When someone does something as cruel as taking a plane to go and be a weekend sniper and dedicate themselves to killing children, young girls, or the elderly, the first reaction is disbelief. Then come the questions. Why? Who was organizing it? Who were these macabre tourists? What drove them to go "hunting" for defenseless and vulnerable people? How is it that no one saw it, or why did people look the other way?

"What can we do? How can we act? How do we invite action?" These are some of the questions asked during the presentation of the Biennial of Thought, which for ten years now—this being its fifth edition—has turned Barcelona's public squares into a place for debate and reflection. In an increasingly dark world, ideas are more welcome than ever, and this year the reflections do not aim to be nostalgic or apocalyptic, but rather aspire to focus on the present with the motto "Unleashing the present".

Going back after a very long life and, therefore, seeing everything through the eyes of experience. It is the opportunity offered to Wilbur Budd, who owns a bookstore empire but is very lonely. Budd is the protagonist of the new novel by the British author Matt Haig (Sheffield, 1975), The Midnight Train (Empúries/ADN), translated into Catalan by Esther Roig Giménez. Haig has published more than twenty books and achieved international success with The Midnight Library (2020), with more than 10 million copies sold. Now he returns to using fantastic elements to talk about the possibilities that life offers us and to delve into one of his favorite themes: how to get out of the pit.

The conservation of farmhouses, churches, and historic houses in the towns and cities of Catalonia will have, for the first time, a specific fund. This was announced this Saturday by the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, who detailed that this fund will be used to preserve local architectural heritage, designed jointly with the Department of Economy and Finance, and will be launched throughout this legislative term.

"Literature serves to say that, for the racist and unsympathetic piece of shit country that we are being left with, demographic replacement is welcome. It's already late!", said Biel Mesquida this Saturday during the inauguration of the 44th Catalan Book Week.The poet and writer, born in Castelló de la Plana in 1947, has spent decades defending freedom in all its nuances, and today his message has also claimed “insurrection”: "I have not come to bring you peace, but struggle; I have not come to bring you well-being, but insurrection. Literature has always been on the front line of humanizing struggles, against the trampling of rights, against ignorance, for wisdom, and for the practice of people's happiness", asserted the poet, who also sang a cappella the first stanza of Bella Ciao.

"What would happen if we lost the ability to love one another, to help each other selflessly, to touch each other, to raise our children, to feel pity for others?", asks Ada Castells (Barcelona, 1968). The writer has imagined a technified world where machines do everything, even when it comes to giving birth: clamps hold the mother's body, and once the creature is expelled, she doesn't even touch it. Obviously, these are pregnancies where sex plays no role. The baby goes directly to a nursery zone, where machines will raise it. Sílvia, the protagonist of the novel The Anthropologist (Edicions 62), turns everything upside down when her daughter, Maria, is born: she decides to trick the machine and keep the girl. From there, all kinds of doubts and a rebellion arise.

"All roads lead to Rome" is an expression that has been used to speak about geography, religion, or as a popular saying to mean that there are different ways that lead to the same result. However, science has just debunked this myth. Research led by the archaeology team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) has shown that the Roman Empire's mobility network did not have the capital as the center of the world.

"You are a fucking ungrateful bitch. I don't want to hear from you, no messages, and let's not meet again." This is the blunt message that reaches Rita eight years after meeting Ramon at a town festival in the Terres de l'Ebre. They have an intermittent relationship that lasts for years and destroys them both. They are fully aware of it, yet they return to it time and time again. This is the core of All the dots and aside (Empúries), the latest novel by Marta Sans (Alcanar, 1988).

The Badalona City Council has initiated the procedures to expropriate the monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Murtra, one of the great jewels of Catalan Gothic architecture, founded in 1416. The goal of the municipal government led by Xavier García Albiol is to integrate this historic site into the city's public heritage and turn it into a thematic and museum center dedicated to the "discovery" of America.The decision comes following news of an attempted purchase by a private company. Currently, this jewel of Catalan Gothic architecture is owned by the heirs of the Güell family. Approximately a year and a half ago, the Badalona City Council already held talks with the owners to try to reach an agreement that would allow for the acquisition of the monastery. "Those negotiations did not culminate in an agreement, but the municipal government has maintained since then the desire for this monumental complex to become part of Badalona's heritage. The appearance now of a firm buyer and the communication received by the City Council have led the municipal government to take a step forward and initiate the expropriation procedure," the council explains in a statement.

The modern habit of chewing areca nut is practiced by approximately one in ten people worldwide. It is usually chewed with betel leaf and other ingredients such as calcium hydroxide, some spices, and tobacco, and it leaves the mouth a deep red color. It resembles nutmeg in shape and color, but it has a very different taste, slightly bitter and intense. It is a drug used primarily in tropical Asia and the Pacific, and it is considered the fourth most popular psychoactive substance on the planet, only behind alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. Deeply rooted in some cultures, its history has a much older origin than previously thought.

“I made the decision to tell this story when I was about 16 years old, but I realized very quickly that I still didn't have the resources or enough maturity to do so. I knew I only had one chance to write this novel, because you only have one family story. That is why I set it aside and kept returning to it over the years,” explains Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann. Born in 2003 and a film student in Zurich, Biedermann published Lázár (Edicions 62/Salamandra; with a Catalan translation by Ignasi Pàmies) when he was 21 years old and it has become a total phenomenon. Acclaimed by critics and praised by Dua Lipa and Patti Smith, the novel, written in German, has been translated into more than thirty languages, the magazine Forbes has included Biedermann among the 30 most influential young people in the world, and the film rights have already been sold.

Like a true trench of resistance in defense of on-the-ground, independent, and rigorous journalism. This is how the 38th edition of the Visa pour l'Image festival in Perpignan presents itself, taking place from August 29 to September 13. In the presentation manifesto, the director and founder of the exhibition, Jean-François Leroy, warns about "the growing precariousness of the sector, the concentration of media outlets, and the political pressures that threaten press freedom." Leroy also points out the disinformation generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and gives as an example the viral fake image of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro handcuffed and escorted by twomarines north Americans. Faced with this, he raises the paradox that AI inexorably needs the rigor of photojournalists to feed on real data and questions whether the agreements between big tech companies and historical publications represent a financial solution or a "deal with the devil".

Yayoi Kusama, one of the most unique and radical creators of recent decades, died on August 14 at the age of 97 in a Tokyo hospital, as reported by her website. According to the statement, which does not specify the cause of death, Kusama painted until her final days, she never put down her brush, obsessed with exploring and finding harmony and collective healing, beyond differences. This will sustained her from the Vietnam War era.

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Granada and author of Cruces de memoria y de olvido. Los monumentos a los caídos de la Guerra Civil Española (1936-2021) (Crítica), where he explains that, through monuments in public spaces, Franco manipulated memory. This August he has seen that his research, in which he denounces how Francoism appropriated a symbol of Christianity, has been used to initiate the process to declare the Creu dels Caiguts in Cáceres an Asset of Cultural Interest.

“I am very proud of my grandmother, of who she was and what she did, even though she must have suffered a lot, and at the same time I am angry about all the silence, because she was never spoken of in my family. I understand they must have done it to protect us and out of fear, but now I want to do everything possible so that people know who Carmen was,” says Àngel González, who contacted ARA after reading the report on Federico García Lorca published in the August 16th edition.

After it was discovered in 1931 that Ullastret had Iberian remains from the 6th to 2nd centuries BC, the Republican Generalitat made an unusual decision for the time: to protect the site without even having started any excavation. As explained by the current head of the Ullastret site of the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia, Gabriel de Prado, this was not common practice, but they must have been aware of its importance. “Since then, hundreds of excavations have been carried out, giving the city a dimension that the first researchers little imagined,” says Prado.

The previous plague epidemic in Mallorca had been in 1652. Almost 200 years later, in May 1820, the plague returned to the island. The disease arrived on board a ship from Tangier which clandestinely disembarked on the coasts of Son Servera. Until now, historiography had described it as a late case of classical bubonic plague: the disease transmitted by infected rats and passed on to humans through the bite of rodent fleas. A study led by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), published in the scientific journal the scientific journal PNAS, has overturned the version. The data show that rats had nothing to do with it and that the plague spread directly between humans at a devastating speed.

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has submitted an official written request to the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, demanding the declassification of documents regarding the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca that the State keeps hidden, on the 90th anniversary of the crime.

The summer of 1936, Federico García Lorca (Granada, June 5, 1898 - between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada, August 18 or 19, 1936) decided to leave Madrid and go to Granada for a short stay. The assassination of the Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Calvo Sotelo, on July 13, had left him very uneasy. "July 18 was his saint's day and his father's, and they were going to celebrate it, and also to say goodbye to the family because he was leaving for Mexico with the actress Margarida Xirgu. His intention was to return to Madrid in the autumn, because he was to premiere La casa de Bernarda Alba and publish Poeta en Nueva York", explains journalist and writer Víctor Fernández.

"Lorca is a universal symbol and is alive in the memory of all of us, his work can be found in any library, but of the rest of thousands of murders in Granada there is hardly any information and they must be rescued from oblivion. There is a memory that could not leave the houses for fear of the Civil Guard, the police and the neighbors themselves," points out the archaeologist Francisco Carrión, who has led many of the excavations, including that of the Barranc de Víznar, in Granada.