For this series, Rubio & del Amo, a Murcia-based studio specializing in visual identity, editorial design and packaging, joins forces with Cruz más Cruz, the Madrid firm founded by José María Cruz Novillo and later consolidated with the arrival of his son Pepe. Two fairly complementary sensibilities feeding into a common project.

In the mid-1990s, I had many printed copies of the Financial Times in my hands. Probably sometime between 1995 and 1997. I was fascinated by its design, the wan salmon of its pages and Ingram Pinn’s illustrations: its visual identity, basically. As for reading it, very little, I confess. It was an almost purely retinal experience, and little else. But it became clear to me that its texts were written for professionals —people who make decisions on the basis of verified information—

The smell of fresh ink on a print just lifted from the press has a remarkable ability to turn devotees into addicts. So do the uneasy intervals built into the process, which forge a very particular bond with the craft. This lies at the origin of nearly every printmaking and screen-printing workshop. Another trait they tend to share is an unusual capacity for endurance...

Given its scale and significance, I will present my analysis of this project in several installments. These are the ten design proposals shortlisted for the next series of euro banknotes. At this moment, they are under the gaze of millions. Citizens of the euro area have been invited to choose their favorites in a survey that will remain open until September 21...

Designing the banknotes destined to circulate throughout a monetary area such as Europe is among the most prestigious and consequential commissions a professional or design studio can receive. Creating an image to be shared by millions of people, condensing an identity into visual form, and meeting complex demands of legibility, security, symbolism, and instant recognition constitute a task at which even a demigod like Hercules might have failed...

I have a couple of friends named Ramses. I met them in Cuba, and both ended up in Spain. I’m not sure if they are still there, probably. But what continues to strike me is not the trajectory. How is it that I have two friends with the name of a pharaoh? How is this possible?
I tend to think it has to do with Ramses II—the pharaoh who ruled Pi-Ramesses (Nile Delta) between 1279 and 1213 BC. Western civilization had little awareness of his existence until the early seventeenth century.

It takes only a glance at my MSN (Microsoft Start) homepage to think that every day someone discovers something that forces us to rewrite the history of humanity. I imagine historians exasperated, stalled again and again on the first page.
One of those stories—always amusing—claims that 'a set of geometric markings engraved between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago on small sculptures and tools is forcing a revision of the history of human communication.'

I had the opportunity to read, in the latest issue of The Critic, an article on Sancta, the most recent work by Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger, one of the most radical figures in the contemporary European scene. It takes as its point of departure Sancta Susanna (1921–22) by Paul Hindemith—already scandalous in its time—and expands it into a hybrid scene somewhere between opera, performance, concert, and a ritual of quasi-satanic affiliation.

On my way home, on one of the trains at Miami Airport, I took this photograph. A passenger had left a sticker on one of the metal poles inside the carriage. Whoever it was—judging by the code—came from Guayaquil and carried it on their suitcase. The author, it would seem, now lives on these shores.

Watching the American Alex Honnold perched on the skyscraper tower in Taipei—508 meters high—immediately carried me to the image of King Kong. With one difference: the latter has an intellectual author, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who directed the original 1933 film alongside Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO Radio Pictures...

Perhaps since the beginning of time, yet within the landscape of contemporary visual culture, polemic, interpellation, and reply operate as devices of symbolic production that act directly upon the processes of meaning and the circulation of images. These controversies, or provocations—beyond merely situating themselves within a context that already shapes the imago—become structuring agents that reconfigure spaces of reading, disarticulate iconographic hierarchies, and redefine interpretive frameworks.

It is 18 degrees in Cincinnati right now—remarkably close to the record high for a December 26: 20 degrees Celsius, registered in 2016. No snow. It would be tempting to invoke climate change if I were looking for a quarrel, but I’ve just come off several days of snow. I lack serious arguments to do so. Snow is beautiful, as are snow-covered landscapes—especially when the sun is out and the air stands still.

Sargon of Akkad’s grandson was born hunchbacked. His grandfather had raised the first known empire, anchored in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia. He was fond of the boy, and let him do whatever he pleased. When he strode peacock-proud through the palace corridors, the servants—because of his short stature—bowed as he passed. And so his most recurrent vision became an endless rosary of crowns: some hairy, others smooth and shining. It gave him an utterly distorted view of life. Today’s grandchildren are not all that different.

Trying to find something even mildly interesting on the platforms for a quiet December night, I stop at what appears to be the latest cinematic version of the mythical Superman. I read that it was written and directed by James Gunn and released last July, just this past summer. I also note that it has enjoyed a favorable reception from both critics and audiences. A commercial success, in fact—the highest-grossing solo Superman film in the United States among those that place the superhero at the absolute center.

Over the past two weeks, I have seen this photograph reproduced again and again across an overwhelming number of news outlets. I cannot say it impresses me from a technical standpoint—far from it. And yet it unsettles me in a way very little manages to these days. It is likely to be chosen among the year’s most striking images. Even if it isn’t, it already belongs to my private selection.

I have a rough idea of where New Zealand is on the map. And I’m quite pleased not to know it with any greater precision; in that vagueness, the place remains slightly mysterious, a little enigmatic. Even there —so far from what we consider the heart of the planet, which is our apartment— events unfold that feel uncannily familiar. My grandmother Jacinta used to say: En tolos sitios cuecen fabes… y dalgunes, hasta les quemen. (Everywhere, the same dramas simmer)

Many of us love stories about extraterrestrials. Enjoyable, measured, tinged with mystery. For some, though, they become a feverish fixation. They comb the internet the way people once prowled libraries, hunting for hidden messages, for the codes and arcana exchanged in some shadowy dimension—guardians of the secrets.

It’s not going to happen, of course, but let us imagine that, suddenly, the Egyptian people —not in an Arab spring but in an Arab autumn— decide that their past is shameful, that all its physical evidence, its traces and monuments, must be erased. They rush with torches along the western bank of the Nile —the shore of the dead: Giza, Saqqara, Luxor, Thebes, Abu Simbel— in a near-telluric frenzy of destruction, intent on rewriting history from the point of view of the oppressed, of those first laborers, bakers, and scribes

In 1992 I was very hungry. Not appetite—hunger. Cuba was enduring what was possibly the darkest year of what the government called the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” That was how President Fidel Castro named it in his televised addresses. For the weight of his words, for the absolute finality of every decision, he could be considered a pharaoh—and in some way, he was. That same year, the Egyptian government officially announced the project to build a new Grand Museum, meant to relieve and update the aging Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square.

No one told me. As, in the distance, we begin to make out the white summits of sixty, and while we hurriedly weigh what still lies ahead, we also start to calibrate what we’ve left behind. We turn hypersensitive, and the weight of transience settles comfortably on our shoulders. No one will lift it off. Imagine we have passed ninety and are left only with memory—if it hasn’t been lost along the way—and the counterweight of our legacy. We watch how the most conspicuous thing, the mark we might call our trace...

I ended the previous piece speaking about what has happened to my country after dismantling practically every vestige of its republican past. The revolutionaries abolished even the privately owned shoe-repair shops. They changed names as charming as “La Cenicienta” to Unit 256 for General Shoe Repair. They stripped them of every sign of identity, every trace of belonging. Where there had once been a prudent owner and two, three, or four cobblers, the space was taken over by a director and a deputy director...

I keep in my files an article The New York Times published on June 11, 2020. You’ll recall those were particularly unsettled months. The paper updated it on the 24th, while the protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis—on May 25, 2020, at the hands of a white police officer—were still echoing. The crime—captured on video and broadcast everywhere—unleashed a global wave of outrage against systemic racism and police violence in the United States.

The greatest library of its age, that of Alexandria, burned intermittently over several centuries. Thousands of scrolls vanished, and with them much of antiquity’s science, philosophy, and literature. The intellectual inheritance of the ancient world was reduced to ash. We cannot rule out deliberate intent in some of those episodes. Long before, a vast portion of Phoenician-Punic art had disappeared in the wars we know as the Punic Wars. Nothing remained of Carthage, a cultural and artistic power of its time.

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Not long ago I came across a Facebook post claiming that “sometimes… destroying art is art.” It offered three examples that, to my mind, have little to do with one another. Let’s take them one by one.
On the morning of November 15, 2022, two activists from Letzte Generation (Last Generation Austria) threw a black, oily liquid over Gustav Klimt’s Tod und Leben, on view at Vienna’s Leopold Museum...

A few weeks ago, a post appeared on my Facebook feed from the Beagle Freedom Project, celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Snoopy — perhaps the most universal of all beagles. Since 2010, the Beagle Freedom Project (BFP) has been rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming animals once used in research laboratories. The initiative was born of people who, for some reason, paid special attention to this breed — probably for its docility and its good-natured temperament.

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Avi Schiffmann was born in Washington State on October 26, 2002. That same month saw the release of Ghost Ship, a gothic supernatural thriller that, through its pale and diluted horror, moralizes about the sin of greed. A salvage crew discovers the ocean liner Antonia Graza, lost for forty years, drifting in the Bering Sea; on board, they find gold bars and the remnants of a massacre. They soon realize the ship is cursed: a demon has set a trap to harvest as many souls as possible, using the treasure as bait.

In these times, corporate philanthropy moves with caution. At least in the United States, it seems to be entering a period of adjustment. Federal scrutiny over diversity, equity, and inclusion policies has altered donation strategies. It is not something that keeps me awake at night. It leaves, rather, a curious sensation—like noticing, in a moment of distraction, that a cloud has drifted over the sun while a cold breeze lifts one corner of the notebook.

Helene has been regarded as the deadliest inland hurricane in modern U.S. history. It was impossible to foresee the magnitude of the disaster as it moved toward eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. It was there, in the latter, that the greatest number of deaths occurred—over a hundred. Material damage is incalculable. Recovery has been slow, fueling political debates. Yet even if it had been swift and efficient, the loss of human lives is irreparable. Like everything that has borne, let us say, a proper name.

If there is something that substantially differentiates the socioliberal left from today’s woke left, it is the politics of cancellation. And if there is a figure that embodies that debate in the world of cinema, it is the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, author of two highly celebrated documentaries, pioneering in many ways, which she made on commission from Adolf Hitler. It is not the first time nor will it be the last time that we talk about the way of judging the relationship between art and politics

When the prospect of some impending misfortune crosses our mind, we knock on wood. When someone whispers another’s calamity, we knock again. In truth, we spend the day rapping at it. Often it isn’t even real wood. And if such a gesture could truly ward off the avoidable, every carpenter would be the luckiest man alive. Both Joseph and his son Jesus might have been. On one hand, seen through today’s eyes, their deeds would rack up staggering numbers of views, likes, and followers—Jesus the most influential influencer in history...

Giorgio Armani died on September 4, 2025, at the age of ninety-one, as confirmed by the Armani Group. He passed peacefully at his home in Milan, surrounded by loved ones, and remained actively bound to his work until his final days, pouring his energy into collections and projects still in motion.

Perhaps prompted by a timely confession—or by something closer to a revelation tinged with the paranormal—a journalist from El Español published today an article suggesting that sharing every moment is no longer the axis of the digital experience. It reads as if announcing a trend I cannot find anywhere. Perhaps it is simply that my generation, the people I follow and who follow me, are no longer inclined to chase trends.

American fashion designer Willy Chavarría, in collaboration with Adidas Originals, introduced the Oaxaca Slip-On, a black-molded, open-toe shoe whose aesthetic directly recalls the huaraches of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag, Oaxaca. The controversy erupted when it came to light that the shoe was being manufactured in China, and that the communities responsible for the craft had neither been consulted nor acknowledged in the creative process.

In the cloistered hush of an archive room, where light is meted out so as not to wound the paper, a witness from another world surfaces once more: a sheet written and signed by Hernán Cortés on February 20, 1527. Five centuries have passed since the ink was still wet; more than thirty years since it was wrenched from the collection safeguarded by Mexico’s National Archives and disappeared without a trace.

A staggering percentage of its so‑called informative content is either false or, at best, inaccurate. Today I stumble upon a post about the alleged auction—at Christie’s—of an AI‑generated work. I read and save. The note focuses more on the controversy it sparked than on the sale itself, perhaps because uproar, confrontation, and intellectual skirmishes attract far more attention than the artworks themselves.

As my enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence grows, so does the range of readings I pursue on its likely paths and its influence on human reasoning. It is a dense undertaking: every day the media returns to the subject, and those articles, as they pile up, age with unsettling speed. AI keeps redefining itself. Yet to stop speaking about it is unthinkable.

I open X (formerly Twitter) the way one steps into a Roman coliseum—looking for blood. It is the perfect arena in which to insult one’s neighbor, the one you will hate as much as yourself. X knows my obsessions: Real Madrid, Shih Tzus, and a good meal. It also knows—though I’ve never marked it as an interest—that I sometimes linger over posts about Cuba.

“Have dinner at a restaurant in your own neighborhood tonight. Order the sauce you’ve never tasted.

Have a cold beer at four in the afternoon in an empty bar.

Go somewhere you’ve never been.

Listen to a stranger who has nothing in common with you. Order a steak medium‑rare. Try an oyster (...)”

No matter how deep I drive the pick or how much earth I haul away, I will not unearth the remnants of an ancient civilization. This is Cuba—a place where ruins were buried alive and left to rot under the sun. What lies beneath are merely the remnants of Havana as it stood half a century ago. There is nothing noble to find.

In the early years of the eighties, while I was slogging through junior high, two ravishing Hungarians crossed my path. Katalina Soós shot past at such speed that I could only glimpse her contours through a pocket telescope. The other, Szonja Török, struck me with the same force with which the Tunguska meteorite flattened the remote Siberian taiga. Hungarians were something else entirely. You could tell by their avant‑garde hairstyles, by the freedom and self‑assurance with which they moved.

A couple of days ago, while browsing the digital edition of the Financial Times, I read that on November 16th a dinosaur is going up for auction. The event will take place at the Château de Dampierre-en-Yvelines, in the Île‑de‑France region, between four and six in the afternoon—right in the middle of afternoon tea. Curiously, its value is estimated between four and six million dollars.

Each year, around October 12, debates resurface across Latin America over the day’s legitimacy. In Spain it is both National Day and Día de la Hispanidad; in countries such as Mexico and Argentina it is marked as Día de la Raza, often with a focus that rejects Spanish roots and exalts Indigenous heritage. In the United States it is Columbus Day. Criticism of the evangelization of the Americas grew after World War II, when newly independent former colonies began to rewrite their histories.