It is most common for guests to feel a little uncomfortable when they have to be photographed. They always ask something: Like this? Are you sure? Or should I position myself differently? Judit Mascó, on the other hand, does not need instructions. She herself explains that her profession is to play at seducing the camera. But, conversely, she downplays the photo she has on WhatsApp. She says her daughters are horrified that she doesn't change it, because it is already old, but she doesn't think about it. She accompanies the image with a phrase, a Buddhist principle: let the river flow.

She carries her home in her WhatsApp photo. The house, or her childhood. The thing is, she has a selfie where you can see, in the background, the place where she grew up, a suburb of Denver, in Colorado. Today she lives a 15-hour drive from that photograph, in Chicago, where she teaches history at Northwestern University and where she has established herself as one of the great experts on the white power movement. Her book Bring the War Home (Capitán Swing) was in the proofreading phase when a white supremacist rally caused serious incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those racist slogans have returned to occupy the political center, and the book is a good example to understand who these groups are and how they hope to shape the United States.

The image may look like it was made with artificial intelligence, but it is his own hand, Sergi Barrios's, making the shape of a dog. He has liked them for as long as he can remember. He says that when he was little they were like a magnet, he had to go and touch them, but he never thought that could become a profession. He actually studied industrial engineering and spent some time working with renewable energy. Meanwhile, he was taking canine training courses that helped him, for example, to understand a dog's psychology. And jobs started to appear, and people started having more and more dogs. Today, that hand making the shape of a dog that he has on his WhatsApp is the logo of his own company where he works with companion dogs and also detection dogs that find things as diverse as truffles, explosives, or bed bugs.

Miriam Nogueras picks up the green folder. It is quarter past one, she has finished the speech where she confirms the no of the party and steps down from the podium. As she returns to her seat, Aina Vidal, a deputy for the commons, says something to her, visibly indignant. She is wearing a yellow t-shirt that reads: "Catalunya is not CiU". Four hours later, the failure of the first housing decree is confirmed. Minister Bustinduy turns towards the Popular Party bench. He encourages them to applaud with their hands; he is telling them, with the gesture, to celebrate it, that what has happened is their merit. And they respond and applaud loudly. Nogueras looks at her phone. A group throws papers from the guests' gallery, shouting "Vulture funds govern the Congress". They resonate inside the building, and also outside, where housing movements have been protesting since early morning. Lara is there, megaphone in hand, repeating slogans like "It is the struggle, the only way". I approach her when she hands the device to a colleague, and she explains to me that she joined the union a year ago, that she has been sleeping in the square for days, and that her salary is barely enough, barely enough, to pay for a flat of just over 40 square meters with her partner. "Do you believe that by mobilizing you will really make the parties change their position?", I ask her. "It's the only way, for sure", she replies. I go back into the chamber and in the second conversation I catch in the hallway, one can hear: "Do you see it or not?" It is evident what they are talking about. It is the question that has been asked since early morning, what the journalists, advisors, and politicians who circulate through the chamber are commenting on. Outside, the word is struggle; inside, on the other hand, elections.

She has a photo on WhatsApp from this summer, at the top of a New York skyscraper. She says it is one of the things she likes to do most with her daughter: travel. In the image, she is wearing a shirt that says girl gang, a band of girls. She says it is pure coincidence, that she just liked the aesthetic of the look, even though on the trip they were effectively a band of girls: her, a friend, and their respective daughters. She had her alone, by choice, at 43 years old, and for 27 years she has worked as a matrimonial lawyer, a place from which to observe, on the front line, what happens and how people behave when love ends and, consequently, their finances change.

A person in a wheelchair raising a rifle. It is the image that Nerea Pérez de las Heras (Madrid, 1982) has on WhatsApp and which is, in reality, the logo of a fictional terrorist group that brought together people with disabilities. It was invented by Álex de la Iglesia in the film Acción Mutante. She already had a combative outlook before the summer of 2023. She had filled theaters with the monologue Feminismo para torpes, which would end up becoming a book; she wrote for different publications and co-hosted the podcasts –which continue today– Saldremos Mejores and Lo Normal. She had already turned 40 and was with a group of friends in a cove in Menorca which can only be accessed on foot or by boat. It was July 3 years ago. That day she was wearing a new swimsuit. The propeller of a sailboat severed her right leg, which was amputated after three operations. She explains this in the book Fantasma (Alfaguara), where she flees from narratives of overcoming to combine intimate narration with an essay that traverses love, disability, housing, and a fierce defense of public healthcare.

I ask him about the photo he has on WhatsApp and Hartmut Rosa (Lörrach, Germany, 1965) takes his mobile phone and tells me that he is not even sure how to look for it. “I try not to waste time with these things and I don't remember which one I have.” We find it, he looks at the screen and laughs. It is a close-up –which I can describe but not publish– where he appears with different sunglasses on his face. It is precisely his gaze that has X-rayed issues of extreme current importance, such as acceleration in our societies. Now he returns with Situación y constelación, a new book that has been published in Spanish by Ned Ediciones and that will be published next year in Catalan by Arcàdia, and in which he addresses how we are losing the ability to make decisions. He has spoken about it these days in Barcelona at a conference organized by CaixaForum.

“They live off this imaginary, off the cousin who studied in a public school and now works in what she wants,” says Àsia. She is 24 years old, was born in Catalonia and is the daughter of Moroccans. They often visit family, especially in the summer. “What do they tell you?”, I ask her. “Well, that I can choose and do what I want,” she replies. She recently graduated in law, and is doing an internship at a law firm while studying for a master's degree in legal practice.

He is seen smiling, with his finger raised and a backpack on his back. But Jordi Sarrats chose this photo for what is behind it: a river. "The horseshoe-shaped curves of rivers have always seemed to me a whim of nature, and this one, of the Colorado River, is iconic." Today he is retired, but he owned an elevator company for many years and today he presides over the guild that groups this sector.

She and a camel. Both in an extreme close-up. It is the photograph that Carla Polo has on WhatsApp. She is in the desert of Oman, where she traveled alone in February 2022. "There was no one there, obviously. Who travels alone in the middle of covid to Oman?" That morning she wanted to see the sunset, and she found the animal. Sometimes she thinks she should change it, because it is not very serious, but it reminds her of a good moment and she leaves it for later. In her status she has written: "I can" (I can). A reminder for the bad moments, she says, so as not to forget that it is worth trying what you want.

Mònica Bernabé is one of the European journalists who best knows Afghanistan. She first went there in 2000, during the first Taliban regime, lived there between 2006 and 2014, and has returned on several occasions, the last one this August 2026, when it has been five years since the withdrawal of American troops. We speak with her about what she has seen, what they have told her, and how she has disguised herself to be able to narrate the reality of Taliban Afghanistan, a regime that does not want foreign journalists and makes it difficult to report on what is happening in the country.

Josep Masalles (Barcelona, 1956) is known as the eclipse hunter. Or Mr. Eclipse Spain. He holds the record for being the person in Spain who has seen the most eclipses - a total of 43 - and is the president of Aster, the Astronomical Association of Barcelona.

"The snail no longer sticks out its horn, it no longer climbs the mountain. The snail no longer brings wine and a Moroccan crushed it", sings a young man, inside a car while with other friends. "We are young Catalans with a reputation for being traffickers", he intones in another video. He is Naim Smaili, a young son of Moroccans who has accumulated millions of views on TikTok by covering Catalan children's songs and placing, with humor, anti-racist messages.

Masculine sphere and heteropessimism. Gimbro and girlboss. They are concepts linked to gender that somehow indicate the cultural acceleration experienced in this area. This is analyzed in Tristes y salvajes by the philosopher and sociologist Lionel Delgado, who has a digital platform –Broders– for young people to express their emotions and concerns.

Daniela de Francisco was told she would never walk or speak again after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage at just 12 years old. But today she speaks, walks, and has completed her final year at the UPF in the degree of philosophy, politics, and economics, one of the most competitive courses in Spain. She has founded the anti-ableist student association.

If nature was the answer, what was the question? It is the quote that appears at the beginning of La respuesta (Destino), the book that paleontologist and co-director of Atapuerca Juan Luis Arsuaga has just published. It is more than 500 pages where there are some answers – let's not confuse them with certainties – and especially questions that help us to fascinatingly retrace the history of evolution and to understand ourselves, humans, in comparison with the rest of the animals.

Chandra was adopted in Nepal in 1998, the year in which a boom in international adoptions began in Catalonia, which lasted well into 2000. Today, those boys and girls are already of legal age and have been able to reflect on what happened to them. Some of them have created an association, Apacat, the first created by adopted boys and girls in Catalonia. And Chandra, who is now 33 years old, is its president.

His hands extracted the DNA of Lasa and Zabala, of the terrorists from 11-M and of the victims of the Civil War buried in Cuelgamuros. Antonio Alonso is a privileged witness to criminal history and forensic medicine in Spain. A forensic geneticist, he directed between 2019 and 2024 the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences. Retired, he now recounts in the book La huella invisible (Crítica) how DNA has changed the history of justice in Spain. 

In 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala was 40 years old and lived in London with her husband and two children. They decided that they would not spend that Christmas in England but in a nature reserve in the south of their country, Sri Lanka. On December 26, the tsunami –a word she didn't know– swept away the lives of her husband, her two children aged 5 and 7, and her parents. For a long time, she only thought about killing herself, but she found comfort in memories and in writing. What remains of those we love when they are gone? What do we remember? Questions and reflections that she wrote over seven years and which became the book Wave (wave), which is now being translated into Spanish by Capitán Swing and will be in bookstores from this Monday, June 8.

Andrea Marín (Barcelona, 2001) is a psychology graduate and one of the technicians researching at the Barcelona Institute of Neurosciences, where she works with cutting-edge equipment to conduct research on brain behavior.