Shane Gillis' monologue on Saturday Night Live this Saturday was like a trip to the past. A slap of alleged humor smelling of mothballs. It is not that this historic NBC sketch show has always been characterized by high-brow comedy. SNL has had very crude periods. Surely, through its sketches, one can observe how television humor has evolved in line with social transformations. For this reason, the opening monologue by Gillis, the host this past weekend, belonged to another era. All the jokes had to do with people's physical appearance and, furthermore, the everyday conflicts he posed to get laughs targeted women. Gillis appeared on stage lamenting being too fat and called out other people in the audience who were “fat as a cow.” Mocking himself and his bad appearance in a beer commercial, he claimed he looked like a lesbian. When he explained his supposed attempt at hiking, he joked about the day he encountered a girl alone on the mountain, implying she might think he could assault her. He claimed it had been so long since he went to the gym that “he didn’t know that women now dress like whores.” He said it was because of the shorts that women wear: “Neon-colored, with wrinkles that wrap around the buttocks and meet at the anus area.” He also lamented that now you cannot look at girls at the gym because they record you with their phones and post it on TikTok to report you. He spoke of some hypothetical older sisters: “I have two huge, fat, very bitchy sisters.” The way to protect himself from this crude humor was to include himself in the physical humiliations. He closed the monologue commenting that the hairstyle he had either looked gay or looked like Hitler. It was predictable: unimaginative comedians, when they want to be provocative, always make Hitler appear in their jokes as the only resource they have to achieve irreverence.

No team wins a title in October, but they can accumulate a capital of excitement among the fans and respect among rivals. We are talking about Barça, which has managed to make fans all over the world ask what day and what time they play, because their matches are a promise of play, goals, and, at times, fantasy.

There are at least two ways to approach debates about identity. One is essentialist in nature and seeks to answer the question of “what it is to be” (woman or man, young or old, parent or child, right-wing or left-wing, Spanish, French, Italian, or Catalan...). And on a strictly individual level, it asks “who am I”. The other proposes a relational approach that we can summarize in questions such as “to whom or to what one belongs” or “for whom and with whom one is” something.

The first CIS barometer after the housing protests places the PSOE as the leading force, twelve points above the PP. The socialists would obtain 34% of the votes, while the People's Party members would get 22.2%. Vox isn't having much of a party, if we are to believe the poll, because it goes from 16.6% to 17.1%, but, above all, it sends gusts of wind down the necks of Feijóo's friends.

The now famous "whoever can do it, should do it" of Aznar has reached, as it could not be otherwise, the Spanish monarchy, and that is where they stand. Announced weeks in advance, the visit of the King and Queen of Spain, Felipe and Letizia, to the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, has no other content than the full support of the royal house for the potential PP and Vox government. At least that is how the Spanish right and far-right interpret it, because it is quite difficult to interpret the gesture in any other way, and even more so in these days of full electoral pre-campaign. “We are living in dark days,” the monarch stated last February, in a speech before the European Parliament, with his characteristic ambiguity: everyone could understand that the darkness he spoke of alluded to the rise of the far-right throughout Europe, or perhaps to the evils of Sanchismo. In any case, Felipe VI and the Spanish Crown do not hide their preferences, at least since October 3, 2017.

There are people who manage their silences and there are those who manage compulsive tweets on social media. This is the case of the socialist Óscar Puente, who lives very comfortably in his role as enfant terrible of the council of ministers, witty scourge of the PP and cheerleader for Pedro Sánchez. About the daily problems of the suburban rail service or the hundreds of people that the high-speed rail has left at Sants Station, what can you tell him. The other day he wrote: "They don't know how to fix it [...]. The sacrifice is always asked of the same people". He was referring to Feijóo, but if we didn't know that he is incapable of self-criticism we would have thought he was talking about himself, because, in effect, they don't know how to fix it, and the sacrifice is always asked of the same workers who every morning have to play the roulette of the train lottery.

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, has scolded Ramon Pellicer for giving a voice to anti-vaxxers on his program Vertex. It is the usual dilemma. Do you give a voice to someone who clearly has a harmful position (from the point of view of coherence)? Do you create a cordon sanitaire for those who demonstrate or are suspected of having anti-democratic or dangerous behaviors or thoughts, or who violate human rights?

1. There are no nuances left now. One after another, the European right-wing parties are capitulating, surrendering themselves to the far-right. In Italy, the latest whim of President Giorgia Meloni, who has already been in power for four years, has been an electoral law that gifts seventy seats to whoever obtains 42% of the votes, that is to say, a bonus that minimizes pluralism. And everyone has taken it in their stride. We are in the dynamic of "anything goes".

1. The elections scheduled for next November 29th are not the consequence of a specific event (the express housing decrees) but rather of an unviable government at least since the events in Ceuta at the end of July, which to this day have still not been resolved. If Junts and the PNV had supported laws that, on the other hand, can be applied provisionally, the parliamentary precariousness would be the same. In this sense, whether the elections were on November 29th or in a few months, in the year 2027, when they were due, is irrelevant. The dramatization of the early call, as well as its overacted political interpretation, is part of a legitimate electoral strategy. In any case, it is just that: an electoral strategy that theoretically favors the PSOE and the parties that provide it with parliamentary support. For the moment, no poll suggests that this expectation equates to a victory.

On Monday, Salvador Illa posted a tweet on the X network to protest against the approach of the program Vèrtex for having given a voice to anti-vaxxers and demanding responsibility for not putting public health at risk. The day before, Ramon Pellicer had introduced the debate on vaccination with a very fragile premise: “This week the flu and COVID vaccination campaign has begun, and we wanted to focus on the other side of this reality: that of the people who distrust vaccines.” The program turns a minority position into a counterpart to the vaccination campaign, endorsed by the journalistic cliché of “the other side of reality.” This other side perhaps does not justify so much attention. In any case, the video of the anti-vax couple they interviewed did not last more than three minutes, and they used very vague arguments. The man said that for him, smiles and hugs were more important for maintaining good health. They were not presented as experts, nor did they use a falsely scientific discourse. The program then dedicated four times as much time, twelve minutes, to refuting the anti-vaxxers' arguments with two expert professionals: Gemma Moncunill, lead researcher of the Caixa Research Institute group, and Judit Vall, professor of applied economics at the UB, to clarify aspects linked to the interests of pharmaceutical companies. Both insisted on the benefits of vaccines, and Moncunill stressed that it was advisable to get “all the vaccines recommended by the Generalitat.” A reporter provided statistical data that consolidated their explanations, including figures on the lives that vaccines save.

It has become a routine operation for civic entities—or directly parties—of the far-right or Spanish ultra-nationalists to take their political demands to the highest judicial instances, and for judges and prosecutors to take on the task of turning them into sentences or resolutions of mandatory compliance for citizens or institutions. This is what is known as the judicialization of politics, a mechanism that was greased and fine-tuned (“fine-tuned” was a key word) during the years of persecution and criminalization of the Catalan independence movement, and which has now reached cruising speed against all enemies of Spain that stand in its way, starting if necessary—as we have also been seeing for some years now—with the government of Spain itself.

During the broadcast of the October 12th military parade that TVE aired yesterday, there was one of those moments when the history of Spain explains the present.

Pedro Sánchez, at a rally in Ponferrada, lashed out at the Supreme Court for pressuring him to approve the grandchildren's law. A law that would allow the grandchildren of republican exiles to vote in Spain. Sánchez must think that the majority of these exiles, in Latin American countries, would vote for progressive options. But that is assuming a lot. Among them all there are those who would, of course. And surely there wouldn't be many who would vote for the PP, of course. But there would also be some—I am thinking of the grandchildren of Catalans—who might choose Catalanist options. In any case, the phrase he let slip was this: "Will the grandchildren of the exiles of Francoism not be able to vote, while the grandchildren of the Francoist regime will?"

There are phrases that are enough to hear once for them to haunt us, that hurt our soul when we remember them. This has happened to me these days with the so-called Cornell case. "Free pussy in the room upstairs," said the message in a group chat where there were about fifty men. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The phrase explains how violence against women has been normalized to the point of brutality.

Vladimir Putin is intensifying both his full-scale war against Ukraine and his shadow war against the rest of Europe. His main goal against Europe is to end the support that the continent gives to Ukraine, in order to be able to subjugate the country, a milestone he considers existential both for the future of Russia and for his own future. While in Europe we must prepare as well as we can to defend ourselves against all kinds of hybrid attacks, the central axis of our response should be to redouble support for Ukraine. Ukraine is his main target. It is there – and only there, not in a struggle of a thousand small hybrid attacks – where Putin's Russia can be defeated and effectively deterred.

Crying inconsolably when losing, being unable to wait for commercials to end, or shouting because they are not allowed to go out with their friends are situations that show a certain difficulty in managing frustration. "Frustration is a skill that must be trained day by day, because we will keep encountering it throughout our whole life," assures the educational coach, Mar Milán.

Rufián has ended up becoming a kind of half-candidate between ERC and Podemos, an idea that until not long ago might have seemed outlandish and that now passes as a kind of compromise solution. Between now and Friday, it remains to be seen whether his maneuver succeeds in leading the rest of the parties "to the left of the PSOE" that are looking to constitute the so-called Broad Front –Moviment Sumar, Comuns, Més Madrid, and Esquerra Unida– to present a single ballot in the elections, as many of their voters and some of the parties that want to join but without diluting their acronyms (as happened in 2023 with the creation of Sumar) are asking for. This is the case of Compromís, in the Valencian Country, and of Més per Mallorca and Més per Menorca, in the Balearic Islands. A single ballot would be the clearest electoral message that the left could send to its voters, and for Gabriel Rufián it would mean the validation of his thesis on the need to unite everyone who has the concern of stopping the extreme right in Spain. A frontist message and thesis, unprecedented in a candidacy for the general elections of a Catalan pro-independence party. The other thing that obviously remains to be seen is how this new configuration affects the electoral results that ERC may obtain in Catalonia. As a counterpart in the negotiations between the two parties, Podemos has renounced running in Catalonia for the benefit of ERC, but it is unlikely that the rest of the Broad Front parties with electoral aspirations in Catalonia will want to do the same.

The English editor Diana Athill discovered, once retired, that writing was what really made her happy. She wrote novels and memoirs, and when she had already turned ninety she published Somewhere Towards the End, a book with a very explicit title in which she reflected on old age and the proximity of death, among many other things. Athill's calculations were wrong, and the author lived another decade that allowed her to publish four more volumes.

Justice must not kill. This idea is part of the European legal consensus built around human rights. In the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, no one has been executed since 1997, when the last execution took place in Ukraine. Abolition is today a condition for membership. The exception on the continent is Belarus, outside the Council of Europe, which maintains capital punishment. But this legal consensus coexists with a certain social erosion. According to the 2025 Barcelona Social Values Survey, 35.7% of Barcelona residents believe that the death penalty can be justified always or in some circumstances; among young people aged 15 to 24, the percentage reaches 47%. The trend is not only local. In several countries of the European Union, support for capital punishment is around 50% or higher. In the United Kingdom, in recent months, far-right groups have proposed reinstating it, also appealing to opinion polls. All of this is part of a broader context in which the European populist right advocates for increasingly harsh penal policies.

Whenever elections arrive, a small miracle of nature occurs. Politicians whom we had only seen for months in congresses, television sets, or party events suddenly appear on the street. They shake hands with retirees, enter shops, walk through markets, and even hold babies in their arms. It is like discovering the first butterfly of spring. One thought they had gone extinct, like diplodocuses, and it turns out they were just hibernating.