EL PAÍS

The paradox of early childhood memories: Why travel with a baby if they won’t remember it

Jorge Marzo — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:50:22 +0000

Scroll through the photo gallery on a phone and it’s common to find a folder marked “Son” or “Daughter” filled with baby pictures: their first birthday, pictures with relatives who have since passed away, their first time at the beach at age two, and an endless collection of memories captured in photos, videos, and audio clips. Adults and children were present in all those moments. Yet the former remember them beyond the multimedia record, while the latter do not. Why is it that people have no memories from when they were very young?

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From January euphoria to February despair: Why most of our New Year’s resolutions fail

Jorge Marzo — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:30:00 +0000

At the end of December, many make New Year’s resolutions to implement from the first day of January. As the annual hourglass counts down, people analyze their shortcomings or excesses and consider how to balance them: learning a new language, exercising more, reducing or eliminating vices... However, as the weeks go by, these goals are often forgotten due to daily commitments, laziness, or simply because they stem from excessive ambition.

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Jamie Campbell Bower, the actor who survived Vecna in ‘Stranger Things’ — and himself

Jorge Marzo — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:32:11 +0000

He played the wizard Gellert Grindelwald in the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010) and in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018); he also portrayed Caius Vulturi in the Twilight saga (2009) and Jace Wayland in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013). But the role that has truly catapulted actor — as well as singer and model — Jamie Campbell Bower, 37, to wider recognition is that of the antagonist in the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. Since 2022, while under heavy makeup required for each character to date (Vecna, Henry Creel, 001, or Peter Ballard), Campbell Bower has earned a reputation as a talent to watch for future roles, including a yet-to-be-confirmed character in the third season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

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The quiet rise of Olivia Dean, the young muse of soul

Jorge Marzo — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:04:24 +0000

A glance at the most-listened-to songs on Spotify is enough to know that Olivia Dean, 26, is destined to be one of the most promising young artists of today. So much so that, despite having spent seven years in the music industry, she has now been nominated for her first Grammy: on February 1, 2026, she will find out whether she wins the award for Best New Artist. But who is Olivia Dean?

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Tate McRae, talent, dreams and discipline to make a name for herself in pop

Jorge Marzo — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:20:23 +0000

When Canadian singer Tate McRae looks in the mirror, she probably sees Britney Spears, her main role model, reflected there. The Canadian, 22, who also rose to childhood fame when she finished third on the U.S. show So You Think You Can Dance at the age of 13, has not stopped working on self-improvement and taking her performances to the limit, with dance as her flagship: “I think as a dancer I’m inherently a workaholic, so time off doesn’t suit me very well,” she explained in an interview last February with Vogue.

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Life on demand: The debate between recording events to remember them or living in the moment

Jorge Marzo — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 04:00:00 +0000

It’s July 2024. The music begins to thunder through the immense speakers set up in the Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid. The audience crowded onto the dance floor begins to scream, excited to see Karol G live. After the main screens show a video, the Colombian artist emerges from below the stage. Thousands of cell phones are already raised above the heads of those present, ready to record the moment. One of them belongs to Manuel Bacas, a 26-year-old from Granada, who uses his height to gain a better view and a privileged focus. With the battery fully charged, his phone stores Karol G in its memory, just as Bacas intended. When the concert ends, more than two hours later, he leaves the stadium rewarded with dozens of videos. But does the show feel the same if he’s constantly on his phone? “I don’t feel like I’m missing out on the concert by recording it, since any video I watch afterward transports me directly to it,” he says.

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Mourning lives unlived: Why we’re burdened by the nostalgia of ‘what if...’

Jorge Marzo — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 04:00:00 +0000

When early childhood education teacher Alba Luna Ros had already settled in Ireland, where she had been working for a year after graduating, she suffered painful losses in her family in Spain. She felt that to heal the emotional wound she had to return to her home country. “I realized that I hadn’t gone to Spain on vacation when everything ended. It was very difficult for me to return to a routine, and compared to the one I had there, here [in Spain] I couldn’t find a job in my field. Those were the moments that weighed on me the most,” she says. But what would her life have been like if she had stayed in Ireland? Like her, many people face crucial decisions that, in the end, lead them down a certain path. However, over time, it’s common for them to wonder or imagine what their destiny would have been like if, instead of doing what they had done, they had followed a different path.

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The ‘tsundoku’ phenomenon, or how we’ve normalized collecting books we’ll never read

Jorge Marzo — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:35:00 +0000

One, two, three… and so on, up to more than 30 books. This is the number of copies that Andrea Aragón has on her shelves at home, unread. A strange collection that, for this reader, never seems to be enough. She will continue buying them in bookstores, regardless of whether she does so impulsively or in a planned way. Like her, many people store volumes in their personal library without starting them or even glancing at the first page. This phenomenon was given a term in Japan in the 19th century: tsundoku. Or, in other words, the habit of collecting books without ever reading them, albeit with the intention of doing so.

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A look at the NBA’s record-breaking high-scoring season

Jorge Marzo — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:21:05 +0000

Recently, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has witnessed a scoring surge that is even more striking this season. Noteworthy performances include Luka Dončić’s incredible 73-point game — he currently averages 33.8 points per game. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are averaging 30.7 and 30.4 points a game, respectively. They are the three highest-scoring players this season, each averaging over 30 points. And it’s not just individual stars excelling — teams as a whole are also scoring more on the court.

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