Have you ever needed to eat chocolate after a very intense day? Or have you felt comforted by eating that dish your mother used to make that you hadn't tasted in such a long time? The relationship between food and emotions is deep and has historical roots because, in reality, food "fulfills many other functions beyond nourishing us," explains Juana Fernández, psychologist, dietitian-nutritionist, and co-author of the book Emotional Cooking (Temas de Hoy, 2026). "Food can accompany us, it can provide us with pleasure, be part of a celebration, connect us with other people, or help us momentarily to calm down," she explains. One only needs to remember Proust's madeleine and the torrent of sensations triggered by the bite of a simple madeleine for the protagonist of In Search of Lost Time.

When we still thought that the phenomenon of low cost and Airbnb would not change the world for the worse, the family formed by Judith, Robert, and the two little ones, Marc and Mateo, headed towards Cassà de la Selva to catch, first thing in the morning, a flight bound for London. Since the flight was delayed and they had time to kill, they decided to stop by Santa Coloma de Farners.

What can wolves teach us about bonds, intuition, life, and death? When still a psychology student, Patricia Pasquín first stepped into the high-altitude desert of New Mexico, in the United States, she was not aware of everything she was about to discover. She had only arrived there to make one of her childhood dreams come true: to work with wild animals.

Where the Pyrenees plunge into the Mediterranean Sea, some rocks resist submergence. The water reaches great depths close to the coast, and yet, some islets protrude, like perennial icebergs. Two of these islets are found at the tip of Cap de Creus, near the lighthouse: s'Encalladora and the Massa d'Or (or Maça d'Oros).

Naomi Campbell, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, Lily Collins, Michelle Williams, Kim Kardashian, Amber Heard, Lucy Liu, Elton John and Ricky Martin are just some of the celebrities who have turned to surrogacy to have a family. Recently, singer Lady Gaga and television creator Lena Dunham have also joined this practice, which is illegal in Spain, both supposedly aligned with feminist ideas, but who, when it came to starting a family, chose a path condemned by a large part of the women's rights movement. Although they are not the first to opt for surrogacy, they are two of the celebrities who have been most harshly criticized for doing so. Many of their followers have understood the use of another woman's body to gestate, a process that is usually accompanied by a financial transaction, as a sign of vital contradiction.

For a decade, the ideal young woman wore neutral tones, emptied her closets, and turned order, self-control, and productivity into an aesthetic. It was 2014 and Sophia Amoruso was unaware that a hashtag, #girlboss, would change everything. A hand extended to thehustle-culture, the culture of busyness, accompanied by a minimalist trend in dressing and decorating everything, drew an apparently self-sufficient femininity: a young woman who worked, was entrepreneurial, took care of her body, maintained an impeccable appearance and home and routines to the minute, always hand in hand with a specialty coffee (or a matcha latte, nowadays). Now, the pendulum seems to have swung back, after years of hustle-culture have caused an almost predictable burnout. Ribbons, pastel colors, and extravagant prints are arriving, a whole ode to kitsch, accompanied by a feeling of nostalgia and a need to recover play, to be little girls again. From the girlbossto the girl dinner (the least elaborate girl's dinner) or girl math (the mental gymnastics to justify an expense); from minimalism to maximalism; from the young woman who could do it all to the young woman who wants to play again. The whimsy-maxxing is one of the most recent expressions to define this phenomenon.

You have had an impossible week at work: one meeting after another, emails at all hours, a project that has become complicated, and a boss who asks for more than you can handle. Friday arrives and, instead of stopping, you tell yourself that you can still hold on a little longer. You work through the weekend, give up the gym, eat in front of the computer, and keep postponing rest until the situation improves. You might think you are being strong. But, according to neurologist Mónica Kurtis, you are doing exactly the opposite of what being resilient means.

At Consell de Cent with Enric Granados, the observer has a very creamy pistachio ice cream, right at the opposite corner of a brunch spot full of girls who laugh and laugh and don't seem to be from here. A burly man, with bushy eyebrows and a grumpy face, walks an English bulldog that walks with exactly the same hip sway. Next to him, a sophisticated girl with a designer coat and the poise of a sphinx leads a stylized greyhound that looks like it came straight from a Milan runway. We even have the local version of Kim Kardashian: a girl with infinite nails and a tight dress holding a Pomeranian so perfectly groomed it's painful, as if it just came out of a beauty salon. The Weimaraner, agile and muscular, goes back and forth at full speed while the gym guy runs his daily kilometers. An elegant lady, who takes great care of herself and is always well dressed, makes a perfect pair with the wire-haired dachshund with "whiskers" and eyebrows that give it a very dignified and serious air, ideal for accompanying the lady to have a snack and run errands.

This autumn, decoration trends move away from perfection and claim warmth, material, and personality. Visible grain wood, braided fibers, artisanal-looking ceramics, and colored glass gain prominence in spaces where objects no longer just fulfill a function, but tell a story and claim all the attention.

You open your phone and there is a news story that outrages you. Before you even finish reading the headline, you already feel like sharing it. You react, you write, you continue scrolling. And it is not an isolated incident. The problem, according to neuroscience communicator Núria Martín Muyo, is that we are increasingly living in this immediate response mode.

Dressed in Prada and with a new haircut, Zendaya has reaffirmed herself as one of the queens of fashion at any awards gala. The performer, who aspired to take home the award for best dramatic actress for Euphoria, was one of the most photographed on the red carpet thanks to a beaded dress with a V-neckline and a carefree pixie cut that is already shaping up to be one of the viral hairstyles of the year. The proposal was classic, but at the same time had a sexy touch.

You have just argued with your partner and are convinced that you are right. Instead of explaining it to a friend, you open an artificial intelligence application and describe everything that happened to it. The answer does not wait: it understands how you feel, validates your discomfort, and explains to you why your reaction is so understandable. It might even suggest a message for you to send to them explaining how you feel. When you close the device, it is easy to leave with the feeling that someone has truly listened to you and that, moreover, you were the one who was completely right.

Imagine going back a hundred years, to the Barcelona of 1926. Cinema was still silent and a fashion show could be, literally, an extraordinary spectacle. In Paris, the great houses had begun to use those presentations to showcase the new collections of the designers of the era, but in Catalonia, no one was doing it. Located at the Pla de la Boqueria, Santa Eulalia saw the opportunity and decided to import the formula. “We were pioneers thanks to the vision of my grandfather,” recalls Luis Sans, fourth generation at the helm of the house, founded in 1843. In that adventure, Pere Formosa also played a key role, having started as an apprentice and ending up becoming a master of the house and the driving force behind that event

Fermín could not go to summer camp because of some inopportune mumps. He was devastated. It was his greatest wish. He spent his holidays at his grandparents' house, in Peñíscola, where in 1961 the film El Cid, starring Charlton Heston, was filmed. Now, fully recovered, he has settled back into his parents' home in La Barceloneta. He is tanned, blonder, with curly hair, without the shaved sides he had been wearing lately. The beginning of a mane, like his friend Ferran, who changed schools this year, has been wearing for some time.

It is seven in the evening on an August Wednesday in Barcelona. Under the Arc de Triomf, hundreds of young people summoned by social media participate in a phenomenon that in recent weeks has jumped from TikTok to radio talk shows, television, and all kinds of conversation spaces. These are the aura battles, with the goal of farming aura, a practice as simple as performing actions designed to project an attractive, interesting, or simply different personality.

The Catalan clothing brand Desigual has once again pulled a Juan Carlos in Botswana with its now iconic "I am very sorry... it will not happen again." The reason? The latest campaign, in which, with a clearly sarcastic and mocking treatment, it makes gentrification, touristification, overcrowding, rising prices, and insecurity in Barcelona the central theme to promote its latest collaboration with the Berlin brand Ottolinger. A campaign that has ignited social media and received a mostly negative reception. Firstly, because many have perceived it as a trivialization of the problems that currently stifle the Catalan capital. Furthermore, this treatment, beyond the fact that a brand based in Barcelona is shooting itself in the foot by ridiculing the city's image, does not aim upwards as a form of denunciation. What we must be clear about is that not all irony is a critique. And if, in addition, all of this is done to sell a few t-shirts, it is even harder to find any real desire to question anything.And I say that they have pulled a Joan Carles again because it is not the first time, in recent times, that Desigual has had to rectify its advertising campaigns. The most recent one, in 2025, starred actress Ester Expósito wearing the slogan Not a doll(I am not a doll), with an apparently feminist intention of women's empowerment. The problem is that, in parallel, the t-shirt campaign Protect the dolls was taking place, to support the trans community following the attacks and harassment by Donald Trump's American government. A campaign that, in no case, was minor, but rather had a great reach, with the adherence of renowned figures such as actor Pedro Pascal, singer Troye Sivan, or designer Haider Ackermann. The campaign itself could have been good, provided it had been carried out in a parallel world. The problem is that contexts are fundamental and seeing Expósito proudly wearing a t-shirt with the phrase "Not a doll", at that moment made the reading go from feminist to transphobic.In December 2012, it launched the campaign Tengo un plan, composed of three advertisements in which three conventionally beautiful women dressed up, in a sexy and uninhibited attitude, in front of the mirror while they explained their future plans. The first, to travel to Thailand to have sexual adventures and leave her life behind, including her boyfriend. The second, to tell her family that she had a female partner. And the third, that she had decided to sleep with her boss. A campaign that, despite wanting to empower women, fell into a false representation of equality by the adoption, on the part of these three women, of behaviors traditionally associated with men.The most serious one, however, was released following Mother's Day 2014, titled Tú decides. A normatively sexy girl, after putting a pillow under her dress to see what she would look like pregnant, took a strip of condoms and poked holes in them. An advertisement that clearly treats women's freedom of choice in the clumsiest way, since, apart from ignoring the other person's reproductive consent, it disregards the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.Seeing, therefore, the promotional trajectory of Desigual, we could think that at the head of the marketing department they have a monkey at the wheel, with a total disconnection from the world and what is cooking. But, seeing the repeated blunders, perhaps what they have is a clever person who, in the face of a company that is struggling with sales, has opted for the old formula that says "let them talk about us, even if it is badly". A dangerous tactic that must be executed very well so that it does not end up being bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.In any case, perhaps the latest campaign regarding the touristification of Barcelona is better thought out than we locals have been able to see. With a brand owned by the Swiss Thomas Meyer and sales directed mostly to the international market, perhaps the campaign was not intended to amuse the people of Barcelona. Perhaps, precisely, its audience was those who experience the city from the other side: as a backdrop to visit, consume, and, now also, wear.

Adulthood involves taking on new responsibilities, professional, personal, parental if applicable, but also a change of role that we don't always know how to fit correctly. We're talking about that moment when parents get old and it's the adult children who have to take care of them. Feliciano Villar, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Barcelona and director of the master's degree in psychogerontology, talks about all of this in his new book Mis padres se hacen mayores (Plataforma Editorial).

We've been living with dating apps for some years now. What's more, we could say they've become the most common way to meet people and hook up. But it also seems that being a user of these platforms is a kind of vicious circle. We enter them with enthusiasm, we get a match, we have some conversations and, with luck, a date. In the end, however, we discover it's not what we were looking for, that it makes us cringe or, in the worst case, they end up breaking our hearts. We delete them, clearly stating we'll never go back to the devil's app again, but after a while, we download it again. And so, time and time again, each time with a little less hope.

August 30th has something (not very pleasant) of a Sunday evening. It's still hot and there might be a few beach days left, but September is already peeking around the corner. However, in these last days of summer before the rush and the more serious part of the routine return, there are a series of nooks and objects in the house that are worth cleaning precisely now, before this kind of reset that also has something of a new year. Some of the things worth cleaning and tidying up now are objects that have been used intensively during the summer and that we no longer want to see lying around the house, and others, because in a few weeks they will be back in service.

We have been sold a very limited idea of sex. We have been made to believe that a good sex life depends on an erection, on penetration, or on reaching orgasm in a certain way. But reality is much richer than all that.