Greenland is a land of contrasts. Ice, sea, and light set the rhythm of an immense and sparsely populated island, where daily life prevails under extreme conditions. Isolated villages, sleds, fishing, and infinite landscapes depict a fragile yet powerful reality. In parallel, this natural wonder has become a focus of international interest. Daily life on the island is marked by Donald Trump's threats to invade the island in recent times, coupled with initiatives from the political and economic sphere of the United States that also seek to gain a foothold on the island. These maneuvers generate mistrust among the Greenlandic population, who defend their right to decide their future without external pressure. The debate over sovereignty and relations with Denmark remains open, now with new players and interests on the scene. According to a detailed Reuters report, prominent figures from the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement are pushing Trump's campaign to seize Greenland and directing its strategy. This context adds complexity beyond geopolitics. The following images focus on the territory and its people: a direct look at life in the Arctic, between tradition and change.

Garden gnomes have returned to the Chelsea Flower Show, the great international temple of landscaping that has been held annually in London since 1913. This week, a collection of gnomes painted by a select group of celebrities, with the complicity of King Charles III, who plays a very active role in this prestigious floral festival, has been auctioned for charitable purposes. It had been almost a hundred years since gnomes were expelled from the competition. In 1927, the organization considered them incompatible with the distinction of the show. They were a tacky trinket that did not deserve to be part of the floral paradise associated with the British aristocracy. Footballer David Beckham, horticulturist Frances Tophill, and former BBC presenter Alan Tichmarsh have designed the garden with the monarch to reconcile with the little ceramic visitors.

Hidden among the rugged peaks and ancient gorges of eastern Anatolia, in Turkey, lies Dersim – officially known as Tunceli – a land where memory clings like mist to the mountains and where resistance and reverence flow together like the waters of the Munzur River. It is a place where faith is not housed in structures, but is etched in stone, sung through generations, and whispered to the trees. For centuries, the Zaza Alevi communities of Dersim have existed in sacred communion with their environment. Their belief system – Alevism – is not confined by minarets or scriptures. It lives in the murmur of rivers, in the smoke of ritual fires, and in the whisper among the pines. Here, the divine is found in the experience of nature. It is tangible: found in the grain of wood, in the shimmer of a mountain spring, and in the careful steps of goats on the cliffs.

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A long queue of people have patiently camped out for days –and the corresponding nights– on Barcelona's Passeig de Gràcia. In the best-case scenario, equipped with chairs and camping furniture to make the wait more bearable. The gathering forced the Mossos d’Esquadra to intervene due to the risk of disturbances. A scene that has been repeated in multiple cities around the world, with even more extreme situations. In New York, they waited for almost a week, while attempts to speculate on the queue also proliferated. In Paris, where over 300 people gathered, the police intervened with tear gas to disperse the crowd. In Milan, the authorities had to cordon off the area after rushes, disturbances, and fights.But what is the reason for this phenomenon? Are we facing a new urban encampment like the one on May 15th to demand a higher quality democracy? Perhaps the genocide in Gaza has pushed hundreds of people to occupy public space? Or perhaps the teachers' strike and the fight for public education have become a global outcry. Well, no. The reason for this collective penance is none other than the tribute that turbocapitalism demands from its most faithful followers: the queues were to get the latest collaboration from Swatch with the emblematic Swiss high watchmaking house Audemars Piguet. All in all, as absurd as it is revealing.The easiest –and also the most tempting– would be to ridicule these people and label them as brainless, foolish, or superficial. It would even be comforting to make them the scapegoat for the ills of a world we increasingly recognize and understand less. But doing so would mean killing the messenger. Because, rather than condemning individuals, what we should demand is to identify the root of the problem.What drives some people to sleep on the street for days is not the desire to get a simple watch – however attractive it may be – but the symbolic reward that capitalism has been promising for decades: the illusion of a better life through consumption. Because today watches, much more than objects intended to measure the passage of time, have become one of the most desired social markers, especially among men. And even more so if we talk about Audemars Piguet, a firm located in the same Olympus of luxury as Rolex and reserved, practically, for that privileged minority that concentrates economic power.

There are houses that are born from a dream and others that are born from a problem. Can Pizzeta has a bit of a dream, but above all it has a lot of having to overcome real difficulties. In fact, it started with a geometry as real as it was impossible: a triangular plot, narrow and sloped, wedged between the street, a neighboring property, and a stream, on the edge of the Collserola Natural Park. The project did not disguise the constraints, but rather turned them into the very shape of the house. That's why it's triangular, almost like a slice of pizza. And that's why the name suits it so well.

On March 10, 1876, 150 years ago, the first telephone call was made, a milestone that forever changed our way of communicating. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” was the phrase that the Scottish inventor and scientist, Alexander Graham Bell, conveyed to his assistant, Thomas Watson, just three days after patenting his invention, which progressively relegated the telegraph, used since 1844. Quickly, that system became popular to become a mass communication medium that we all carry in our pockets today.

A few days after crossing the Pyrenees on foot to flee Francoism, in the middle of February and in the midst of a glacial cold, Montserrat Casals fell ill. She was only three years old. She was transferred alone to a hospital in France while her mother and brother were locked up in Gaillon Castle, in Normandy, and her father was interned in the Barcarès concentration camp. A week later, a nun from the French hospital where Montserrat had been admitted went to the castle with the child in her arms to hand her over to her mother, Rosa. "I bring you your daughter because she is about to die. We can do nothing more," the nun told her. It was 1939.

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In Sant Bartomeu del Grau, they have the Vic plain at their feet. “We are a borderland,” they say half-jokingly, as the town is within Lluçanès but administratively attached to Osona. One spring weekend, residents arrive at the municipal building where the assembly hall is located. People of all ages. Some children are playing football outside, and inside, tables are being prepared for a fellowship meal where local cured meats are not lacking. The Barça supporters' club is organizing an event, and it seems half the town will be there.

It might seem that as societies modernize they tend to gradually shed inherited rituals laden with formality. Current times, increasingly oriented towards practicality and immediacy, have refined many social ceremonies that today seem excessively solemn: from the rigor of wearing mourning clothes to the protocols associated with baptisms or communions. However, from time to time, rituals emerge that, like stubborn salmon swimming against the current, not only survive but reappear hypertrophied, clad in a ceremonial that they did not even have in the past. This is the case with graduations. The turn is so unexpected that there are already specialized brands in this festive-academic niche and teenagers capable of patiently waiting five hours in line to get the outfit with which to publicly stage that they have finished the fourth year of ESO.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the second part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the character Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how many days there are in a year. She replies 365. Then he asks how many birthdays a person has. And the protagonist says one. And Humpty Dumpty triumphantly concludes that this allows for 364 days a year to celebrate unbirthdays, non-birthdays. From a satirical and literary perspective, the proposal might seem attractive. But it is of absurd logic because the fun lies in celebrating the exception and not the norm. Years later, from Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter character sang A very merry unbirthday to you during the tea party. It was a way of telling us again that any occasion is good for a celebration without giving too much importance to the reason.

In Andalusia, everything can change in a matter of days. The black, the hoods, and the rosaries – visible expressions of penance, renunciation, and faith – suddenly dissolve into an explosion of patterns, colors, flowers, and bodies that demand prominence at the Feria de Abril. The chest-beating and stark cries of Holy Week processions give way to celebration, excess, and immoderation. If in one case aesthetics impose restraint and anonymity, in the other it demands the exact opposite: to stand out and occupy space under the gaze of others. It is not just a change of atmosphere, but also a deeper displacement: from one emotion to another, from a way of feeling and inhabiting the body marked, with almost ritualistic precision, by the calendar to another. As if faith (or its theatricalization) also had seasons. And this is where one of its most eloquent instruments comes into play. Because, at the Feria, this need to be seen is dressed up. And it does so with a garment that draws all eyes: the flamenco dress.Despite the current perception, this dress was not born as a showpiece, but as clothing for the popular classes of the 19th century. It was worn by peasant women and vendors who attended Andalusian livestock fairs, especially the April Fair, which in its origins was a commercial space and not festive. Its shape responded to the patterns of the time: a fitted bodice and a voluminous skirt, in this case resolved with ruffles. These ruffles, now distinctive of the dress, have been interpreted in various ways. On the one hand, they have been linked to gypsy and Andalusian contexts, where the movement of the body (both in dance and in daily gestures) found its correlate in clothing that not only accompanied it, but also made it visible. On the other hand, they must be placed within the framework of 19th-century women's fashion, dominated by voluminous skirts supported by internal structures such as farthingales or crinolines, which limited mobility. Without evidence that they were conceived as an alternative, the ruffles nevertheless allowed volume to be generated without immobilizing the body.

Just twenty years ago, Hollywood premiered, without intending to or expecting it, a film that would end up becoming an icon of the fashion world, The Devil Wears Prada. Beneath the appearance of a light comedy, the film hid a much more biting background than it might have seemed at first glance. The story brought to life the homonymous novel by Lauren Weisberger, which stemmed from her own experience as an assistant to Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and one of the most powerful figures in the industry. But what could have remained a simple chronicle of the fashion world became, in reality, a deeper reflection: not so much about fashion itself as about the forms of power that sustain it and, in particular, about the degree of violence that our society is willing to accept when this power is presented as excellence.Talking about Anna Wintour is not just talking about the magazine Vogue, but about a figure who has redefined the rules of the game of contemporary fashion. Endowed with a particularly keen nose for detecting trends and new talents –like those of John Galliano or Alexander McQueen–, she has also been the architect of one of the traits that define the sector today: the hybridization between haute couture and more everyday aesthetics. And, in parallel, she has decisively contributed to turning the inauguration of a fashion exhibition into a global event, such as the Met Gala, which has just taken place on February 4th. However, following Weisberger's account and the epithet with which she herself christened her –devil–, Wintour also embodies a certain way of understanding power: as an exercise of perfectly normalized violence, both within the sector and in relation to all the people around her. Working for her implies accepting constant humiliation, extreme competition, and renunciation of any form of personal life as natural. After all, as is repeated in The Devil Wears Prada, “a million girls would kill for this job”, even if it means seeing a brilliant resume reduced to tasks as mundane as bringing her coffee, picking up her dry cleaning, or satisfying her daughters' whims.

A young man gets off a train car of the Railways. He is not dressed up, but the intention to achieve a good appearance is noticeable. On his left arm, he carries a bouquet of roses, upside down. He holds it with theatrical nonchalance, as if the flowers were accidental. It is as if he were somewhat ashamed to walk around with that bounty of flowers. He is uncomfortable. It is inferred that he has to give them away, but until he delivers them, it seems he is also carrying an added dose of vulnerability that he tries to hide.

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Where do they go? What do they learn? What do they gain from it? Each person's favorite place – to get lost in, spend time in, work in, or even live in – is explained by intimate and profound reasons. Experiences that, possibly, take root in childhood; others are born from impressions awakened by certain landscapes, silences, mysteries, or subtleties that reveal the reason for an attraction. A person's connection with a space they feel is their own activates an inner pulse. An office where ideas turn into realities, a sea that evokes pirate stories, rocks bathed in colored water, depths and sea distances that revitalize, a street steeped in history, and that first place that sparked a vocation that became much more than a profession: these are six life stories shared by well-known personalities from the country, revealing the extent to which the place they return to is important to them, the lessons they draw from it when they are there, and what they take with them simply for being there.Lluís Llach, singer-songwriter

“I am from here and I have it very clear”

“This is where I learned to swim with my mother”, recalls the singer-songwriter Lluís Llach. With towels in a basket, that woman ahead of her time – she had studied to be a teacher during the Republic and, at a time when almost no one had a car, she even knew how to drive – often accompanied her son to the beach of l’Estartit, with the Medes Islands in the background. A corner of the Empordà coast with a sea full of pirate stories that fueled the outings of that child and where he would continue to go, also, as an adolescent. His friends beat him at swimming, but he always surpassed them underwater. “I knew how to relax submerged, which is very important”, he assures. With his father, on the other hand, he didn't come as much. “He was a doctor and couldn't afford to go to the beach”, comments Llach as he admires this “curious” place that appears before his eyes as a “living horizon” of geometries and contrasts.

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My grandmother was only three years old when she lost her father. Her mother was left a widow and pregnant with her younger sister, María. This event completely changed the destiny of their lives.

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Annalisa Massaro

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The Wall Street Journal, one of the main economic newspapers in the United States, has had a monthly column reserved for three years to talk about retirement. The section Retirement rookies (which could be translated as Retirement for beginners) is written by two people. It is signed by Stephen Kreider Yoder, one of the former editors of the newspaper, and his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, both retired from professional activity and motivated to reflect on this new stage of life. The couple, who have not yet reached seventy years of age, live in San Francisco and are presumed to have a privileged and quiet retirement. They address everything from the most typical dilemmas such as the opportunity to travel, move to a quieter town or buy a motorhome, to some fears such as health, widowhood or staying in good shape. They delve into psychological and emotional aspects related to personal identity when you stop working. They also deal with economic issues, such as the anxiety of running short of savings, the need to reduce expenses or the consequences of inflation for retirees. However, from the first columns they wrote, a recurring concern of the Kreider Yoders about time management becomes evident and, above all, a certain demand to invest it wisely. In these three years, they have insisted on the complexity of finding a balance between doing a lot of activities and learning to disconnect, changing old routines for new ones, making lists of realistic plans without getting stressed or correctly distributing attention to the rest of the family. Time is a background headache that always appears.

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