On the road leading to Manresa, just before reaching the turn-off that takes you to the Oller del Mas winery, where a group of wine lovers and I take the specialization course in sommelier studies at Joviat, there is a plane tree, like the ones you find on so many rural roads. As in so many other places (a fence, a bridge, a milestone...), there are flowers that indicate that a fatal accident happened there. Flowers are only placed there if that has been the case. I seem to recall that it is on the Vallvidrera road where there is a graffito that says: "We will always remember you, Copi". In this tree, however, apart from the flowers, there is another element. A balloon, one of those that float, in the shape of a motorcycle. In the shape of a silver Vespa. This makes you understand that whoever surely lost their life at this tree was riding a motorcycle.

“Networks are not limited to reflecting unrest, but rather summon it”. This was stated by the director, Esther Vera, in her column on Monday, in which she invited us to reflect on the destiny of democracies in the digital age, and I agree. It is evident that the history of the media explains and accompanies the evolution of societies. And it is also true that in modernity –when information technologies have been modifying themselves in an increasingly accelerated way– the idea of change is inscribed in day-to-day life. By definition, economic structure, the evolution of communication, and the configuration of institutions determine processes. And there is no doubt that things change with a celerity that makes prediction difficult.

I read La croisade des enfants (1896) by Marcel Schwob in the early eighties, when I was in my first or second year of university, in the beautiful and tiny Spanish edition by Tusquets with a prologue by Borges (I don't know where it ended up; I remember its golden cover). I re-read it in its original language recently, and it still seemed to me an extraordinary literary recreation of a historical fact that was adulterated, undoubtedly, but in essence real. These days I have thought about it in relation to another "crusade", this time with many quotation marks. I do not intend to make a comparison of the historical context or the facts, which have nothing to do with each other, but rather the phenomenon of virality; I underline this so that what I will explain below is not misinterpreted.

The tackle by the Andorra goalkeeper that caused the death of the Tenerife forward went far beyond what we call the limit of the rules. A journalist who had been narrating the play live would probably have been able to describe it as a “criminal tackle,” an expression that after the death of Jesús de Miguel takes on a terrible meaning.

The PP and its anti-leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, have resumed the pre-campaign in a presidential tone, like an investiture speech, with which Feijóo sprinkles his interventions in public acts and media. It is nothing more than the old doctrinal construct of the traditional Spanish right (patriotism, reactionism, rejection of diversity, unfettered capitalism disguised as liberalism) grafted with the depleted uranium of the hate speech of the so-called new rights. So new that, in the case of Spain, they incorporate elements as innovative as the ideological legacy of Falangism and the Francoist dictatorship, which they claim without hesitation.

The world is waiting for elections that will be decided by the pockets of Americans. The price of gasoline and unaffordable electricity bills are today the thermometer of a discontent that will tip the next political majorities on Capitol Hill. Donald Trump has turned the midterm elections into a referendum. An examination of the costs of global volatility and the limits of presidential falsehood that masks the mess of his administration.

Every day we make hundreds of decisions that seem personal to us, what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, what we buy or where we travel. Some of these choices, however, come preceded by an automatic recommendation produced by algorithms that organize content, select what appears first and determine, often without us being aware of it, which options come to be part of our horizon.

This Sunday the 30 minuts was different. Route 66, listening to the United States was a report by Lídia Heredia in which she crossed the North American country from east to west. If on the news her reports feel short and you have the feeling that the correspondent had much more to offer than what she could fit into three minutes, this time you felt you had enjoyed her journalistic potential. 

Minister Parlón went to El suplement, on Catalunya Ràdio, the day after the police operation that cordoned off the center of the Catalan capital due to the threat from the very young vandals of Blocus. She responded to the accusations from the CUP, which Roger Escapa put to her: that the police had been carrying out identifications “for racial reasons.” She answered this: “After what happened last week in Barcelona, can anyone suggest that the police were carrying out identifications for ethnic reasons? Honestly? I don't think so.”

According to most forecasts, Donald Trump could lose the Republican majority in one of the two chambers of the United States Congress this Tuesday, or both. It would be logical: the cost of living has skyrocketed and people directly relate the poor state of their pockets to bad presidential decisions, especially the Iran war.

The curious word in the title is the American English term for referring to the redrawing of electoral maps with the goal of favoring the interests of a particular party. This practice is called gerrymandering, which is exactly what Trump has forced in a total of fifteen electoral districts, with the purpose that the results of this Tuesday's legislative elections allow him to maintain the majority he currently holds in the lower house of Congress. We said that Trump has forced a gerrymandering because the territorial redistribution was not "due" until 2030, when the census will have to be updated. But it seems that the maneuver must have had quite limited success, because it only gives three safe seats to the Republican Party. It also gives an idea, admittedly, of the anxiety with which Trumpism and the MAGA movement – and the minimaga in the provinces, of which we have a good number around here – are facing these midterm elections.

We are in an extremely delicate political moment and, unfortunately, there are many voting options that tend more towards revenge, to punishing those who have not done what we expected of them, rather than towards adherence to an exciting project that we feel represented by. I hear, around me, many opinions that go in this direction, and especially those of many feminist women, who for many years have voted for left-wing parties and now, angry, tell me that they will not go to vote. The left has disappointed them in many aspects and, therefore, this time they do not want to support them.

We drive a car without thinking that we have in our hands a machine capable of killing. We turn on the turn signal, change lanes, and go through a traffic light with the naturalness of someone doing a household chore. Repetition makes us forget its importance. We normalize what we do every day.

On Saturday morning, in the center of Barcelona there were still workers covering the windows and ATMs of bank offices, as if a hurricane were coming and we were in Miami.

This country no longer fits in its own skin. And it is not that it is full of joy. Quite the contrary: Spain has not been able to adapt to its exceptional demographic growth, the largest in the European Union, and the seams are bursting.

Antonio Machado worked his whole life as an inspector for the low-null-know-nothing speed line between Seville and Madrid. After years sweating on the catenary, he was kicked out of the bull-skin-fraud railway company. On the platform of his exile, the poet of the track wrote that there is “a Spain that dies and another Spain that yawns”. Antonio, with the respect I have for you, and you already know that my cat and I recite your verses from memory without being drunk, there are not two Spains: there is only one.

The Urda railway tragedy has knocked out the electoral pre-campaign, but it hasn't killed it. It has, however, had the effect of letting news that deserves more attention go unnoticed. For example, that Eduardo Inda's digital outlet, OK Diario, paid up to 240,000 euros for the defense of the corrupt Koldo García, sentenced to 19 years and eight months in prison for the high-profile scandal that bears his name, or that of his boss, Minister Ábalos, and which compromised the Ministry of Transport precisely during the period it was led by the aforementioned Ábalos. As you can read in the news story published by this newspaper, Eduardo Inda's digital pamphlet (calling it a newspaper is an exaggeration) paid for Koldo's law firm, coinciding with the time that OK Diario published a series of interviews with Koldo García, in which, by installments, Ábalos's go-to man turned on the fan against former socialist colleagues and against the big fish Pedro Sánchez. The interviews even had their own section title: Koldo's Blanket.

November and the holiday of All Saints' Day arrive, and for a few days we talk more about those who are no longer with us by bringing flowers to the cemetery, remembering grandparents, or telling old family stories. And while we do this, we try to manage our own emotions, and if there are children nearby, the question may arise: what do we do with children's grief?

In 1941, Herman J. Mankiewicz won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. It has been explained on other occasions how he wrote it: isolated on a ranch in the middle of the Mojave Desert after suffering a serious car accident. Orson Welles, aware of the screenwriter's alcohol addiction, confined him while he was bedridden, and made him write a script that would cause a turning point in their lives and in the history of cinema.

Never in history had it been so easy to organize a riot. Barcelona, the Rose of Fire, has seen it all, but never had the reason for urban uprising been a contagion of the characteristics of the riots on October 24th. A riot that was avoided yesterday with a strong police presence, but which could be reproduced at any moment. Barcelona, like other large European cities, such as Paris, Milan, and Bilbao, has experienced in recent weeks urban chaos of a new nature: fast, unashamedly violent, oriented towards looting, and carried out by very young boys. But what singularizes them most historically is that the call, through platforms and social networks, allows the naivety of many and the social frustration of some to be converted into flash mob mobilizations without the need for traditional political structures to channel discontent, anger, or to structure collective demands.