A.J. Alfafara is 47 years old and has a life rebuilt on the ashes of a past that civil law refuses to bury. Although she hasn't heard from her husband in over a decade, the Philippine state still considers her his wife. This activist encountered the cruelty of the system when trying to buy a home: a routine procedure became a wall when the notary informed her that, without the signature of a man who had been missing for ten years, she had no legal standing to acquire her own roof over her head. Her case is not an anecdote, but a reflection of a legal structure that keeps tens of thousands of women in the Philippines – one of only two countries in the world, along with the Vatican, where divorce is illegal – trapped in marriages that now only exist on the republic's stamped paper.

When Marilyn Monroe died on August 4, 1962, her belongings went to Lee Strasberg, who had been her teacher at the legendary Actor's Studio and had become her confidant. Among the actress's possessions were a handful of manuscripts, letters, and some of her own poems, texts that Monroe often scribbled on hotel stationery wherever she stayed. All these personal writings were first edited in 2010, under the title Fragments" (Spanish edition published by Seix Barral), and they offer a privileged glimpse into the inner world, expressed in the first person, of this actress who was born a century ago, on June 1, 1926. They also give us a lesser-known image of the star: that of the avid reader; that of the actress who feels secure in front of photographers but not when she has to speak with journalists; that of the woman who connects with the progressive political concerns of the time; that of the performer who finds in New York a territory for artistic enrichment at the antipodes of Hollywood glamour.

In 1874, Jules Duruof and his wife got lost while trying to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. At that time, balloons – and airships too – had no maneuverability and were often at the mercy of the wind. They fell into the water, but a fishing boat was able to pick them up. Other aeronautical adventurers were not so lucky. All this led Baldomer Oller, an aeronautics enthusiast born in Calaf and exiled in Paris, to want to devise a device that would allow the balloon to be directed wherever its crew wished, and from this came the patent for the airship Catalunya. But the story of this Catalan exiled in Paris is much more interesting and goes beyond technological entrepreneurship. It is a story of unionism, anarchism, imprisonment and torture, exile and return, with the culmination of a surprising invention that was never built.

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I am 56 years old and have three grown children: one 26, one 24, and one 20. Right now, I'm thrilled that it's like this. I like that they've grown up and that I can maintain a different relationship with them; and even though two of them haven't left home yet, I can already do my own thing. It sounds selfish. And it is. On everyone's part. They have immense desires to live their own lives, and so do I. They no longer need me to survive, and I live this absence of vital need with joy. Does this mean we don't want to share together? Absolutely not, but the dependence of small children has faded and has freed us. That sweetness of a child has also gone. But I didn't have children like someone raises bonsais, and that they have grown up seems logical, fantastic, wonderful to me.To begin with, she no longer lives at home and the relationship is a pleasure. From time to time I bribe her with a lunchbox, or by going for a set menu when I don't have time to cook. She has also invited me to dinner at her place a few times. We talk often on the phone or WhatsApp, we see each other, but the terms of our mother-daughter contract have changed. I will always be her mother, but from a different perspective. Freer, more equal, more adult.Is everything ideal? No, of course not. Especially with the two children remaining, because living together is never easy. Obviously we get annoyed. Obviously they would like to leave but they can't yet. Obviously sometimes they are fed up with me and I with them. But we can talk about everything in a different way, and when I get nervous about the chronic mess or whatever, I can tell them one of my favorite phrases: "I'm not scolding you like a mother to a small child anymore, I'm telling you, you who are already an adult." Because I am truly happy with my life, with three adult children. Young, but adults, and I can't help but see advantages. Such as, for example, them actively worrying about me.A great advantage

Not long ago I had a serious personal problem and I explained it to one of my children, and he explained it to his siblings so that they would all know. When I realized it, I felt strange. I imagined them sharing my sadness and conspiring to be attentive, just as I am with them. And what can I tell you, I was moved in an extra-magdalena mode.But the great advantage is that it all catches me in the mature stage, because it makes me live everything in a different way. How to learn that the chickens to be resolved in their lives are above all their own. With me by their side, but their own. My work is done and my role is another: to be there, to accompany them and to allow them to move forward. Yes, I am lucky that menopause has not caught me with teenage children. But, even so, when I see women my age who are facing their children's adolescence, I compare it to when I lived it a few years ago and I think that now they have this superpower. Because maturity is that, and you just have to be aware of it and enjoy it.

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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.

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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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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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In the magnificent novel Instructions for living without her, by Empar Moliner, the narrator explaining Claudia Pruna's story contrasts her husband's low energy with Pruna's productivity: “Perhaps this is the real difference between men and women. Women, past fifty, want to do a lot of things. They have energy, they laugh, they wet themselves laughing. Men lose it all and some never laugh again. It's like a transfer.”

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Dear Regi, I should be angry, envious, and resentful of you for many reasons. Your book Les calces al sol (La campana) and my Un cor de neu (La Magrana) were released together in September 2022, and yours, slowly but surely, succeeded, and mine, well, it didn't. And this is despite yours being the first book you published, not like me who has published a few. On top of that, you're quite a bit younger than me. And a good person. And talented and wonderful and hardworking and persistent. And stylish! According to the manual for a good follower of the patriarchal cliché, I should choke every time I read something about you. But the opposite happens to me.

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Zara has done it again. Without any shame or embarrassment, it has strolled through the supermarket of social struggles, underground cultures, and symbolic identities with its cart wide open: a bit of marginality to give it pedigree, some uncomfortable figure of those who were a nuisance in life, and, above all, a good dose of rebellion. That's right: all nicely domesticated. Everything, passed through the quick boil of fast fashion, shrink-wrapped and ready to be consumed in the form of a prefabricated identity. And this time, who got to enter the shredder of turbocapitalism? Camarón de la Isla.And this in the full Camarón year, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the birth of the iconic cantaor, a figure who was not only an exceptional voice of flamenco, but also one of its great renovators. From La leyenda del tiempo, he opened the genre to new sounds and sensibilities, and moved it from an almost fossilized space to a living territory in tension with the present. But, furthermore, he contributed to overflowing the social image of gypsy culture beyond the cliché to which it had been subjected during Francoism, trapped between folklorism and marginality. Together with key figures like Paco de Lucía, he broadened the imaginaries around gypsy identity, both from within and in its public projection.

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An omnipresent element in Rosalía's concert is a large white canvas that serves as the backdrop for the stage, as if it were stretched over a wooden frame. It is the reverse of an immense cloth, as if you were seeing the back of an imposing painting. With a Palau Sant Jordi still with its lights on and the audience filling the stands in a hurry, the back of this canvas patiently awaits the start of the show until, when everything goes dark, it opens in half, as if we were entering the interior of the work of art. It is a way of telling us that what we are seeing is not just a musical performance, but also an artistic process that will unfold before us. It is much more than a concert, it is a total work of art, in motion, full of life, of references, and in constant evolution and transformation. Rosalía is the artist who completes her work during the two hours of the show.

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“Salvador Espriu Castelló, writer, single, sixty years old, a native of Santa Coloma de Farners [...]. He declares that he in no way wishes to be buried in the cemetery of Arenys de Mar. He further declares his express wish that his body be cremated, if the laws permit”. These are verbatim words, handwritten by Salvador Espriu in what is a document of last wishes, a draft of a will, written at some point between the summer of 1973 and that of 1974 – he was born on July 10, 1913 –, drafted in Spanish – the law did not provide for any other option – and addressed to his great friend and lawyer Josep Ferrer i Rius.

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