1. Under the guise of combating drugs, you seize our oil. In 2012, when Trump was presenting reality showsHugo Chávez, even at that time, made two predictions. The Venezuelan president said: "When the world runs out of oil, there will still be five countries with significant reserves: Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Venezuela. All the presidents who have come and gone in the last hundred years, who have tried to control the oil business, have believed that oil is essential because the powerful Western countries need it." Months later, Chávez elaborated further: "There's an operation brewing, one they've been preparing for some time. They warned me about it years ago. They told me: 'They'll end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker. Not that the government supports it, or that the government allows it... No, no, no. You, Chávez. Chávez. The United States is preparing it. They're directly linking Chávez to drug trafficking, and then anything goes against a drug trafficker. The script was written, and fourteen years later, it's been followed to the letter."

1. Last summer, 2,763 Catalan adults answered an online survey for twenty minutes. The questions posed by the research firm Soluciones Netquest were the same in both Catalan and Spanish. Commissioned by the Catalan International Institute for Peace (ICIP), the study aimed to quantify a reality we all perceive: that young people, including young Catalans, are turning towards right-wing ideologies, both politically and socially. And you only have to listen—on the street, in bars, or in the locker rooms of a sports club—to realize that young men are becoming more radicalized, and at a faster rate, than young women. The study's data, of course, confirms the initial hypothesis. No surprise there.

1. I'm warning you from the start that this article will have a twist that might put you in a bad mood. As much as it put me this Saturday. For work reasons, I spent thirty hours in Ciutadella. The twentieth edition of the Catalan Book Fair was being held, and I was invited to give a talk at Saturday's Literary Vermouth. In the open-plan Plaça des Born, perhaps one of the most luminous squares in the entire Mediterranean, there was a tent, necessary to protect us from the October rains or the sunburns that would have burned our shells. Inside, seven of the eight bookstores in Menorca had a stall with books in Catalan on display, draped in the flag, a custom we've normalized without realizing how absurd it is to use a country's flag as a large sheet over our legs. On an island with one hundred thousand registered residents—roughly the size of Sant Cugat—there are eight bookstores. The ratio isn't bad. Even better is the crowds that have passed through this fair, which only lasts two days. On Friday, there were lots of schoolchildren. On Saturday, a crowd of families shuffling books and leisurely wandering from stall to stall.

1. It's surely one of the photos of the year. Even of the decade. It's Netanyahu, in the Oval Office, talking on a landline phone. Following Donald Trump's instructions, the Israeli leader is apologizing to the Qatari prime minister. The US president, serious as well as unable to, holds the phone from Netanyahu, who refuses to even look at it. Semiotics doesn't lie. The message is clear. "Hey, Boo-boo; I'll call, I'll put it through to you, and you apologize because I told you so." Much has been said about the incident because it was key to everything that followed, leading up to the ceasefire in Gaza, as hopeful as it was long-awaited. Much less has been written, however, about the aesthetic detail that caught our attention from the very beginning. Why did the White House, in 2025, show this photograph only in black and white?

1. A couple has breakfast every day at the same café. They pick up the newspaper on the counter and usually sit at the same table. At our place, they still make a habit of buying newspapers for the clientele. At the bar, they have, quite simply, a variety of titles to suit all ideologies. The couple—white hair, good clothes, expensive cologne—are in their eighties, and I estimate they've been married for more than fifty years. I've been observing for many months, and the ritual, precisely because of its persistence, gives me goosebumps. They sit side by side, elbow to elbow, and right in the middle, they place the newspaper strategically, almost precisely, like the way they set a table at Buckingham Palace. The beauty of it all is that they read the newspaper together and discuss it, news item after news item. Sometimes he stretches the thread, sometimes she wants to delve deeper into a particular fact. At any moment, a headline stimulates a question, and then they delve into the depths of that topic for a while. They're never in a hurry. When one isn't turning the page, they're turning the other, and from time to time, biting into a croissant, each one turns to their own. They don't argue, they don't get indignant, they don't peek out. They speak in a whisper, without disturbing anyone. Nor does anyone else exist on the planet but the two of them, at that moment. The world passes them by, they get information simultaneously, they share the sacred moment of the day, and when they reach the back page, take a last sip of their café con leche, say good morning and until the next day. I like to see how their eyes scan wars, genocides, political misery, hostile takeovers, penalties awarded to Real Madrid, and corruption of all kinds, and assimilate it all with a tranquility of spirit and a shared tenderness that inspires a certain envy. For love, for companionship, and—let's face it—for seeing that journalism still has important hours in a hectic civilization, for the rush, for the nonsense, and for the immediate impact. Seeing them, I think all is not lost. And I'm already looking forward to Tuesday so I can see them again.

1. Cervera, La Segarra. Night of May 20, 1992. Roser is watching the European Cup final on television. Koeman scores the most important goal in Barça's history, and in the euphoria of the moment, the woman jumps, falls to the ground, and breaks her ankle. Despite the pain, Roser and Julià decide to celebrate that victory with gusto, and just nine months later, their son is born. Marc Márquez i Alentà is the fruit of joy and a fall. These are two of the characteristics that, over time, we have seen most often in the prodigious career of the motorcyclist. Marc is a compulsive smiler, an optimist by nature, a human being who, with this attitude, you can already guess that he will always achieve his goals. It's also true that in the last six years he has fallen off his motorcycle a hundred times and has suffered all kinds of injuries. The most serious, the crash in Jerez in the year of the pandemic. After being left like a human wreck, anyone else would have parked their bike and walked away.

September. The first day falls on a Monday. Welcome to routine. Goodbye, for a few months, to a disturbing image: that of single-file tourism. Who knows if, starting today, social media will stop flooding us with images of mile-long lines of people trying to reach a destination that, with few people, will be heavenly. In high season, on the other hand, reaching the finish line has been a test of patience, endurance, and, perhaps, human stupidity. Not a day has passed when we haven't seen videos of the caravan of cars stopped for hours trying to reach the port of Sóller. Sometimes the traffic jam extended far beyond the Caubet roundabout. To park in Positano and see the cascade of colorful houses hanging over the Amalfi coast, you must get up well before the sun. Otherwise, arriving by road is a tiresome, hopeless dream. In Santorini, tourists only see the sunsets, arranged one after the other, like a school queue that stretches on for hours. But not all picture-postcard paradises are in the Mediterranean. To get to Gaztelugatxe, and attempt to climb the 241 steps to the Hermitage of Sant Joan, it doesn't matter if you have a reservation. The problem, since the series Game of Thunder He filmed some impressive scenes, allowing you to access it without spending hours in endless traffic. You end up knowing every curve of the Basque coast by heart. At Mont Saint-Michel, the same. Or much worse. You can only get there during low tide and if you have a pre-reserved parking space. Once you've left the car, the photographs of the procession of tourists walking to the abbey are shocking. Overcrowding is this, a highly contagious disease that goes, in a flash, from an absurd vice to a morbid mania. As if, because it's so difficult to get there, we should like that corner of the world even more. On the contrary. Those of us who obsessively flee traffic jams already consider all these places worth visiting. Is it worth it? For a crowd, it seems so. For me, not at all.