Michael Ignatieff (Toronto, 1947), an intellectual specializing in human rights and democracy, was also the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, a country currently in vogue in Europe and threatened by Donald Trump. Winner of the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, he is also the author of an honest book about his failed stint in politics, Fire and Ashes. He has now been in Barcelona for the presentation of the Cidob International Yearbook. Ignatieff speaks clearly, highlighting the grave moment the international landscape is experiencing. And he insists on one idea: we must wake up.

Sitting down to write about the siege on democracy while images of Russians voting appear on screens is poetic justice. We call the cardboard stage sarcastically organized by Vladimir Putin's regime legislative elections. The new tsar has been at the center of Russian power for 27 years thanks to methods learned in the KGB. The systematic elimination of dissent, of civil and political opposition, and of free media, along with a predatory instinct, have turned him into a totalitarian leader who swims in corruption. After internally drowning any symptom of democratic development and wiping out the oligarchs and the opposition, Putin has been waging a war against Ukraine for four years, with Chinese acquiescence, which he is now expanding to the whole of Europe. The advantage of totalitarians is that social control has no costs. Especially for a paranoid and icy mind like that of the Russian president, who is determined to turn into reality the territorial expansion that only connects with a glorious past in his imagination.

If a company, a scientist, a chef, a doctor, or an architect were to fail continuously, would they change the way they work? Probably yes, right? Well, that is what we must urgently do with schools.

The illusion of a certain order based on democratic expansion in the world ended, most likely, on September 11, 2001. Perhaps it was only an illusion that justified the hyper-leadership of the United States, but the fact is that the instructions for use of international relations began to be torn apart until reaching the chaos of today.

That of women is, probably, the great revolution of the last century. It did not take palaces, but it transformed daily life. The way of working, of loving, of having children or not having them, of relating to our body, to money and to power. We women of today walk on the shoulders of giants who debated what seemed indisputable and Gloria Steinem is one of them.

Adventure books and good meteorologists explain that in the eye of the hurricane there is a certain calm. The eye is the central and calmest region of cyclones, where pressure drops and winds are gentle. It is surrounded by vertical storm towers. More or less like holidays. When the summer period is over, it will start to rain cats and dogs, and the idea that life is a slow, cozy place where ice cream is eaten will be denied. The course promises strong emotions and various hurricane storms.

The most disturbing lesson from Antonio Scurati's books on fascism is that it did not impose itself solely through force. Totalitarianisms are not the victory of fanatics over an innocent society corrupted by a leader's ambition. It was also a sum of fears, renunciations, opportunisms, and complicities. A tired democracy stopped defending itself; elites believed they could use Mussolini; a part of society accepted violence in exchange for order. It allowed itself to be seduced.

The crisis in education in Catalonia not only has consequences today. If the degradation continues, the country condemns itself to a future of economic irrelevance and social fracture.

There are strong, heavy, labyrinthine, relentless states. There are also failed ones. In the case of Spain, I leave the qualifying adjective to you, but the fact is that we would not be talking about either decisive or pragmatic. Perhaps the majority of our society is not either? That is a topic for another day.

Whatever your age, you who are reading this article know that technology is moving faster than human capacity to adapt to a new perception of reality. We have become a kind of overwhelmed jugglers or tightrope walkers traversing a cable far above our heads. I don't know if we have always been surpassed by technology throughout history; I suspect so, but never with such great acceleration, on so many fronts at once, and with such extensive shared knowledge of the metamorphosis we are immersed in as a society.

Franco had just died, Arias Navarro was still president and the country lived between hope and fear. In this context, fifty years ago, the Rally for Freedom was held, the first major democratic political event authorized in Catalonia since the end of the war, which boosted the PSC and gathered 15,000 people. Raimon Obiols (Barcelona, 1940) was one of the participants and this year the Government, through the Directorate General of Democratic Memory, and the Rafael Campalans Foundation paid tribute to him at the Barcelona Bar Association.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Few political formulas have had such a long life and such great force as these words from the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Approved on July 4, 1776, they represent a historical break: power could not derive from blood, from the crown, or from divine will, but from the rights of individuals and the consent of the governed.

Our interview takes place in Olot’s old Barberí foundry, converted into the studio and beating heart of RCR Arquitectes. Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta discuss returning to Olot, the decision to always work together, landscape as an ally, the Pritzker Prize as freedom and responsibility, and their Vila as a cultural and life project.

The floodgates of political contempt have long been open in Spain, and the water of mutual contempt between the opposition and the government is at a record level. The worst thing is not that they mutually detest each other and permanently show it, but the effects this has on public opinion which will one day go to vote.

The weekly The Economist, with a hard-won reputation for rigor and liberalism, also excels – like The New Yorker or Libération– on its covers. A few years ago, one was dedicated to Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had just arrived at Downing Street, asking: "Is Bambi a carnivore?”. Over the years and the Iraq War, the British Labourite proved to be not only a carnivore but also an anthropophage.

His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) catapulted him to global fame. But even then, the French economist Thomas Piketty had been one of the most respected names in economic theory for over a decade, as co-founder of the Paris School of Economics and co-creator of the World Inequality Database. A specialist in the study of inequalities and wealth distribution, Piketty now presents the Global Justice Report, an ambitious economic roadmap that outlines how global inequality can be eliminated and the climate crisis curbed before 2100.

"The poor have understood many things", the Pope said in the Canary Islands on the same day that Space X went public and Elon Musk became the richest man in history. What we don't know is what the South African has learned humanly. Only the speed and vertigo of the changes we are going through explain that the confusion we are experiencing does not explode. In Spain, political confusion turns a pope into a moral reference in a Congress of Deputies poisoned by polarization, which applauds him unanimously for seven minutes. Each one ready to use him in their own way. It is the same confusion that turns Musk, a textbook unbalanced person with zero humanist capacity, into another reference of our times.

I understand everything but comprehend nothing. In the world of permanent exhibition, religious experience these days becomes a kind of mass spectacle televised by the minute. Spiritual experience is sublimated in stadiums and grand performances, massive avenues and a lot of paraphernalia. Peter's representative arrives in Madrid and will pass through Barcelona and the Canary Islands with an excess of solemnity.

Government changes in Spain go through processes of demolition. They seem like regime changes, and sometimes they even are. I'm not talking about the virulence of political confrontation. Internal struggles within and outside parties do not make Spain unique. No, what makes Spain unique is an unfinished territorial architecture that always threatens to be demolished or reconfigured. It is this unresolved issue and the bloody expression of ideological difference that turns politics into a battlefield.

This article is a tribute and expression of gratitude to our readers. A very diverse and qualified jury, convened by the Generalitat, has awarded the National Communication Award in the press category to the director of ARA. But this is an award for all of us who make the newspaper AND especially for our readers, who are our reason for being. Free citizens, interested in the world around them, involved in their society and their time, and who consider it worthwhile to support a media outlet in stormy times and pay for the information we publish.