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.

In times of educational crisis, the death of Salomó Marquès (l'Escala, 1942) leaves a particularly painful void. A benchmark in the study and vindication of the pedagogical revolution led by the teachers of the republican years, most of whom were later purged or went into exile, Salomó Marquès leaves Catalan society an extensive body of research and dissemination, and an example of civic commitment. In recent times he suffered from Alzheimer's. He passed away this Thursday, at the age of 84, just as he was about to enter a care home.

I propose a summer literary plan: swimming in our Mediterranean with the verses and poetic prose of J.V. Foix. The poet from Sarrià and Port de la Selva thought that, faced with the immensity of the sea, humans are insignificant beings, like pigeon droppings: "The sea pigeon", he used to say. More than 70% of the Earth is made up of oceans. An idea that came to him from afar. As Fòcius (that's how he signed some texts in the newspaper La Publicitat, the best newspaper of the 30s), playfully, in an article of March 1, 1932, he quotes himself: "Our sosie J.V. Foix in his book Gertrudis said in a poem that the Earth should be called the Sea and that men were larvae of fish rejected along the shores. The world for him is «a spherical fish tank thrown into space for the amusement of angels»".

Josep Maria Sans i Travé has died. The media have buried him with brief notes. Fame has long ceased to go hand in hand with erudition or a job well done. It follows other winding and unpredictable paths. Perhaps it has always been this way. A few months ago I received his last book, with a dedication included, "Dos bàndols, a novelized recreation of the post-war atmosphere in Solivella, the town in Conca de Barberà where the Xipella subdialect is spoken and where he was born in 1947. He soon left for Barcelona and beyond. But he returned often. He was a restless man all his life, an intellectual of action with a political soul. An "orden" Catalanist with a shrewd look, with a controlled impetuosity.

Does the genius loci exist, do places have a soul? Is Escaladei, the corner of Priorat where the Carthusian monks settled in the 12th century, a magical place? Without that monastic gesture, the region would not be a land of vineyards today. Why do we get emotional in certain environments? Is it because we are predisposed? Did the first people who set foot in the place and decided to stay feel something special, a spirit, a daimon? What were they looking for, what seduced them? Beyond the ideas and baggage we all carry, beyond our capacity for suggestion and imagination, beyond the language with which we describe it, nature is always an here and now. An autonomous reality. A powerful fact.

Rereading Oriol Bohigas, I found in his diaries a reference to his time at the mythical Institut-Escola. He recounts an anecdote illustrating the civic spirit of that exemplary institution, which was meant to be the vanguard of republican educational change. The dictatorship destroyed it all. Damned authoritarian intolerance, which is returning... Educational optimism, tinged with an essential veil of naivety, remained buried for decades. But we must also return to it. Urgently.

Nigel Barley, educated at Oxford, spent two years in Cameroon doing fieldwork. The experience resulted in a hilarious self-critical chronicle, The Innocent Anthropologist. The Dowayos took him for a ride. And he ended up playing along. The work has become a classic.

The joke goes that the PSC is now the Christian Social Party. Salvador Illa has been explicit since he became president in his ideological positioning, which he bases on Christian humanism. The same that Pope Prevost, Leo XIV, defends, as has been clear in his first encyclical. The social aspect of this pontiff is even more solid than that of his popular predecessor, the Argentine Bergoglio. Prevost has become a strong global voice in favor of welcoming immigrants, in favor of the most vulnerable, against the renewed warmongering of Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin, in favor of cultural dialogue and against platform capitalism that polarizes society, both ideologically and economically, with a purely pecuniary logic of use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

We interview the delegate president of the Sagrada Família Construction Board Foundation, Esteve Camps, a few days before Pope Leo XIV visits the temple to mark the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death.