GLOBAL FEAR

Never before in human history has fear been so concrete and endemic, affecting so many people in so many places at once, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban journalist and writer whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages. In this article, the author writes that violence, as an expression of social, political, and even personal relations, has developed into the habitual response of not only individuals but also social groups and nations, with the result that fear extends into every level of society. There are types of fear that are stoked and manipulated by the powerful: fear of change, of difference, in people as well, like immigrants, fear of that which diverges from the interests or dominion of power. It is clear that not all violence is irrational and gratuitous but almost always has economic, social, or political roots related to marginalisation, poverty, or, at the other extreme, the arrogance of the powerful. Our lives today are fenced in by terrorism and antiterrorism, preventive wars, cold wars. There are no safe places left, there is no margin for innocent attitudes; almost no one can escape from fear, starting with the most powerful, who are in need of more and more bodyguards.

THE BEAST AND THE BEAUTY

The decision of the organisers of Madrid fashion week to bar \'\'excessively\'\' thin models from the city\'s runways immediately reminded me of a grim joke in very poor taste about Ethiopian children who, seeing the photo of a very, very skinny top model, decided to organise a collection of food to send the destitute woman, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Cuban writer and novelist, winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Best Literary Crime Novel. In this article, the author writes that the fashion world\'s habit of setting extreme thinness as the measure of female beauty (and personal success) appears to have reached worrying extremes: according to scientific authorities, the attainment of these emaciated physiques is related to psychic and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, which are becoming more and more widespread. If we do not respect that which was granted us by the miracle of evolution, an inhabitable planet and a body with intelligence, the future of the species and its common home could be condemned to premature death generated and engineered precisely by that great human virtue: intelligence. Or by its major defect: foolishness.