There are no infallible formulas, but it could be said that a good short story is one that, by showing us only a piece of the lives of its characters, is capable of telling us about their entire lives and personalities. This is true, at least, for short stories of realistic conception, tone, and perspective, let's say of the Flaubertian and Chekhovian tradition, a tradition that 20th-century American short story writers (Hemingway, O’Connor, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Munro, and an endless etcetera) developed and explored in a way as brilliant as it was influential. Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) fits within this tradition.The six medium-length stories that make up his new book, Everything was the same hole, translated with the usual skill by Pau Joan Hernàndez, all share the same narrative mechanisms and address very similar human materials. With a clear prose, of contained intensity and with a devastating expressive precision – more sober and wise than showy and exuberant –, always within the coordinates of the everyday, with narrators in the first or third person, Rodríguez focuses his attention on brief sections – an evening, a few days, a few weeks, a little over a year – of his protagonists' biographies. They are biographical sections in which everything is about to change or go off the rails, moments in which the uncertain possibility or the exciting hope of another life is glimpsed.Rodríguez shows us her protagonists by touching upon the touchstone of a husband, a lover, a friend, a lifelong (lesbian) partner, neighbors, a group of strangers, or her own family, and is capable of explaining these relationships in a rich, suggestive, subtle, complex way. They are relationships crossed by changing moods, agitated by long-sedimented contradictory feelings, overwhelmed by incompatible emotions that nevertheless must be reconciled.Unbalance the reader's expectations

Perhaps the story that best defines Rodríguez's literary proposal is Canícula, which opens the book. The protagonist, Ixabel, is a woman in her fifties, existentially tired and bored, married to a husband with whom they talk more about his dental problems than about anything more or less pleasant, adventurous or loving. One day Ixabel goes to a nudist beach, meets a slightly younger man there, gets excited, and falls in love with him. From here, Rodríguez could build a melodramatic, passionate story, full of debasing secrets, the typical revival of adolescence in adulthood, but he does the opposite and builds a mature marital love story, in which adultery is nothing more than a fleeting and ultimately unimportant circumstance.The ability to break or at least significantly unbalance or relocate the reader's expectations is the house's trademark. Rodríguez is very good at concluding her stories with small, disconcerting but meaningful details: the girl who has said goodbye to her best friend and gets into her father's bed and hugs him with a beautiful and purest love (in "Mars and ruins"), the nocturnal caress that betrays a very deep crack in a supposed marital paradise (in "Duck Heart"), the small terminal push that casts a shadow of doubt over a lifelong love affair (in "The Crater"). Another of Eider Rodríguez's virtues is her skill in creating secondary characters with little narrative presence but great substance. Rodríguez knows the mechanisms of the short story genre as well as the mechanisms of the human heart.

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“We started listening to podcasts when we were on car trips because they were always asking to watch cartoons, and we only let them watch them on very long journeys. We thought of it as an alternative and looked for children's stories. Now they ask for them themselves, whether it's a short or long trip,” explains Raquel Morta. Although there are increasingly more podcasts dedicated to children, the figures are still far below what is offered to other age groups: only 2% of the podcast programming on the main general audio platforms in Spain is dedicated to children, according to the article. Audio consumption in childhood and adolescence: Radio and Digital PlatformsHowever, it is still unknown to what extent children listen to podcasts because the available data, such as that from the General Media Study (EGM), only includes listeners from the age of 14, which leaves out a whole age group about which almost nothing is known: whether they listen, when they do so, or what podcasts they listen to.

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A few months ago I wrote about the creature-men through Ernest, the protagonist of Game theory, by Arià Paco. In the same article, I quoted the words of another literary protagonist, Eloi from the novel The screams, of Victor Recort, as a vaccine against the progressive infantilization of many young Catalan men: "A man is only a man if he is capable of returning at least the same number of goodnight kisses he received as a child."

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Over the past few decades, life expectancy in Catalonia has steadily climbed. Today, it stands at around 83 years on average. This fact has redefined old age: it is no longer seen as a period of closure, but rather a highly fertile phase for introspection, creation, and the transmission of knowledge. "During old age, writing is not only a creative act, but a form of vital reflection; it is a powerful tool for introspection, emotional elaboration, and personal affirmation," says Anna Soldevila, a doctor in psychopedagogy specializing in educational gerontology and emotional education.

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One of the 160 stories collected in these two essential volumes, which collect all of the short works of Hans Christian Andersen —an author who also practiced other genres, but who became famous for his stories—, is titled Pen and inkwell. Says the inkwell, boasting of its potential for creativity: "It's strange, all that can come from me! Yes, it's almost unbelievable! And I myself, truly, don't know what will happen next time, when that person begins to pour the ink on me." An inkwell, indeed, contains all the laws of literary possibilities, and all that is needed is for the writer to put the pen to it and develop his genius on the sheet of paper.

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The fashion of thestorytelling, says Byung-Chul Han, stems from a narrative void, a lack of direction and meaning.storytelling It's the art of telling stories with the goal of emotionally conveying messages. What counts is not the plot or the veracity of the story told, but the ability to move. I thought last week as I watched Donald Trump's whiteboard scene live, with some disbelief and stupefaction. It all seemed like a parody. The unexpected appearance of the worker in a reflective vest even had a touch of unreality. Be that as it may, Trump made use of thestorytelling effectively. The message was not directed to the world—if it had been, it would have been quite different—but to its voters. The proclamation urbi et orbi He deployed it in the following days, suggesting that everything is negotiable, etc., but that to do it properly, it is necessary to start from an advantageous position. The man, at least, is frank, or cynical.

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