The world we live in, they tell us, is as it should be, there is no better one. We must adapt to it whether we want to or not. Fortunes are so enormous, corporations are so gigantic that they would seem to be omnipotent deities and not mere organizations run by people as human as you and me. Forgetfulness and ignorance of recent history make us believe that it is the force of progress that has brought us here, to this grim scenario in which it seems we have decided to initiate, without having formally agreed, a mass suicide. Or what else does a society that stops reproducing do? A human group that does not perpetuate itself is a group that chooses its own extinction, thus resolving Camus' dilemma because for a long time the only philosophical problem has not been individual (suicide) but collective (stopping having children). But how are we to decide on this act of blind faith in the future, of desperate hope, if it turns out that the bonds that have always sustained us have weakened to historic lows? Without a solid family or relationships that can withstand the pressure of a system of fierce competition between individuals for jobs, housing, social benefits, for life itself, without ties that escape what can be bought and sold, how are we to embark on the mad adventure of bringing a child into the world? In the city of Barcelona, birth rates have reportedly fallen to 1920 levels. And still thanks, I would say, because this is a very hostile environment for children. Firstly, because, due to the big housing problem, many families who have decided to have children have moved away, and secondly, because the neighborhoods that might be more suitable for living with children are the ones most liked by tourists and expats who have driven us out. My heart breaks every time I return to Gràcia and walk through the streets and squares where my children used to play. Now there are more dogs, with their groomers and clothing boutiques. Yes, progress must have been this: that in a city like ours there are more dogs than children, that animals are dressed and taken in strollers and we give them exquisite delicacies to eat while between 25% and 30% of the child population lives in poverty. That on a well-known music streaming platform, the advertisement for an apartment rental platform appears, threatening to leave Barcelonians without festivals if they continue with the obsession of wanting decent housing. Openly and brazenly, the spot asks us to imagine that there wouldn't be enough tourist accommodation for those who come to have a good time, that then we wouldn't be able to enjoy all these incredible concerts whose tickets cost more than a nursery monthly fee or what a family eats in a whole month.

The perplexity of what we have all experienced in these days of papal fervor and the passion of those who govern us for this religious leader still lingers. The attendance of our representatives at strange rituals and other performances called liturgies is a nauseating ignominy, there is no other name for it. The right is labeled hypocritical for proudly proclaiming their Catholicism while defending values supposedly contrary to those promoted by this particular sect on issues like immigration, but the most blatant hypocrisy is that practiced by the left. They embrace the Pope to project an anti-fascist image (forgetting the Church's long history of good relations with totalitarian regimes) while deliberately overlooking the rest of Catholic principles that are contrary to everything progressivism represents. They thus demonstrate the extent of the ethical and moral downfall of those who claim to be defenders of individual rights and freedoms. More than hypocrisy, it is, in fact, pure and simple cynicism. And a shameful betrayal of everything that has cost centuries of struggles, deaths, and suffering. There are two glaring examples: that of women and that of gay men. Seeing the entire Congress standing and applauding for seven minutes with religious fervor the leader of a particular organization that has used all its power to keep women subjugated and condemned to reproduce against their will is an image that definitively confirms the death of institutional feminism. With Francina Armengol saying "su Santidad", socialist deputies, others from Sumar, from ERC, all servile and prostrate before a man who, of course, tells them to their faces what they are doing by having abortions. All of them must be willing to return to forced reproduction. Their applause is the fertilizer that will contribute to the already initiated campaign of regression in the advances achieved by the struggle for equality. And the gay men who have attended mass and have communed with the millstones of those who have always been their executioners, those who have denied their mere and simple existence, these men also betray the long history of the struggle to decriminalize free love and sex and shamelessly adore the head of a State all too known for its homophobia. 

Call me resentful, but there are grievances that have stuck in my memory and haven't left me even after years. With the arrival of June, the light of the lengthening days, swallows crossing the sky, and the exaltation of the beginning heat, I can't help but remember that end of the 8th grade school year. The summer camp had been in preparation for months, more important than any that had happened before because it would mark the end of this very significant stage of our lives, the end of primary education and, to some extent, childhood. It had been an effervescent school year, I had learned, thought, and felt more than ever, and I was convinced that anything was possible. One of the problems with summer camp for families was always the cost, but at our school they knew this very well and, since before Christmas, they launched initiatives to help us finance it. One of them was selling lottery tickets. I didn't know yet if they would let me go that year or not, but I wanted to go so badly that I thought if I worked hard to cover the cost, I would eventually achieve it. Surely my tutor and the school principal would convince my father to let me participate in such an extraordinary activity that filled me with immense excitement, as if it were a trip to the Moon. So, I spent my Christmas holidays in the center of Vic stopping passersby with that plain accent I had back then, saying: "Would you like a lottery ticket?" I remember myself like this and I find it hard to believe that I overcame my shyness and dared to speak to strangers as if it were nothing. I soon discovered that I had a great knack for this new activity. I sold everything that could be sold, and I covered the expenses for my summer camp and for others. And yes, I was absolutely sure that with that effort, He (as we called him at home) wouldn't say no to me. I spent the day imagining what it would be like, how much fun I would have, and also that I would be near the boy I liked, of course. I was 14 or 15 years old. I would leave the neighborhood, breathe a completely different air.

The news talks about nothing else: the Pope is coming soon. We citizens who pay our taxes will lay out a red carpet for him because blessing the new cross of the Sagrada Família is apparently very important. A man arrives, a simple man, to whom millions of people, as human as he is, attribute some kind of power beyond what the rest of us earthlings have, and the city must bow at his feet. It must be that we always need someone to adore: Bad Bunny, Rosalía, the Pope, Lamine Yamal. The Pope, by the way, completely refutes the premise of gender deconstruction theories according to which a male wearing skirts and dresses is the antithesis of patriarchal power and is subversive, and I don't know how many more inventions we owe to the also revered, almost sanctified, Judith Butler. There are plenty of men in robes who, unfortunately, do not represent any subversion of the performative mandates assigned to their sex (because the mandates are for us) nor, of course, do they constitute any opposition to the misogynistic order. Quite the contrary, if I think of men who don't wear pants, it turns out they are holy men with the most masculine power: bishops, imams, priests, monks of all kinds.

On Saturday, a voice clip on Catalunya Ràdio captured the demands of one of the sales assistants from the textile and footwear sector who had joined the strike and was demonstrating in the center of Barcelona. She described an unusual scene that I would have liked to see with my own eyes: that at the Chanel store on Passeig de Gràcia, due to a lack of workers to attend to customers, some managers had to stand behind the counters. The protests had as their main objective to halt the new collective agreement proposed by the employers' association, which represents a step backward in the labor rights of a sector that is already among the most precarious. To reduce these rights, they intend to adopt the already known dynamic through which working classes have been impoverished in recent decades: gradually replacing veteran employees with new batches of hires with much worse conditions. Until the day comes when we can no longer even remember that there was a time when jobs had more dignified conditions. The saying "we will live worse than our parents" is a resistance-free acceptance of this neoliberal drift that wants us to consider this change in the organization of work and the distribution of wealth of increasingly greedy companies, capable of squeezing the base of their production pyramid to 19th-century levels, as a kind of fatal destiny.

Politics should not be a profession. In an optimal democratic system, our representatives should come from society itself and, therefore, already have their own job, a profession. The cases of those who come from work and return to work once their task is finished are so unusual that their case becomes news, as happened with Julio Anguita. Former presidents, moreover, have a lifelong pension, a secretary, an office, and a driver with an escort, whether they were in office for half their lives or only lasted a few months. A luxury retirement, at the opposite extreme of widows who receive the minimum wage. The establishment of these privileges is already a scandal and establishes a completely unfair comparative grievance with the rest of the workers. (Well, I am self-employed, so I know what awaits me the day I can no longer string two sentences together and get paid for it: becoming an occupier and anti-system grandma, at the very least.)

I went to give a talk at a high school and asked the students if they had witnessed any act or instance of discrimination based on sex. I directly addressed the boys because years ago I realized an obvious truth that had not occurred to me: that many of the men with whom we have lived throughout our lives, even though we have had them by our side in schools, homes, jobs, and recreational spaces, have not the faintest idea of what we have suffered for the simple fact of being women. I am not talking, of course, about those who have discriminated against us, whether out of custom and culture, ideological conviction, or simply because they did not want to give up the privileges that being part of the dominant sex gives them. I am referring to the men who have never seen us as inferior or as humanly different. Children, boys, and men who are genuinely egalitarian because they do not conceive of relationships in terms of submission until they are taught to be the masters of their female counterparts. Although feminism must primarily deal with the dire consequences that patriarchy has on women, we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we did not also keep an eye on how they live this social organization that is given to them. Some fit into it and accommodate themselves without any problem, but others do not.

Our cousins from Morocco told us that at school they received physical punishment, whether it was a shove from time to time or blows with a ruler on the palm of the hand. We, who had loving and close teachers, were dying of fear imagining those punishments, but it was even more terrible to know that if the boy or girl came home complaining about a teacher's slap, what happened was that the father gave them another without even asking what had caused the reprimand. Fortunately, that way of linking violence with teaching has long been left behind and no one believes that blood is needed to make letters enter any human being. In that context, the authority of teachers was imposed by force and it was fear that led to respecting it. Rereading Montserrat Roig's stories about terrifying nuns who educated her is a good way to understand this world that some have never experienced.

Killing children is not easy; one must know how. In abstract terms, extermination proclamations of an entire people can be made, as Netanyahu or other genocidal leaders do, but the truth is that this job –annihilating creatures– cannot be done by just anyone. Who will go door to door, when the extermination of an entire race is decreed, to finish off all the children living there? Who will be able to pull the trigger or drop a bomb, who will aim with a squinted eye directly at the head of a child who barely stands a few feet tall? Who will plunge a knife into tender flesh and endure the sharp, horrifying screams? Very few people, in fact, could carry out the worst of acts, the most fatal and terrible: ending the life of a defenseless sprout. That is why soldiers must be trained to dehumanize the other in a process that is two-way. Because it is impossible to see “the enemy” in a creature if one has not suffered a significant erosion of one’s own humanity.

Junts has been marking a tough stance against immigration for some time. They feel the breath of Aliança Catalana and Vox on their necks and believe the best strategy is to copy their discourse. I speak with the taxi driver and the doorman, the waiter and the shop assistant, and we all share the same feeling of weariness with a political class that seems to live light-years away from people's real lives. They play a game that isn't ours, even if they do it with our money and our lives. Now they're bringing up the burqa issue in Congress, knowing it's useless. Why are they doing it? Why are they throwing hours and public resources into the trash? To spread propaganda, of course, now that the one from Ripoll is chasing them. Catalan right-wing, like all Western right-wings, has completely renounced classical liberalism which spoke of good sense and order (that hypocrisy sustained on the violent exploitation of the working class) and is embracing cruelty organized and inspired by Trump. It is the perversion of stoking the hatred of the poor (even if they consider themselves middle class) against the poor who are a little poorer and already come from home with eroded humanity because they have had the whim to be born in another country. 

Silvia Orriols proposed a couple of weeks ago that the Quran be banned because, according to her, what is said in it is barbarism. Dictators, authoritarians, and fascists have that urge to burn and ban books, I don't know if it's because they've never read them or because they can't stand the fact that there are consciences that endure on supports as light as paper. Eternity on thin sheets transmitted through the centuries. The holy book of Muslims, taken from a literary point of view, is a very interesting work full of stories, imagination, and fantasy. The snag is that so many millions of people over the centuries suffer from the quixotism that religious people call faith: confusing fiction with reality. The Quran also has very boring passages, and if it were an original aspiring to be published, any editor today with a minimum of professional judgment would take scissors to remove superfluous repetitions, worn-out clichés, and other defects in the supposedly sacred text. Some of its fragments are sublime, with rhythm and musicality, images of enormous beauty and lyricism. My favorite surah, which I still remember from the times I memorized it in the oratory on Ramada street in Vic, is the first one revealed to Muhammad when he took to going alone to the mountain. Or so says the official history of Islam. That the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him the first word that would be used to found a religion that today has over a billion believers. Gabriel told him: Read! Thus, with such a categorical imperative. Something that surprised the future prophet because, according to the myth, he was completely illiterate, a merchant who traveled Arabia and the Middle East buying and selling things but without any ability to decipher written letters. "Read!" the messenger angel repeated to him. "Read in the name of your Lord, who created you from a drop of blood," etc. In this, I confess that I have been very obedient to my parents' religion. If Gabriel had stopped at the beginning of the surah (Read, damn it, read!) perhaps I would still be a Muslim. But that miraculously appearing being from nowhere kept returning with the ups and downs typical of someone who insists on writing a long book, sometimes more inspired and sometimes not so much. 

There is an age from which, we have been told, women stop being relevant. We disappear, we become invisible just because we have stopped being fertile. Reproduction or death, tied to the imposition of the duty to be pleasing to the eyes of men. We don't feel that way, of course, it's how they continue to represent us in high-impact media: series, films, advertising. The idealization of youth (to which many of us wouldn't return even if crazy), the creation of needs derived from the desire to preserve it at all costs, and the lack of women's voices telling us the real and honest experience of what it means to grow old create a terribly cruel imaginary for those of us who are still alive past forty, fifty, sixty. Smear yourself with creams, exercise, starve, mutilate yourself.

The latest book by linguist Steven Pinker, When everyone knows that everyone knows...Published in Spanish by Paidós, this book deals with common knowledge, the cognitive system that allows us to be aware of what others know. That is, what we know everyone knows. These are the kinds of mental faculties that allow us to navigate life as couples, families, in society, and as citizens. Without an awareness of what we think and what we know others think, it is impossible to share a common space, impossible to live with others. It is necessary to establish tacit consensus, norms we follow even before they are codified in law. This is why common knowledge becomes an essential vector of freedom of expression, academic freedom, and freedom of thought.

I've only seen David Uclés once, on the day of this year's Nadal Prize ceremony. When he gave his acceptance speech, I found that he spoke like no one I've ever heard anyone speak, that he expressed himself in a way as singular as his attire. Something unusual in our field: we're all quite original. When I was young, I used to say that I only wanted to be a "normal" writer, until, after meeting many colleagues, I realized that "normal" writers don't exist. There are mediocre ones, of course: the efficient mercenaries of the written word who churn out a book every year and produce novels like they're churning out sausages. I don't consider these writers—you'll have to forgive my professional purism, but I say this more as a reader than a writer. When I read, I want access to a consciousness, a world, a perspective on life, and an artistic work created with words and with the pieces and mechanisms inherent to literature. If I want to be entertained by stories told in a flat, soulless style, I already have afternoon soap operas. Anyway, I don't want to talk about books, since I haven't read either of the two novels Uclés has published; I want to talk about writers, the press, and all that part of the work we usually call "promotion."

Quality education accessible to all, regardless of a student's family's economic status, is one of humanity's greatest achievements. It is essential for building a society of free citizens who think for themselves and understand the many alienating strategies employed by political and economic powers. Emancipatory education is not instruction aimed at producing functional, efficient, and obedient adults who can easily integrate into the productive machinery of capitalism. Good education equips children with the necessary tools to understand themselves and their place in the world, to be aware of the importance of the bonds that unite us with others, and of the human and humanistic values ​​that make collective life a good life. It is an education that fosters kindness, that nurtures and develops each child's innate abilities, that empowers them to stand firmly on the ever-shifting ground of existence. It is not about curricula or projects: it is about connections and coexistence, about recognition and respect. And we will have role models who guide us beyond the family sphere.

The woman suffers all day long, worried that someone will occupy the apartment she bought with her life savings. Not a day goes by that she doesn't turn on the television and see images of vandalized properties, terrible violations of private property rights. These scare tactics dominate the morning news. The woman, of course, doesn't see the perversion of a system that speculates on housing, dominated by large landlords and vulture funds that make access to decent housing impossible, and that uses her as a pawn to impose a general climate in which evictions are not only acceptable but absolutely necessary. It doesn't matter if the "evictions" are of families, of children. Property is more sacred than compassion for the homeless, and lumping them together with opportunists and freeloaders makes their dehumanization easier. So, the fear of the woman is, in reality, a fear of poverty, of those who have nothing. If they have nothing, they have nothing to lose and, therefore, can risk much more than someone who has something.

We talk a lot about the violence that occurs in the intimacy of relationships, but very little about desire, about what happens to us women in the murky waters of sexuality. Like any other human experience, sex, love, and eroticism are also learned; they don't arise instinctively, detached from culture. From the available representations in literature, in the audiovisual world, in the stories told about us, we know very well what men's desire is like, what it consists of, how it is expressed, and how far it can go. Or rather, we know the desire of men who feel entitled to display their size, to put on a show of strength not only to impress their potential romantic conquests but also to compete with other men like themselves, to demonstrate that they are bigger, more potent, and more powerful. The sexuality that dominates the collective imagination is, therefore, the sexuality of predators who experience conquest as a hunt. To avoid appearing weak and helpless before their male counterparts, they pursue, harass, dominate, and sometimes even domesticate women to the point of annihilation, turning them into trophies.

Only bad faith or utter ignorance could give credence to Vox and its proposal to ban the burka and niqab in public spaces. They speak of "our culture" as if theirs were everyone's. Their stale patriotism, their Francoist nostalgia, their radical misogyny, and their freedom-crushing attitude are certainly not "our culture." But what's surprising isn't Vox's racism, but the ineptitude of a left wing that doesn't seem to see these things coming, and out of laziness, mediocrity, or cowardice, allows certain thorny issues to fester until they erupt in controversies like the one we're seeing these days.

Young people today lack private and shared spaces where they can interact freely and independently without adult intervention. There is the space dedicated to formal education and extracurricular activities, but outside this broad range of organized time, what is left for them? In the physical, analog world, only consumption: streets full of shops and shopping malls. The available parks are designed for toddlers. In a few squares, there are still some ping-pong tables. In any case, there comes a time when children disappear from the city. If we look at the types of people we find on the street, outside of school hours, we see older people or very young children, but it would seem that teenagers don't exist. Where are they? Locked away at home, of course, and, in many cases, in their bedrooms, where all the social life they once had in person, as a real, physical being and not a digital avatar, has been displaced. The virtualization of childhood and adolescence is an unprecedented phenomenon whose long-term consequences are unknown. Currently, the data on mental health problems in this age group are so alarming that they should prompt us to reconsider this social shift, which we have neither decided upon nor thoroughly evaluated. Those of us who had children at the turn of the millennium were later told that we couldn't do anything, that we couldn't oppose the digitization and virtualization of our own offspring. To be against it is to be old-fashioned, technophobic, and practically an internet-bound Amish.

I've been to prison several times, always as a guest writer at the adult education centers they usually run. The visit that affected me most was to the youth detention center, which used to be in Trinitat. It was an old, dilapidated facility with thick metal doors. Just being inside already caused me a certain anxiety, and I find the work of the professionals who go there every day admirable. When the buildings are new, like Lledoners or Puig de les Basses, the space is more sterile and the architecture less prison-like, but the knot in your stomach is still there. Especially as you walk in and the doors close behind you, and you put yourself in the shoes of those who never get out. I say the youth detention center affected me the most because it was full of kids who seemed very familiar. In fact, I found some from my neighborhood, who gave me greetings for my brothers, and some didn't want to attend the event because they were embarrassed to be recognized. Among those children were likely career criminals, real movie villains, but I got the impression that many were there because of bad choices, getting involved in illegal activities without really considering the long-term consequences of their actions. The boys from my street who ended up in prison—I knew them—were products of poverty, of parental neglect (boys were street kids and girls were homebound, so the boys were the ones who suffered from sexism), and, in many cases, of drug addiction. I remember Musta, for example, affable and friendly, whose name I came across one day in a short note fromHe 9 NewHe had died of an overdose.