The cost of the shopping basket and housing, climate change temperatures, overcrowded beaches, roads collapsing at increasingly wider rush hours…, in short, a loss of quality of life in Mallorca and Eivissa. To deny the evidence is to delay in time problems that have been worsening in recent years: overcrowding and the warming of the Mediterranean, two aspects that directly affect our waterline. Other cities are ahead of us, but here we continue to try to convince that the problem is fictitious, a fake, it does not exist. We open this edition with a documented report on the still timid but forceful diaspora, talking to some of its protagonists, who have opted to move to the north of Spain and harbour no doubts about the ‘suffocations’ that the Balearic Islands are experiencing. Their move is not a trivial decision. Our columnist Camilo Cela Conde analyses it in his regular article.

• A legend of sport, of basketball, Rudy Fernández, has granted us an exclusive interview in which he talks about his career, his professional and family life, his retirement, his plans for the future, his hobbies… It’s not to be missed. Rudy is, without a doubt, one of the greats: his titles, his values and his modesty corroborate this.

• The gynaecologist Pepa Manzano, from the Juaneda team, a recognised expert in menopause, explains the details of this natural change in women, its treatments, how it affects sexuality and the fears and risks it generates. A subject that is increasingly in the public eye and in doctors’ surgeries as a result of the baby boom generation, which occupies the largest segment of the population pyramid.

• Amparo Sard has become an unavoidable artist. Necessary in these crazy times in which we live. Tireless, her works call for reflection on the social problems of this world and of this moment. In any of the languages and media she uses, she demands our attention. She has earned a place among the contemporary international references. You have to listen to her and feel her through her work, which is why we have spoken to her and we tell you about it here.

• We are in a time of great changes in our city. Polígono de Levante and La Soledad, Portitxol-El Molinar, Paseo Marítimo and Club de Mar and now will come the Plaça Major, a neuralgic point that still hasn’t found its personality, except for the arcades, and that doesn’t communicate well with La Rambla. It has been abandoned, as has been the Paseo Marítimo. These two poles will change the physiognomy and the rhythm of the city, as long as they are provided with adequate services. This is analysed by our collaborator Carlos García-Delgado in his magnificently documented opinion article.

TIMES OF ANXIETY
Citizens are not used to uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. To limit unpredictability, we spend our lives establishing rules and respecting traditions. When they break down, society convulses and normality is disrupted. This is what is happening now in the world because of an arrogant and idiotic global leader, with irrepressible tics of an autocrat, who does not weigh the consequences of his actions and declarations, in a terrifying whirlpool of contradictions that nobody knows how it will end or how many people it will engulf. Trump, a new Putin but with much more power than the Russian, and on top of that an ally and abuser of Europe, where he lords it over by issuing insults left, right and centre. Perhaps in order to shed some light on this drift we should ask ourselves: cui prodest? Who benefits from his statements? And to investigate in depth all the stock market and economic movements, his own and those of his entourage at large. Just a thought.

CAPTIVATING AI
Artificial intelligence tends to respond in the tone in which you train it, enhancing it with a wide range of variables: kind, caring, empathetic, witty, joking, romantic, cynical, polite, hooligan, and so on. And it is very convincing because it aims to outdo us. The AI has split-second access to all kinds of expressions, intonations and nuances that find their nurturing environment in our influenceability and accessibility. Theirs is mechanical and rational, ours is emotional, variable and intuitive. In emotional intelligence, even without having emotions of their own, they can beat us. That is why there are so many cases on the web about people who fall deeply in love with an AI, in which the voice is a fundamental tool. Is such an emotional connection possible? Do not doubt it.

Firma