The figure of Ada Colau emerged in the fight for decent and affordable housing for everyone. A youthful activism that eventually led her to become the first female mayor of Barcelona when she was 41 years old. From the position (2015-2023), despite two terms in power, the progress in housing policies was limited, frustrating. It remains the great problem in the Catalan capital and in all large cities. One only needs to look at the promises that have led to the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Elif Eralp in Berlin: access to housing is marking the emergence of a new progressivism. The phenomenon is making its way into the urban world, where the problem is bleeding and where the left-wing vote usually carries more weight. Madrid, so tilted towards populist right-wing, is a global exception.

It is very different when someone who has experienced it firsthand talks to you about immigration than someone who has not. That is why I wanted to read the essay Class boundaries (Anagrama, 2025), by the Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi, professor at the London School of Economics, author of the now famous book Free. She was able to leave her country under very difficult circumstances, when they were supposed to be free and everything was collapsing after the late fall of communism. From the sidelines, it is easy to theorize and pontificate: only let the legal ones in, hire at the source, return them while still hot... Has anyone seen the 2023 movie Me Captain, by Matteo Garrone?It narrates the dramatic journey of Seydou and Moussa, two 16-year-old Senegalese cousins who leave their hometown, Dakar, to try to reach Italy. It is based on true stories. Pope Francis, impressed, received the two actors who starred in it at the Vatican.

Isabel has her mother and her father-in-law, both elderly; she is in her nineties and he is almost there. It is a problem. Phew! For her mother, she has found two caregivers who live in the village: a young girl from Honduras, Carolina, who is sweet and hardworking, and an older one, María, about to retire, who came from Córdoba as a little girl and has managed as best she could her whole life. María often goes to the mother's house with her granddaughter, Naiara, who keeps them both entertained: she dances sevillanas for them and does her homework. Carolina stays at night. She is pregnant now. We will see how she manages in a few months. But what drive and charm she has. She also cleans houses during the day. María has done that for years.

Perhaps some of you have read the monumental SPQR by Mary Beard, the work of a lifetime of research on ancient Rome. In her new book, the author places us in the intimate interior of that research, with a piece of advice: "The underlying message is that you get much more out of the classics if you revere them less". A phrase that we can apply to all our inclinations: hobbies, habits, beliefs, politics, sports... It is not bad to take a bit of distance, a therapeutic dose of skepticism towards what we consider "ours". It is about doing so, however, without losing the passion, for example, the one that Mary Beard has dedicated to ancient history, and which she now serves to us with amenity in the autobiographical text Classics Unfiltered (Columna, in translation by Joan Solé).

The election results in Saxony-Anhalt have fallen like a bucket of cold water on Germany and Europe as a whole. The continental wave of the far-right, which at one point seemed to be slowing down, has suddenly returned to the heart of Nazi amnesia. And it has received the applause of Trump-Musk-Putin. The AfD is pro-Kremlin and wants support for Ukraine to stop. The worst ghosts of anti-democratic xenophobia hover over the Old Continent.

Pilar Rahola Martínez reached a moment, during the 'Procés', when she became the organic and ubiquitous talk show guest of the independence movement. She was everywhere, pontificating about everything, supposedly knowing everything. Until everything went to rack and ruin and she disappeared. Some illustrious Rahola ancestors who preceded her were also, in their time, prominent figures: lawyers, politicians, businessmen, doctors, bankers, architects, editors... And they also disappeared, of course. Nothing lasts forever. We could say that she is the last—so far—of an energetic and influential Empordà lineage. The journalist and writer Xavier Febrés reviews their relevant figures in Els Rahola, una saga infinita (Editorial Gavarres).

French historian Johann Chapoutot has delved into Weimar Germany to see who made Hitler's rise to power possible. He examines this in detail in The Irresponsible (Angle Editorial, translated by Andreu Gomila). Now that we see, here and everywhere, how many people buy the fatalistic and angry narrative of the far-right ("first our own"), this reading is well worth it. The parallels are so evident that they are unsettling. It is a book that emotionally refers, and provides the entire historical context, to The White Ribbon, the icy film by Michael Haneke.

This Friday marks 150 years since the death of the engineer Ildefons Cerdà, creator of Barcelona's Eixample and father of modern urban planning. In our tortured 19th century, he embodied the progressive enlightened spirit. There are people with a powerful personality who mark an era. Cerdà, a social scientist and politician, a man of thought and action, was one of them. But he was not alone. He had good influences and good friends, such as the economist Laureà Figuerola, the hygienist and humanist Felip Monlau, and the geographer Pascual Madoz.

Lluís Bonet i Armengol, rector of the Sagrada Família parish for 25 years, died this Friday at the age of 95. His figure is intimately associated with the Gaudí temple, of which he was an ecclesiastical and human reference, in addition to being the brother of the architect who continued the works, Jordi Bonet, who died in 2022, at the age of 97.

The leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, has proposed a major political, social, and technical pact for a team of experts to lead the Department of Education for a decade, thus setting aside the partisan struggle and the professional bad blood in which the system has become mired. In the middle of August, the proposal has all the makings of passing without a ripple. The school year will probably start again in September with strikes. And the results of the botched PISA test will be made public. In other words, we will remain stuck in educational defeatism, which is the sure path to failure as a country. Does anyone else have any ideas to break the vicious cycle and enter a virtuous one?

There is debate about when human control of fire began. For hundreds of thousands of years there were only flames due to natural fires caused by lightning or volcanoes. But a day came when our ancestors were able to take fire from nature and maintain and transport it, although not yet produce it. This semi-appropriation must have happened between one million and 790,000 years ago. Scientists do not agree. Perhaps someone remembers the hypnotic film Quest for Fire (1981), by Jean-Jacques Annaud.The mastery of fire –the generation of fire by rubbing wood or striking stones– fully entered human societies 50,000 years ago. That is a lot and not so much. It was a fabulous technological revolution. Since then, we have been able to cook –and greatly improve our diet–, warm ourselves, light ourselves at night, better protect ourselves from all kinds of beasts and enemies, forge metal... Also to wage war more brutally among ourselves.

Democracy comes from demos (people) and kratia (power, authority). Aristocracy comes from aristos (the best): the power of the best. But by becoming hereditary power, the best ceased to be so. The best thing is to combine democracy with meritocracy, a government of the people in which positions are held by those who have the most merit, those who deserve it.

Suffocating heat. Chained waves of heat. A lot. We don't stop drinking liquids and we'd spend the day in the water: the sea, the river, the pool, under the shower. We'd like to live soaking wet. Are we clear about the privilege of opening the tap and always getting a good stream? Millions of people suffer from water scarcity in urban environments. And at the same time, they feel the recurrent threat of cold drops (DANAS). Viewed globally, water is not a scarce resource: it is simply poorly distributed. Technology helps a lot, but it's not everything. Everywhere, agriculture-livestock-fishing, tourism, and urban planning generate needs that are difficult to balance. AI has just been added to the intensive demand for water.

Sorting books in the home library, I stumbled upon the catalog of a photographic exhibition about libraries, from thirty years ago (1996), in which the art historian Francesc Miralles Bofarull, in the introductory text, goes back to the prehistory of the book, when the cities of Alexandria and Pergamon competed for who had the best library. The book was a cutting-edge technology, synonymous with innovation, power, knowledge, and information. It was the AI of its time. If AI is dedicated to collecting, processing, and exploiting all millennia of bookish information, the books of then fixed for the present and posterity all preceding oral knowledge.

Journalistic independence has always been difficult. Information is power. What power does not want to influence the media, who does not want to condition them, who does not want to control them? Not being influenced, conditioned, and controlled is part of the essence of the profession since journalism is journalism. This does not prevent each masthead from having a positioning or editorial line, a background ideology from which it looks at, explains, and interprets facts, reality.

The acceleration of life – things happen faster and faster and we do more and more things at the same time – stresses us out and distracts us from what is essential. In contrast, there is a value that is once again gaining importance: continuity, permanence. The prestige of what is lasting. Antiquity. When everything is ephemeral and fungible and obsolescent; when objects and ideas and friendships seem to be made to be used and thrown away; when people, in addition to being consumers thirsty for sensations and objects with an expiration date, have also become non-reusable consumable subjects, then it is especially attractive to encounter something that comes from afar and persists: a lineage, a landscape, a classic book, a monumental building, a belief, a company, an association, a love...

First, the data. Back in the 17th century, one in five Catalans had been born in Occitania and other parts of France. That's a long time ago, agreed. Let's jump ahead: in 1930, the same was true for 27% of the population. And at the end of the 20th century, only 25% of people had all four grandparents born in Catalonia. In recent years, especially since the failure of the independence process and coinciding with the global wave of the far-right, exclusionary discourses have taken hold. The old guard of Catalan politics, especially former president Pujol, but not only him – also the heirs of PSUC and PSC, or Pujol's own historical rival, Raimon Obiols–, continue to defend welcoming and inclusion, but who listens to them?

The scapegoat is the one who pays for the faults of others: the expression originates from the ritual sacrifice of a goat (kid or billy goat) to atone for the sins of the people of Israel, as narrated in the book of Leviticus. A solemn barrabasada (in this case, the expression comes from the villain of Christianity, Barabbas). Today we continue to practice goat sacrifices, but metaphorical sacrifices, bloodless, of a mouth or a tweet. They work quite well as a mechanism for us to vent.

"Even if our sole concern were national economic growth, we would have to protect humanistic education." This is stated by the American philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (New York, 1947), according to whom, in schools and universities worldwide, the exact opposite is happening: the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, etc.), as well as the arts, are increasingly scorned, if not directly eliminated. What is happening to us? Nussbaum is in no way against hard sciences or technological knowledge. But she warns against the error of despising humanistic knowledge and the critical thinking associated with it. And she warns that, at the same time as the curriculum is being stripped of humanistic elements, the pedagogy of memorization is being reimposed (obviously, this does not mean she rejects all memorization).

Immigration must be discussed, we cannot bury our heads in the sand: can ten million people fit in Catalonia? This is the star rhetorical question that has taken hold in public opinion and fuels the xenophobic discourse of the far-right. It is their main ideological fuel. The implicit conclusion: too many people are coming from outside. Of course, many of those who ask the question do not consider themselves xenophobic or far-right. But they have been caught in the web of great suspicion against newcomers, whom they blame for all our woes: the housing shortage (as if the real estate crash and tourism had not been decisive), the education crisis (as if it were not a global crisis), the strain on healthcare (it is ignored that the immigrant population is much younger and uses little healthcare), the stagnant vitality of the Catalan language (it is absurd to blame new speakers we want to attract), precarious employment (but the minimum wage has gone from €648 in 2015 to €1,221 in 2026)... Immigrants are an easy scapegoat to point at and be battered.