In this Sunday's newspaper, Àlex Gutiérrez interviewed the comedian Maria Rovira, known as Oye Sherman, with whom I had the good fortune to meet doing radio a few years ago. I remember how impressed I was that such a young girl showed such great interest in language and culture, and sparked a quick and funny mind without any desire to grab the spotlight.

For young people, it is positive and necessary to have role models to follow, it helps them to build their identity, imagine different possibilities, find motivations, and know where to go. “The most important thing would be to have several role models, and for them to be human and imperfect, so they become a guide to look up to and not a pressure to imitate”, proposes Sylvie Pérez Lima, a registered psychologist and professor at the UOC. But what are young people's idols like in the digital age? From the 1960s to the 2000s, teenagers' bedrooms were transformed with posters of their youth idols hanging on the walls. “They were young people a bit older than them whom they looked up to, and they idealized their image and identity,” explains Carles Feixa, a professor of social anthropology at the UPF and coordinator of the Youth in Spain Report (INJUVE 2024). In the 1960s, teenagers appropriated their bedrooms for the first time and displayed their idols, especially musical ones, rock’n’roll and rock evolutions. In the 70s, they were revolutionary political idols –Mao Tse Tung, Che, or Fidel Castro–, who, with the crisis at the end of the 70s, ceased to have continuity. Then, consumer idols returned with more commercial music, not so much protest-oriented, and sports idols, especially in football and tennis, who were models of success. It is from the 2000s onwards that digitalization began and more artificial idols emerged, youtubers and influencers, who would go on to occupy an even more intimate space, social media. Lucía (15 years old) does have posters hanging in her room, a couple from one of the Spiderman movies and several of Sadie Sink (@sadiesink_), an actress from Stranger Things: “I follow her on social media and watch all the interviews she does, she's my crush”. What she watches most on TikTok and Instagram are reels of series, music, and especially humor, accounts that make her laugh –“many silly things, falls, and slips”–, Manu Rivas (@manurivasr) or Pablo Vera's (@pablovr11) dances, news channels, and people who explain things like Javi Hoyos's (@javihoyosmartinez) gossip.

Arnau Pericàs (2005), Martí Salvia (2005) and Luana Rocha (2005), are three third-year audiovisual communication students at Pompeu Fabra University who are currently succeeding with their video podcast Guarres!, a program in which they weekly talk about sex frankly, without filters and without fear, in a bold and provocative way..Last year they took the radio class, in which they had to present an audio pilot, and they decided to talk about sex in a theatrical way, with characters from their own fantasy universe. That episode was very different from what we can find on their platforms now, and it received a grade of six out of ten. All three were left with a great desire to apply the professor's corrections, which is why last summer they decided to resume the project voluntarily and extracurricularly. Despite changing the program's structure, they kept the characters of Gina Bashina, Luz Phallus, and Consol Adó.

The Catalan Finance Institute (ICF), the public bank of the Generalitat, has granted to date 846 loans to young people aged 18 to 35 to obtain the down payment for an apartment. The average granted is 36,332 euros and an average housing price of 189,908 euros with an average age of beneficiaries of 29.4 years, according to data presented by the Secretary General of Economy and President of the ICF's governing board, Juli Fernández, and the entity's CEO, Vanessa Servera.

“I’m noticing it’s getting harder and harder for me to go out partying,” says Albert Thió Hortoneda, 26, from Barcelona. “You go into a club at two in the morning, you’ve paid 20 euros, and to get your money’s worth, you have to stay until six. This throws my sleep patterns off a bit,” he explains. He says that packaged, consumer-focused partying that lasts for hours on end doesn’t appeal to him. “I hadn’t really thought about it being a generational thing, but I do see that a lot of people around me are experiencing the same thing,” he points out. In fact, articles and videos with hashtags like "We've normalized not going out"where very young people speak openly about not going out partying in their 20s. What was once a stigma – having to tell friends not to include you in their plans – seems to have found its niche on TikTok with hashtags on well-being and self-care.

The president of the Generalitat (Catalan government) has posted a video on Instagram reacting to a clip published by Flaixbac. The video shows a group of young people attending the Saló de l'Ensenyament (Education Fair) being asked, "Who is the current president of the Generalitat of Catalonia?" Among the incorrect answers were names like Salvador Espriu, Joan Pera, Salvador Dalí, Jaume Collboni, and Pedro Sánchez, which they uttered amidst awkward laughter.

"There are no more urban tribes, and there won't be any, at least not with the presence and strength they had in the second half of the 20th century," states José Mansilla, an urban anthropologist in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). "In Spain, they emerged with great force in the 1980s as a result of a period of realignment in Spanish society. Now, only a few nostalgics will remain," he asserts.

We're ending the week with gasoline prices climbing and the war escalating. To give you an idea, the US Treasury Department has announced it will temporarily authorize countries to buy Russian oil from tankers in transit.Iran's new supreme leader, son of the previous one, says the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed While Netanyahu remains silent and bombs, Trump speaks to continue occupying the center of the stage alone and says things like the increase in fuel prices is bringing many benefits to American companies.

For work reasons, I live and share meals with a group of young people in their twenties and thirties. I've cooked with young people before, of course, but the meals were always prepared or paid for by me. This is different—we eat with a few scrapes from work—because I can observe their culinary habits and customs.

This Monday, March 9th, the application period opens for the state-run Youth Rental Grant (Bo Alquiler Joven), a subsidy of up to €250 per month for two years designed to facilitate access to housing for people up to 35 years old. Applications can be submitted from 9:00 AM this Monday, March 9th, until 2:00 PM on Friday, March 13th, and will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis until the allocated budget is exhausted. The Catalan government (Generalitat) is allocating more than €29 million to the program, as announced in February by the Minister of Territory, Housing, and Ecological Transition, Silvia Paneque, who urged young people to register as soon as possible with the Catalan Housing Agency (Agència de l'Hôtel de Catalunya). How to apply for the Bo Alquiler Joven (Youth Rental Voucher)

The application can be submitted in different ways:

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"It distresses me greatly to lose friends. I enjoy deep conversations with my mother. I worry about not achieving what everyone expects of me. I need a hug. I need to be closer to my family. You grow old when you feel nostalgic. You grow old when you look at supermarket prices." These are just some of the reflections that can be heard in a sound installation at the exhibition. We are seventeen years old, a group portrait, which can be seen until May 17 at the CCCB. Its unique feature is that those who speak are 17-year-olds, and what they reveal is very intimate: their thoughts, their concerns, and their worries, free from the pressure of social media or the prejudices of the adult gaze.

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The Mossos d'Esquadra pointed out that The death of five young people in a storage area of ​​a building in Manlleu (Osona) The fire on February 16th was accidental: the cause appears to have been a fire in a mattress, likely started by a cigarette butt. Initial investigations by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) indicate that the young people did not die from burns, and that the burning mattress was in a different storage room from the one where the young people were found. The police have now concluded their initial investigation and have sent their findings to the court handling the case. Instead of fire, they concluded, they found no accelerant or explosion. The young people were fully clothed and showed no signs of foul play or burns, as confirmed by the autopsies. Emergency services also found no locked doors to gain access to the fire and did not have to force entry. The investigation also confirms that the fire did not cause structural damage to the building. To gather all the necessary information, the Mossos took seven statements, allowing them to study and analyze what happened during the afternoon and up until shortly before the fire. Although these initial steps have been completed, more work remains to be done, and further checks by the investigation unit are also needed.

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In April 2017, Daniel Siad sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein to thank him. This French-Algerian man had just settled in Barcelona and announced that he had already contacted two modeling agencies based in Spain to begin "the"scouting"Of girls. "Spain is safer than Paris, especially Barcelona, ​​it's full of tourists everywhere," the man adds. The documentation that the United States Department of Justice has declassified regarding the Epstein case has allowed thousands of documents of conversations and emails that the pedophile and corrupter of minors had with celebrities, businessmen, and facilitators he had scattered all over the world to come to light. Siad was one of them. The conversations that Epstein had with many young girls also appear.

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If my children hear me say this about primeThey make faces and walk away from me in shame.

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Sonia is at Tarragona station, desperate. The train she was supposed to send hasn't arrived, and she has a job interview. After passing two rounds of selection, today is the day of truth. Her future boss is waiting for her. Sonia won't make it because her train will ultimately be canceled. Stories like this have been repeated countless times during the railway (and AP-7) debacle. People have been unable to get to the doctor, to university—it's exam time—to work, to the airport, to their parents' house, and so on.

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I was running on the treadmill at the gym trying not to think about anything, but the scene prevented me: to the right, a man was struggling to walk uphill while a TikTok one after another, and laughed heartily; to the left, a retired woman smiled dreamily at the screen of the treadmill, on which Santi Millán was presenting Factor XIn both our eyes, it was a kind of hypnosis. I remembered then the last lunch I'd shared with people, and how it was the older folks who checked their phones when notifications popped up or answered calls by getting up from the table, as if nothing were amiss. I remembered the last few trips on the subway, on the blue line that takes me home, and that army of tired people, all adults, going home like me, amazed by the most vulgar videos created by artificial intelligence or getting their news from fake news websites. Who would have thought it, right? We'd like them all to be ill-mannered youngsters, bewildered and rude teenagers, uncivilized youths, but it turns out they were older people, some with gray hair, people who looked serious and respectable. Who would have thought it, really.

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Polls have been indicating for some time now a disturbing social phenomenonThe shift of young men towards right-wing ideologies in both political and social aspects, and the consequent increase in the discrediting, ridicule, and rejection of feminism—both trends that Xavier Bosch discussed in an article from this newspaper.

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These are not low-quality videos, but the opposite. The set is meticulously prepared, the editing is impeccable, and the sound quality is high. The podcast is called Return to the truth and has 46,800 followers on Instagram. "A man needs his wife to be willing when he wants to be with her. And it is forbidden [in Islam] for her to refuse, unless she has a legitimate reason: menstruation, if she is going through a difficult time… (…) Even if she is cooking, she must stop cooking and go," says Sheikh Yusuf Soldado in one of the podcast's videos, talking with other Islamic influencer Aleksandar Petrov, that is even more popular. Petrov has 508,000 followers on Instagram.

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Feminism emerged in 2018 from social movements at the forefront of the media and social agenda —that year saw the first global feminist strike in history— thanks to the Me Too movement denouncing sexual harassment, which originated in Hollywood and spread like wildfire. In Spain, the trigger was the street protests against the La Manada case. Feminism advances in waves, and we are now in the fourth wave, which has the denunciation of sexual violence as a key element. Me Too connected us as women and shattered the illusion of equality: "It was an awakening. Despite many decades of equality policies and equality in formal terms, attitudes of sexual violence continue to be reproduced underneath," argues Maria Freixenet, a researcher at the Institute of Political and Social Sciences ( The neo-machista backlash after the fourth wave of feminism, signed by several academics.

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Barcelona aims to position itself as a leading city in sustainability. To achieve this, Barcelona+B asserts that it's essential to start in schools. This premise is the basis for the Eduquem+B project, a program that surveyed over 2,000 students from 29 schools across the city to determine if young people are prepared to face today's environmental and social challenges. The initiative, spearheaded by Barcelona+B with academic support from EADA Business School, begins with an innovative test. Be Ready for NowBased on the European GreenComp competence framework, the objective is clear: to diagnose what young people know about sustainability, how they act, and what skills they need to develop to become real agents of change. Training and raising awareness in educational institutions is the foundation for action.

The diagnosis reveals that students demonstrate a very positive attitude and a good level of understanding regarding environmental issues. They excel in systems thinking (69.1%) and in promoting nature (60.6%). However, only 42.8% express an intention to act in favor of sustainability, especially in the collective and political spheres. This contradiction worries the project's promoters. "Young people understand the complex nature of the problems, but they don't know how to act systemically; they don't act in groups or mobilize others," explains Federica Massa-Saluzzo, Director of Sustainability at EADA Business School. She points out that, historically, it has been young people who have driven major social transformations, and therefore considers the low level of civic participation detected "worrying." "We believe that good training and awareness-raising in schools could change this baseline," states Elena Damiá, Director of Barcelona+B at B Lab Spain.

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