We have been explaining for a long time: the current energy model is devastating for the climate, for pollution in cities, and for our energy dependence on external sources. Even so, it is difficult for society as a whole to fully believe it. And with the war in Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the new energy crisis, we are reaping the fruits of our stubbornness: price volatility and concern about supply. What more needs to happen?

¿Is there any medicinal herb that can cure us of forgetting? "We can all find our flower, we don't have it that far away, we surely have it very deep inside, hidden," says Eloi Aymerich, director and producer of the short fiction film Flor del cel, filmed in the lost valley of Vansa (Alt Urgell), on the southern slope of the Cadí. Since "Solitud" was filmed in 1991 on the northern slope of this mountain range –by Romà Guardiet, based on the novel by Víctor Català–, no other professional filming had been done. Rural depopulated Catalonia lives abandoned and quiet, both things. A delicate coexistence.

The meticulous account by the journalists of The New York Times published by l’ARA confirms what was obvious from three hours away: it was Netanyahu who dragged Trump into the war against Iran. The Israeli prime minister enthusiastically sold him a product of the type “What could go wrong?”, tailored to the scattered and capricious attention span of an egomaniacal president. And it worked.

I arrive at the Parcir bookshop, in Manresa, to preach, as authors are let loose around Sant Jordi. As it's early, I ask the booksellers (we've known each other for many years) to let me have a corner to write. And here I am, allowed to sit at the counter. "But they'll come to ask you for books," they warn me. Nothing makes me happier than playing bookseller or bartender. I sit down. On my desk screen, there's Les gratituds, by Delphine de Vigan, pending entry. The customers laugh and talk about me as "this new intern".

The first oil crisis, that of 1973-1974, ended up generating, especially in the developed Western world, a situation that was defined as "stagflation", that is, the simultaneity of economic stagnation and inflation. The world had come from a place where the two concepts were quite opposed, given that stagnation was fought with expansionary policies that were inflationary and inflation could be reduced with stabilization policies (i.e., stagnation or contraction). The repetition of expansionary policies simultaneous to the existence of strong supply inflation —the increase in the price of oil was due to unforeseen extra-economic causes—, ended up meaning that economic stimulus policies were useless. Only the same stagnation that was sought to be combated was achieved, but with the addition of inflation.

After the Easter cake, there's still a trace of chocolate in the bakeries. In supermarkets, if you look closely, you can find an egg among the laundry detergents. Or a rabbit near the drinks. There's never too much chocolate. When you meet someone who doesn't like it, you're suspicious. You think it's not normal to miss out on one of life's great pleasures. Even if you later remember that pleasures are personal and non-transferable. Nevertheless, you're suspicious. 

We know Enric Sòria, one of the most valuable authors in contemporary Catalan literature, for his work as a poet, diarist, and essayist. Now he is releasing, at last, a singular work, which is also a major contribution to our culture: Et tornaré a veure(Apunts sobre cinema 1910-1945), which has just appeared in a superb two-volume edition by the Valencian Film Archive and the Alfons el Magnànim Institution. I write “at last” because I have had the good fortune to be one of the happy few who have followed the writing process of this book over the —many— years it has taken, and that authorizes me to say it: it is an important work.I'll See You Again brings together comments by Enric Sòria on films belonging to the period mentioned in the title, that is, from the beginnings of cinema as an artistic language until the end of the Second World War, with the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of one of the most powerful cultural industries. The work offers a selection of these texts, but, even so, it is of somewhat overwhelming dimensions: twelve hundred pages divided into two volumes, with nearly nine hundred films commented on, ordered chronologically. There is cinema from everywhere, with a profusion of North American, British, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Japanese films, not necessarily in that order. The display of knowledge that the author pours into it on the subject he deals with is as spectacular as it is fascinating, and his writing, without a gram of pedantry or false erudition, has —as is its hallmark— the virtues of elegance, clarity, mastery of the language, and an irony that, fortunately, is frequent and achieves what is so difficult: to instruct and entertain the reader at the same time. They are texts of irresistible reading: it is difficult to stop at one and not want to continue with the next.In the illuminating prologue, Enric Sòria explains his personal —and familial— connection with cinema, emphasizes that it is an art that tends to abolish chance and, therefore, exactness, and stresses that it has been (often through the most unexpected means) a form of protest against the dictatorships and authoritarians that ravaged the first half of the 20th century, as they are also doing, for now, with the first third of the 21st. He also presents it thus: “From its origins, cinema is close to spectacles like illusionism, variety shows, and, above all, the circus: clowns, sword-swallowers, bearded ladies, acrobats, and lion tamers, but also other shows [...] like concerts, dance, theatre, and opera. Cinema did not just move between these two realms: it could encompass them, and that is what it has done.” Catalan culture counts and has counted, fortunately, with excellent film critics and scholars, but until now it did not have a work like I will see you again, the fruit of knowledge and literature, but also of pure passion, love, and fascination. A great party.

Early in the morning, a girl takes her dog out for its morning pee and, indeed, the animal lifts its leg and leaves its present dribbling around the corner and sliding down the paving stone. The girl looks at me with a sort of "So what?", and between her being sleepy and me being in a hurry, the autopilot decides it's too early to start the day with a lecture titled "Since last February, municipal ordinances have established that not diluting dog urine with water is punishable by a fine of up to 300 euros". The sequence ends well, because after a moment another pet owner, who has followed the scene from a distance, rinses the wall and the pavement with the water he was carrying in a small container.

Science fiction is one of the genres that best allow us to verify that human imagination is more reliable than we ourselves are often willing to admit. In the space of not many years, science fiction ideas that were cataloged as mere fantasies have become realities: for example, only one hundred and four years separate the publication of the novel "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne from the arrival of Apollo XI on “our” satellite. Changes have occurred more rapidly as the 20th century progressed and the 21st arrived: the script for the film Blade Runner (freely based on a story by Philip K. Dick) brought to the table issues such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, climate change, or large migratory movements, which in little more than forty years are the most prominent problems on the international agenda. Another film based on a novel (science fiction practices promiscuity of narrative languages, and goes hand in hand with literature, cinema, comics, video games, etc.), like Soylent Green, posed the global food crisis and the degradation of democracy with the consequent emergence of authoritarian forms of government, as we see today. The Californian company Foundation is driving the mass production of a robot called Phantom MK-1 that – unlike other major robotics proposals known so far – is specifically designed to fight in war situations (Terminator). Major technology companies have long been researching time travel and the colonization of Mars.The lesson of all this is that everything we imagine is also real. If we can imagine it, it is already real. That is why, from Aristotle to the Surrealists, there have always been those who have defended the lucidity of dreams. Ideas that at some point were rejected, ridiculed, or directly persecuted as fantasy, delirium, or blasphemy (such as traveling to the Moon, demonstrating that the Moon orbited the Earth and that the Earth orbited the Sun, or asserting that the Earth is round and not flat) become empirical and undeniable realities thanks to the intelligence and persistent effort of a species, the human one, which does not always dedicate itself to committing atrocities.The Artemis II mission has opened the era of Moon conquest. The objective will be to inhabit the Moon, establish bases and laboratories there, work there, build there, colonize it. This means a new race between the world powers, and the need to deploy an ad hoc legislation that will be complex and that will have to be avoided (I don't know how) from being put from the start at the service of oligarchies and oligopolies. And that another science fiction prediction is not fulfilled, in this case from the film Matrix: “You humans –Agent Smith said–, you establish yourselves in a place, you consume all the resources, and when you have exhausted them, you go to another place and do the same thing again. There is only one other species that behaves this way, and that is the virus.”

We read in ARA

Economists are often asked to give an opinion on what we predict will happen in the economy, especially in light of the events we are experiencing. For my part, I usually answer that the correct answer is that I have no idea, but that out of courtesy to the asker I can anticipate, more from experience than from certain knowledge, that... I will not make jokes about economists' forecasts, but in our defense I will highlight the complexity of a moment in which geopolitics is the cause of uncertainties, in which what intervenes is a set of interdependent factors and, even more so, driven by the character who today leads the White House. This geopolitical framework has as a forecast more than a single economic variable, to which an element of risk can be associated. And when risks are chained, the probability of each forecast, which we obtain by multiplying by a value less than 1, becomes very low. Everything depends on everything! So that, despite the fact that today we have, unlike in the past, better forecasting tools and more reaction instruments than ever, these situations, increasingly complex and interconnected, are more difficult to anticipate. The safety net falls, logistics or the transport of goods breaks down, the value chain is lost and everything is paralyzed at once.This generates a certain frustration: economic science cannot anticipate, avoid, or sufficiently correct cycles or their effects on people's well-being! In the Middle Ages, science in general had less to say than today to set the world aright. Today, there are more things that were previously considered exogenous, which could not be influenced, that are no longer so. The world's misery, lack of water, hunger, loss of health, inequality: we know they are treatable and we can act on them. And even though we know we can, we don't. This cannot leave us with a clear conscience.We live in a world of exciting progress in the field of technology, but which frightens us later, seen up close; they generate as much hope as fear. Innovations that question many jobs, assets — as it has settled in. MAGA already has roots.

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. 

When this article appears in print, we will already know if “a whole civilization” has died “this night”. After all, if God made the world in seven days, what could prevent the best president the Earth has ever seen since the appearance of Man from erasing Iran and its thousands of years of history in a single night? Trump's ability to turn everything he touches into shit is exhausting, day and night.

"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.

1. “It’s a 3D view accompanied by personal experience, which gives us a much better interpretation than many images obtained by robotic probes”. I found it gratifying that a NASA administrator, Lori Glaze, recognized the human gaze, at a time when AI seems poised to overwhelm natural intelligence, risking domination over collective experience, ridiculing our condition. Victor Glover, one of the four astronauts who orbited the Moon, said during the eclipse: “It’s the strangest and most surreal sight we’ve had today, with the Earth’s glow illuminating the Moon”. And the spacecraft continues its adventure, which no one can explain better than the four people who have lived it. Without them, there would have been events but not an experience. That is, a lived reality transmitted by beings of flesh, bone, blood, and natural intelligence, who will be able to explain it to us (with the limitations imposed by the relevant authorities, it must be said, which is also a human condition) with the intensity of the lived experience. That is, a perception, from reason, accompanied by sensations, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, that shape our species and that AI, capable of generating infinite accumulation and combination of data, will never be able to transmit with the singularity and sensitivity that, for better or worse, constitutes the human condition.

A few days ago, King Juan Carlos, the emeritus, was applauded and cheered by the audience in a bullring, who, with signs of enthusiasm, asked him to return. To return to Spain, of course, but also to return to the position of power and preeminence that, according to these people, he deserves. Juan Carlos I, it is worth remembering, is an unelected head of state who, over forty years of reign, defrauded billions to the Treasury of the very state over which he reigned, and who also used the institutions and powers of the state (and, naturally, the public treasury) for his personal interests, ranging from erotic adventures to business dealings with oil sheikhs who have finally taken him in under the auspices of a dictatorship. Many, however, are still supporters of Juan Carlos convinced that the monarch lives in forced exile, a victim of his son Felipe's treacherous understanding with the enemies of the homeland, etc.I mention this because, in Spain, corruption is so deeply rooted within the very architecture of the state that it is an inseparable part of it. From the king downwards, literally: the judiciary, the army, the police forces. Of course, also elected governments, whether central, regional, or municipal. And political parties, naturally. One should never forget the lush jungle of corrupters, which includes everything from construction, energy, and technology companies to media outlets, and, needless to say, banks.Now, the PP and the PSOE are facing, in parallel, trials for corruption cases: the corrosive Kitchen plot, concerning the Popular Party, and the shabby masquerade case, or Koldo case, or Ábalos or Cerdán (it is referred to in all these ways) concerning the Socialists. The coincidence of these two judicial proceedings can be considered the start of the election campaign for the upcoming general elections. Therefore, we will see and hear the leaders, and sympathetic journalists and media, exchanging insults and reproaches in the childish and poisoned tone that Spanish politics has adopted for some time, in a spectacle that can only be endured on the most cheerful days.However, we should not be mistaken. Even in corruption there are classes, and in the Spanish state, the one in charge of this matter is and always will be the Popular Party. The corrupt dealings of the socialists and other parties can amount to considerable mire, but no other party, not even the PSOE, can afford to organize patriotic police forces or to blow up banks in Andorra just to destroy political enemies, both external and internal. This is for one reason: as in the film Tomorrow is Another Day, the other parties are contingent, while the PP is necessary. Necessary for the continuity of the homeland, as understood by the aforementioned institutions and companies. Necessary to maintain a balance of power in Spain, as understood by, for example, all those who applauded Juan Carlos in the bullring.

Every new geopolitical threat has served to bring the United Kingdom and the European Union a little closer. For a year now, London and Brussels have been in a process of accelerated and silent reconnection. The Russian invasion of Ukraine opened the doors to defense cooperation, and the Trump disruption, now magnified by the horizon of economic and energy crisis generated by the war in Iran, has increased the need for economic and commercial understanding.

We read in ARA an interview with the former curator of the Lleida Museum Albert Velasco, regarding a book, absolutely essential, that he has just published: Les pintures de Sixena. Un foc que encara crema

Although Ayuso is understood when she speaks, this time her new creation –“the culture is universal”– does need translation. What she is saying is that only Madrid is universal and, therefore, the Guernica cannot be lent for nine months to the Basque Country, as requested by the Basque government to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the bombing of civilian populations by Hitler's aviation, an ally of Franco. With the full sentence it becomes clearer: “I think it's provincial, and I think that culture is universal”.