla Sobral (Marín, Pontevedra, 1989) took a leave of absence from her job at a technology start-up because the unexpected success of Comerás flores (Libros del Asteroide) has meant she can only sleep at home two or three days a week. Working between shifts in hotels was already unsustainable. The day after Sant Jordi, she took a flight back to Oviedo, where she lives, and this Saturday, to Argentina.

A conversation with Professor Joan Alberich (Reus, 1944) is an endless outpouring of knowledge and curiosities. He is a professor of secondary school Greek, a university professor, a member of the Bernat Metge Foundation, and a translator of various works in Greek, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius – he currently has one of Pausanias' travel books in hand. We talk about languages and civilizations and jump through the centuries following the trail of Greek on the occasion of the publication of the second revised edition of the Greek-Catalan Dictionary from Enciclopèdia Catalana, a fundamental pillar of Western culture in our language, which Alberich and Francesc J. Cuartero have directed and co-written, with several authors.

Five years have passed since the publication of Torno a casa (Proa) and it has been a time of great changes and revelations for Joan Carreras (Barcelona, 1962), after a chaotic and sad personal phase, with two traumatic breakups. "For the first time in my life I did something I had never done: asked for help," he confesses. The psychologist diagnosed him with ADHD with high abilities, a condition he had controlled over the years but suffering its consequences, such as obsessive behaviors and depression. "The diagnosis was a brutal shock, but as I got to know the symptomatology, everything started to fit. It's as if I had always been hitting myself in the face, in the body, in the knee, and suddenly someone turned on the light in the room and I could see that there was an open drawer, or the closet door, and that's why it hurt. I wish I had been diagnosed at 30, or at 20 years old; not only for myself, but for them, and for the journalists I've related to and who found me a bit strange," he reflects.

Sant Jordi changes its route in Barcelona. This year it will extend from Gran de Gràcia to the Plaça de la Catedral in Barcelona. There will be nearly three continuous kilometers of book and rose stalls to celebrate the most massive Diada in the history of the capital. As the ARA advanced, the works on La Rambla will force a modification of the iconic route of the Diada, so it has been decided to lengthen the natural route of Passeig de Gràcia and extend the stalls through Plaça de Catalunya, Portal de l'Àngel, Plaça Nova and up to Via Laietana, passing in front of the Cathedral. It is a new axis and, in principle, temporary, although it could also be consolidated to spread out the stalls next year. "Sant Jordi is alive and adapts to realities," says Eric del Arco, president of the booksellers, who believes it is "an opportunity".