The arrival on the Moon in 1969 was a technological feat, but above all political and symbolic. It emerged in a polarized world where every scientific advance was, or wanted to appear, a demonstration of strength. In that context, the United States turned the Apollo program into a priority operation. It was necessary to demonstrate that its social, economic, and ideological model was capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not, and to underline in the most theatrical and incontestable way possible the superiority of a political system. The pressure generated a concentration of funds and a collective will that is hard to imagine today. They were the happy sixties, yes, but what drove the joke up is disconcerting: during the peak of the Apollo program, between 1964 and 1966, NASA's budget reached between 4% and 4.5% of federal spending and approximately 0.8% of US GDP, which at that time was, and by a very large margin, the richest country in the world. It was a disproportionate amount, but even so, it met with little opposition. The technology available at the time – computers with ridiculous capacity, materials still in experimental phase, etc. – is also disconcerting, but the political and social determination was absolute. Risk was assumed as part of the project, and society accepted a dose of almost suicidal audacity, which today might not be accepted.Artemis II, on the other hand, fits into the framework of the “new world disorder”, where bloc logic has been replaced by a multiplicity of actors, interests, and often contradictory priorities. The space race is no longer a grand ideological duel, but a modest foosball match of economic competition and technological exhibition. Space agencies must justify every euro invested to fragmented public opinions, shaped by a media ecosystem that demands immediate and photogenic results. Technology is immensely superior – state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems, ultra-sophisticated materials, simulations that anticipate thousands of scenarios – but collective will is more diffuse. Risk, which in 1969 was an exciting element inherent to the epic, is perceived very differently today. The paradox – exponentially more advanced technology, yet achievements perceived as less epic – reveals a profound shift in postmodern mentality.

"Open the fuckin' strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell!" ("Open the fucking strait, crazy scoundrels, or you will live hell!"). This delicate, diplomatic phrase was written by President Trump on Sunday on his network, Truth Social, surely with the intention of de-escalating the conflict and reaching a cordial and peaceful agreement. Jokes aside, how did we get here? Although the question seems simple, it is actually misleading, due to the evident nature of the answer: we have arrived here because a very clear majority of Americans voted for Trump, knowing perfectly well what they were doing. Consequently, the question is another, and it turns out to be a bit uncomfortable: why did many vote for a character who, as in the case of numerous Latin Americans, went against their interests in a clear, explicit, unambiguous way? In politics, social groups do not vote solely based on their material interests, but on a broader framework of identity, emotional, or symbolic factors. This explains why certain segments —such as the aforementioned Latin Americans, impoverished white workers from the Rust Belt, or certain religious minorities— could support options that, from an external perspective —I mean, European—, seemed little or not at all coherent with their objective needs. Here and in the United States, everywhere, identity can weigh more than the economy in certain circumstances. Many voters make a decision based on who they believe they are (not who they are in reality), or on what (subjective) threats they perceive. A common case is the totally illusory identification with the middle class. There are other factors, though. For some North Americans of Cuban, Venezuelan, or Nicaraguan origin, for example, any discourse that evokes the specter of the socialism that drove them from their country had, and has, an immediate emotional impact, regardless of the specific policies it entails. When voting becomes catharsis, programmatic coherence ultimately ceases to be determinant. To this is added a —let's say— aspirationalism: many citizens do not vote for their current situation, but for what they imagine they could achieve.

The extraordinary global resonance of Rosalía's latest album, the success of the film Los domingos, the media coverage of the papal succession, and the more or less "spiritual" bias (the quotation marks are important here) of certain high-audience series have led to the expression "Catholic spring" being used in certain circles. I already referred to Rosalía's specific case a few months ago, because it seemed significant to me, to say the least. The fact that it is a genuine marketing product, albeit of high aesthetic and musical quality, does not discredit the real interest it has generated among many young people (and not so young). How should all this be interpreted? The CIS data show that there has been no increase in the practice of Catholicism in Spain in recent years, but rather a slow and sustained decrease. According to CIS surveys, the percentage of the population declaring themselves Catholic —practicing or not— has fallen from around 60% in 2020 to 55.4% in April 2025, with a particularly marked drop among non-practicing Catholics. In parallel, the groups of agnostics, indifferent, and atheists continue to grow, together accounting for nearly 40% of the population. The CIS does not detect, therefore, any "spring", that is, any generalized upturn; in fact, the dominant trend is progressive secularization. Catholicism continues to be the majority religion in Spain, yes, but it has not experienced any real growth, at least during the 2020-2025 period. All of this, however, does not quite align with the references we presented at the beginning. So, what is happening?There is no structural revival, nor of vocations, nor of liturgical participation, nor of the global proportion of Catholics, but there are micro-tendencies that no one expected and that suggest certain changes in attitude. Could they be symptoms of a minority but significant cultural change? We will see. What we are witnessing is not a sudden explosion of spiritual fervor, but rather the progressive exhaustion of a life model that, for decades, has presented consumption and ultra-individualistic self-sufficiency, without ties or commitments, as immediate paths to happiness. This narrative, which took root strongly from the second half of the 20th century, has been showing its cracks as younger generations have experienced firsthand the consequences of a fragmented, accelerated, and often meaningless life, which demands more and more stimuli (generally, by paying).

The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was a spark in a context already saturated with tensions, rigid alliances (with me or against me), and powers willing, or perhaps even resigned, to enter into total conflict. Today, however, although the world remains dangerous and unstable, the logic of military escalation is not the same. Therefore, even in the face of aggressions as serious as the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the US attack on Iran, nothing resembling the start of World War III has occurred. Like it or not, a key element remains nuclear deterrence. Since 1945, the major powers have known that a direct conflict could lead to a nuclear brawl with apocalyptic consequences. This awareness has created a system of mutual restraint that, paradoxically, makes it unlikely that certain wars will escalate. In the case of Ukraine, both NATO and Russia have carefully calibrated their actions to avoid a direct confrontation. They have also measured the language used to refer to the possible use of these terrible weapons, even in the case of a verbally incontinent person like Trump.

The death of Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026), one of the most important thinkers of his generation, has coincided with a particularly delicate moment: a war whose underlying cause—oil—affects the entire world. What can Habermas's ideas contribute to such a grim scenario? His theory of communicative action extends far beyond the Strait of Hormuz, to put it simply: it allows us to interpret contemporary international politics globally, a world marked by deep-seated and very old geopolitical tensions, as well as by newly unleashed, all-out wars.

Adopting a view shared by most of his voters, Donald Trump has made the fight against gender ideology a central tenet of his political project. In fact, this issue was one of the first areas of convergence with Elon Musk before their notable political split. The attack on Iran, in this sense, brings about a perplexing turn of events; this is what we will attempt to explain in this article.

The increasingly striking disproportion between the scale of wars like the one in Ukraine and the lack of images of the conflict doesn't seem to stem from a single factor. In any case, we must consider, among other things we won't elaborate on here, the confluence of a new puritanism with the emotional immaturity of a seemingly significant portion of younger generations. This combination has created a communicative ecosystem where war becomes a sanitized, filtered narrative, ultimately disconnected from its devastating nature. Conversely, and also in a neo-puritan vein, when armed conflicts are framed in childish terms of transgression/punishment, images previously filtered through the sieve of political correctness abound.

I have always valued politicians who, when necessary, abandon the script and make proposals that involve a certain risk. That is what ERC deputy Gabriel Rufián has just done in Madrid. All my respect, although, as I will try to explain in this paper, neither the diagnosis nor the prescription seems appropriate to me. The discussion about how parties "to the left of the PSOE" should act (sicThe idea of ​​avoiding vote splitting, including the proposal to present single candidates per constituency, only scratches the surface of a much deeper debate. No one dares to address it, whether due to ideological discomfort and/or fear of political damage. In most European countries, the left has been losing its connection with the urban working class, as well as with a rural population that is currently at a critical juncture and which everyone ignores for a simple arithmetic reason: they represent few votes. Ultimately, the fundamental issue has little to do with the electoral tactics proposed by Rufián and much more to do with a lack of genuine representation: who feels addressed by this type of left today, who actually perceives a solution? This is the issue, and nothing else, and it cannot be resolved without a course correction that should have occurred long ago.

Risk management by public institutions operates in an uncomfortable and uncertain space, ranging from reasonable prudence to overreaction aimed solely at protecting themselves from recent setbacks. When the Catalan government decreed preventative measures last week in anticipation of strong winds, some sectors felt it had gone too far: phenomena like that, or even worse, have occurred many times, although never before had such a radical response been taken. Others, however, considered the crisis to have been managed proportionately to the predicted weather threats. The debate, in any case, is not new: it forms part of a deeper question about the legitimate limits of state intervention in protecting citizens.

I confess that at lunchtime I sometimes turn on La 1 to catch the end of the program hosted by Valencian journalist Javier Ruiz (52 years old), with his colleague and partner Sarah Santaolalla (27 years old). Ruiz's mannerisms are reminiscent of some broadcasters of yesteryear, like Alfredo Amestoy or Jesús Hermida; Santaolalla's are harder to categorize. In any case, the program makes it impossible not to recall formats from the late 1990s (everything comes back around) and content similar to that of the news programs during the Rajoy era, although the current ones, obviously, serve to construct a daily hagiography of Pedro Sánchez and his government. The younger members of the group may no longer remember that this style, where information and opinion merge in a viscous way, was introduced to Spain by the old José María Carrascal. Today it's simply part of the norm.

Do you really think I'm going to start this article by repeating that misleading vagueness about the problem not being technology but how it's used, etc.? In a way, I just did, but sarcastically. Let's leave that vagueness aside, because you'll find plenty of pre-digested clichés elsewhere. However, there's a fairly common misconception on this subject that needs clarifying. Today, we tend to identify technology with something as hyper-concrete as the tangible results of digitization, but a violin, for example, is (cutting-edge) technology that has been refined since the 17th century. A bicycle or glasses are technology, and so are an elevator, a can opener, or a refrigerator. Human beings are descended from an opportunistic and violent ape that didn't have great physical capabilities, but was somewhat more cunning than its neighbors; Desmond Morris already explained this in 1967. The naked apeWe've gone from flint to silicon, which are more or less the same thing and have the same function: to complete us. Keep that verb in mind, because it's what will guide this article. Without the help of technology, no human being can face an elephant or run like a gazelle, but it turns out we end up dominating them and, depending on how, eating them. So far, flint. Now we move on to silicon. However good someone is at mental calculation, there's no one capable of solving certain arithmetic challenges at a reasonable speed without the help of a calculator or some similar tool. Technology, therefore, completes us.

Last Thursday I spent the whole day in the city of Lleida. Despite the bad weather of the previous days, it was a splendid, almost spring-like day. Even the trains behaved more or less well (and I do say "more or less": I left Sants station a quarter of an hour late and Lleida-Pirineus station twenty-five minutes late. Given the shameful state of the Cercanías commuter rail, that's not much). Luckily, I finished what I had to do an hour ahead of schedule, so I was able to stroll for half an hour along a section of the Eix Comercial, which, at 3.5 uninterrupted kilometers, is one of the longest shopping streets in Europe. Aside from the inevitable memories the walk stirred—one's true home is one's childhood—I noticed that this network of streets had regained its vibrancy, the energy it once had.

1. "All sequences have reached their conclusion / Time cannot..."Back in 1980, the group Zombis released what is considered the founding song of the Movida Madrileña: GreenlandI was a 16-year-old kid in my second year of high school. Fascinated by Catalan and French singer-songwriters, the lyrics seemed like a trivial bit of nonsense to me, but it was impossible to avoid: they played it on every radio station. Forty-six years later, however, the first two verses of the song are enigmatically suggestive. Time loves everything.

Can one mistake a seemingly emerging period, like the supposed "new American golden age" proclaimed by Trump, for one that is actually a swan song? Of course: at certain times of the year, like this one in January, the velvety red of sunrise and sunset are identical, especially on windy days like those we had last week. Perhaps MAGA America is a pure optical illusion, more twilight than dawn. Perhaps even such a striking and militarily flawless success as the kidnapping of Maduro doesn't mean much. The history of empires is a succession of chance apogees and inexorable declines. Despite the diversity of contexts, cultures, and political structures, periods of decline share some recurring features from the earliest civilizations to contemporary powers. In the ancient world, one of the most common, though not the only, was the inability to maintain increasingly complex and expensive structures. The impossibility of effective territorial administration, suffocating tax pressure, and the need for gigantic armies were common features of the imperial declines of antiquity; the Roman case is the most studied and often the most emblematic. In the modern world, the agony of the Ottoman Empire, for example, is also significant: excessive bureaucracy, loss of military control, and an inability to adapt to changing times. In general, history shows that decline is not exactly an accident, but a structural process that inevitably accompanies the very logic of imperial expansion. Precisely for this reason, Emmanuel Todd accurately predicted the fall of the USSR a decade in advance, based primarily on demographic indicators.

The capture of Nicolás Maduro comes in a year laden with symbolism: it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, a turning point that completely redefined global (in)security. The coincidence is not merely chronological: it also serves to contrast two eras, two ways of understanding global threats, and two ways of justifying things that are more or less unjustifiable.

The warning had been brewing for some time, alluding to issues as diverse as Brexit, peasant uprisings, bureaucratic chaos, the lack of a sustainable migration policy, and leadership that was purely administrative (at best) or merely decorative (at worst). Ultimately, the dreaded word: decline. This is part of a value judgment, but also an objective and quantifiable reality encompassing demographics, productivity, technological obsolescence, and much more. Those aspects I will attempt to explain here, while acknowledging that I will inevitably leave some unmentioned, suggest that 2026 could mark a turning point in the viability, even in the medium term, of the European Union. There are at least three elements worth highlighting.

Just a few days ago, a friend gave me two booklets published in the early 1930s by the Foment de Pietat Catalana, founded in 1909 by Eudald Serra i Buixó. And this wasn't just any year: it was the year of the Tragic Week. The two volumes I'm referring to contain the encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) of Leo XIII and Fortieth Year –better known as Restoration of social order– of Pius XI (1931). The translation is done in a standardized but at the same time archaic Catalan; that of Rerum Novarum It's from 1933, and the one from Fortieth Year From 1931. In the 1930s, amidst the global economic crisis and the rise of totalitarianism, these encyclicals gained prominence in the European social and political debate. They could be interpreted as a kind of third way between liberal capitalism, which the 1929 crisis had profoundly discredited, and communism, which was advancing as a radical alternative and which the Church considered incompatible with its principles. In this turbulent context, the reception of Catholic social doctrine was diverse and often contradictory.

Those of my generation, or even a little younger, may remember the dreadful paintings of deer and horses that were given away in the 1970s when you bought one of those three-piece suites Made of plastic, freezing in winter and scorching hot in summer. In most cases, the animals depicted in the bucolic paintings ran through the forest or drank from a lake or stream. The story I'm about to tell you is loosely related to this type of painting. The world's first nature reserve, legally protected by the state with all its resources, was created in France in 1853, during the prosperous era of the Second Empire. It wasn't very large: about 630 hectares of the extensive Fontainebleau forest. Today, such an initiative would be considered left-leaning on the ideological spectrum; however, in 1853 things were quite different. The Fontainebleau reserve originated thanks to pressure from a group of aristocrats who, to fill their leisure time, dedicated themselves to amateur landscape painting. One of the most common subjects was precisely those paintings of deer and horses that experienced a resurgence in the 1970s, associated with the sofas that were fashionable at the time. The initiative of those amateur painters had immediate effects, but not exactly on the progress of art. In Fontainebleau, there were people, generally very poor, who earned their living making charcoal. Beekeeping was also an important activity, both for honey and for beeswax, which at that time still had various uses. There were also, of course, many hunters who suddenly became poachers, that is, criminals. It is likely that before his death in Cannes on April 16, 1859, Alexis de Tocqueville learned of the creation of that reserve. It would be very interesting to know the opinion of the author of The Old Regime and the Revolution about the event, because Fontainebleau is not exactly a neutral place in relation to the history of French absolutism.

Despite leading a political party with significant electoral prospects, Silvia Orriols—and, in general, the leaders of Aliança Catalana—have a modest public presence. This contrasts sharply with politicians from other parties who spend their days posting on social media and strive for omnipresence in the press. In the case of Aliança Catalana, is this an oversight or a deliberate strategy? It seems that, despite being risky, the gamble is already paying off. A political party aspiring to consolidate its hegemonic power can choose between two strategies: clearly define its platform or become an abstract concept, open to interpretation by voters according to their own expectations. This second, seemingly paradoxical path can be effective in societies where diverse interests make it difficult to craft a single narrative that satisfies everyone. Indefiniteness then becomes an asset, because it is not an absence of content but a magic mirror in which each citizen sees their problems and aspirations reflected. Marked by volatility and immediacy, current politics tends to reward those actors capable of generating strong emotions, rather than offering concrete and feasible solutions, which are naively taken for granted. The diffuse, blurred idea functions as a symbol: it doesn't say exactly how it will materialize, but it suggests that it can become the vehicle for change, or security, or prosperity, that each person desires in their own way. Ambiguity allows the same slogan to be interpreted differently by a businessperson seeking stability, by a young person earning an insufficient salary, or by someone who is simply very angry about things that happened in 2017. The strength of the party-idea, then, lies in its ability to avoid contradicting any of these interpretations, maintaining its place within a specific space.

I don't know if it's a global phenomenon, but it seems to me that the trend of hanging padlocks on bridge railings and similar places is widespread. In fact, in some tourist areas, the authorities have had to take measures to prevent damage to the street furniture. A few weeks ago, while strolling with my wife along the seafront promenade of a town on the Costa Daurada, we discussed the rather unpleasant feelings these rusty, salt-covered objects evoked in us. They seem to display a morbid possessiveness: "You're mine, and that's how things will stay, held together with a steel cylinder." The heart drawn on a tree was perhaps gentler and more forgiving... The padlock, locked forever, suggests to me an invasive display of symbolic violence, not an expression of love. However, it's quite likely that many people think the opposite and interpret it as a symbol of loyalty, for example. When harassment occurs on social media, or when messages and calls are abused, the aggressive, invasive, or threatening nature of the act is evident. "Sexist cyberviolence – as explained in the website of the Department of Equality and Feminism The Generalitat's actions can manifest in many ways: from constant location tracking to mass insults on social media or the dissemination of intimate images without consent. Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly common and can have fatal consequences; anyone who is informed knows this. This institutional campaign is, in short, timely and necessary. –"If it looks like gender-based violence, it is gender-based violence"—is unfortunate. The issue, as we will see, goes beyond the semantic gap that exists between the verbs. seem and be.