When my son was 15, I grounded him for violating his curfew. He moped around the house, silent but clearly furious. "If you're angry at me," I said, "let's talk about it."

"Dad," he grumbled, "I really don't want to talk about it. Stop trying to be my therapist."

My wife and I are parents of the psychotherapeutic age. We are the generation that talks more about our feelings —and about our children's feelins— than any generation of parents in the history of humankind.

But are we going too far?

Walk onto almost any playground in middle- and upper-class communities, and you hear some parents repeatedly asking about their children;s feelings and noting their moddos. "That must be frustrating for you." "Does that make you sad?" "You must be feeling tired."

This constant monitoring is irritating and intrusive. It's like pulling a bandage off a wound every five minutes to see if it's healing, or pulling a plant up every few minutes to see if it's growing.

And it can cause kids to get too wrapped up in their feelings. Each passing amotion takes on too much importance. Sometimes we also treat a child's feeling as if it is on trial for its life. We worry that one betrayal will break our child's trust. Or that being excluded by a clique will crush our child's self-esteem. Yet children are far more resilient than that. and when we treat them as fragile, it can undermine their confidence.

¿Por fin la culminación de la transición relgiosa? ¿Una vía hacia el modelo laicista francés? ¿O es sólo un cambio para que todo siga igual? Las declaraciones del ministro de Justicia, Francisco Caamaño, sobre la inminente reforma de la Ley Orgánica de Libertad Religiosa han disparado las especulaciones. Algunos temen que se desate una nueva guerra de los crucifijos, e incluso que peligre la paz religiosa. Otros dicen que ya es hora para esa reforma. Y muchos recelan. Han colmado sus decepciones en los últimos años y creen que el Gobierno carece de coraje para llegar al fondo enla proclamada aconfesionalidad constitucional del Estado español.

Las disputas sobre la masiva presencia de símbolos católicos en los coelgios públicos son la historia de nunca acabar. En realidad, encubren un debate más amplio: el de la confesionalidad encubierta del Estado español, muy visible en ocasiones. En muchos aspectos, el férreo nacionalcatolicismo franquista sigue vigente, pese a lo acordado por la Constitución de 1978. Ocurre cuando el presidente del Gobierno y los ministros toman posesión de sus cargos ante un vistoso crucifijo, o cuando asisten a ceremonias católicas que son calificadas oficialmente "de Estado"; también cuando el Gobierno socialista acuerda con la Conferencia Episcopal un nuevo y más generoso sistema de financiación pública para el culto y el clero católicos, marginando al resto de las confesiones, que cuentan ya con varios millones de fieles en España.

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing —a new generation of deep-storage battery that's small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America's antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

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Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it "smart".

The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it's been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies —solar power and deep-storage batteries— has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

"These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables," said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec's science advisory board. "They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 —a 110-year-old approach— and turn us forward."

To sell his vision of a high-speed train network to the American public, President Barack Obama this week cited Spain, a country most people don't associate with futuristic bullet trains.

Yet the country is on track to bypass France and Japan to have the world's biggest network of ultrafast trains by the end of next year, figures from the International Union of Railways and the Spanish government show.

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Spain opened its first high-speed line, between Madrid and Seville, in 1992. At the time, the decision to run the line to sleepy Seville, host to the World Expo that year, was deeply controvertial. Critics said it would be a costly failure for then-Prime Minister Felipe González, and that he built the line just to take him to Seville, his hometown, on the weekends.

But the AVE —which means "bird" in Spanish— proved to be a popular and political success. Politicians now fight to secure stations in their districts. Political parties compete to offer ever-more ambitious expansion plans. Under the latest blueprint, nine out of ten Spaniards will live within 31 miles of a high speed rail station by 2020.

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Critics say the AVE will never stop losing money. Even its backers say high-speed rail can only be economical if the state bears much of the construction costs. But they say the train's benefits —lower greenhouse-gas emissions, less road congestion and, in Spain's case, greater social cohesion and economic mobility— make it an investment worth making.

How does NHS health care compare with the US health care?
Like most developed countries, Britain ranks above the US in most health measurements. Its citizens have a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality, and the country has more acute-care hospital beds per capita and fewer deaths realted to surgical or medical mishaps. Britain achieves these results while spending proportionally less on health care than the US —about $2,500 per person in Britain, compared with $6,000 in the US. For these reasons, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Britain 18th in a global league table of health-care systems (the US was ranked 37th). However, there are measures by which the US outperforms Britain: for instance, the US has lower cancer mortality rates.

Does private health insurance exist in Britain?
Yes, and it works in a similar way to health insurance in the US. Many employers offer private health-insurance plans as a perk to workers —a minority of patients opt out of the NHS system to receive their medical treatments privately. Private patients can choose their specialists and avoid waiting lists for non-emergency procedures; NHS patients wait an average of about eight weeks for treatmens that required admission to a hospital, four weeks for out-patient treatments and two weeks for diagnostic tests. While NHS patients have a choice of hospitals, they cannot always choose their specialist.

Is it true that NHS bureaucrats put a price tag on life?
The short answer is yes. The NHS has a body called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) that decides which new treatments and drugs the NHS should pay for. One of the factors NICE considers when deciding whether to approve funding for a new treatment or drug is cost-effectiveness. To determine the dividing line between what is cost-effective and what isn't, it must set a threshold. Taking its lead from Britain's Department of Transport —which has a cot-per-life-saved threshold for new road schemes of about $2.2 million per life, or about $45,000 per life year gained— NICE rarely approves a drug or treatment that costs more than $45,000 per life year gained. In short, NICE does not want the NHS to spend more than $45,000 to extend a citizen's life by one year.

While NICE's decisions have angered some doctor and patient groups —particularly some oncologists who say they are unable to prescribe expensive, life-extending cancer drugs— mainstream politicians, the media and most Britons accept NICE's rare rejections as a necessary compromise to keep universal coverage affordable in the face of rising healt-care costs. As NICE chairman Sir Michael Rawlins recently told TIME, "All health-care systems have implicitly, if not explicitly, adopted some form of cost control. In the US, you do it by not providing health care to some people. That's a rather brutal way of doing it."

Is it true that old people receive inferior care on the basis of their age?
NICE uses what it calls "citizens councils" to help it sort through difficult ethical issues, and one of the decisions the councils have made is that age should not be a factor in the institute's approval process —that is to say, a year of life should be considered as valuable to a 77-year-old as to a 12-year-old. In every part of the system, a 77-year-old has the same access to treatment as anyone else in Britain.

El filósofo francés Michel Foucault llegó a la deprimente conclusión de que "el hombre no existe", que cada ser humano no es sino una larga secuencia de simulacros variopintos hechos, deshechos y rehechos por las circunstancias variables de la realidad en la que transcurre su existencia. Todavía más audaz, y acaso más frívolo, Jean Braudrillard fue más lejos y concluyó que aquello que creemos la realidad cuando abrazamos al ser amado o sopamos la pluma en un tintero, tampoco existe, porque la verdadera realidad en la que vive el bípedo contemporáneo no es el mundo que cree pisar sino las imágenes que fingen reflejarlo y que no son sino las ineresadas y manipuladas versiones que dan de él los medios aduiovisuales al servicios de los poderosos de este mundo.

Estas divertidas, brillantes y falaces fabricaciones intelectuales —así las creía yo al menos— acaban de recibir un sorprendente respalgo, una indicación concreta de que si las cosas no son así todavía, podrían llegar a serlo pronto, dadas las inquietantes caracterísitcas que va adoptando, aquí y allá, la civilización que nos rodea.

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La investigación produce este pasmoso resultado: Wallace Souza llevaba a cabo espeluznantes crímenes con el único designio de poder filamrlos antes de que lo hiciera alguno de sus competidores, para obtener las primicias que tenían enganchada a la vasta teleaudiencia a la que alimentaba en cada programa con sangre, verismo y pestilencia a raudales. Para ello, había montado toda una infraestructura de colaboradores, diestros en la pistola y el cuchillo, seleccionados entre las propias fuerzas de la policía a la que —otra revelación— había estado asimilado. Quince de ellos están ya en los incómodos calabozos de Manaos, pero no el héreo del macabro aquelarre, pues, siendo legislador y gozando de impunidad, la Asamblea Legislativa tiene antes que despojarlo de aquella para que pueda ser encarcelado y juzgado. ¿Lo será? Paciencia: lo dirá el futuro, y con abundancia de derivaciones y detalles, porque mi institno me asegura que esta historia tiene para mucho rato.

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No es difícil, para cualquier aficionado a la esgrima intelectual, demostrar que Wallace Souza es un producto del siglo XXI, en el que la cultura predominante, en gran parte por la miseria que ha generado la televisión en su frenética carrera por conquistas audiencia escarbando en las sentinas de la vida, destruyendo la privacidad, explotando sin el menor escrúpulo las experiencias más indignas y prioridad de prioridades, aunque, para conseguirlo, como hizo Wallace Souza, haya que disparar y hundir puñales en el prójimo. Desde este punto de vista, asesino y todo, el director y productor de "Canal Libre" es un héroe, o un mártir, de la cultura que, con ayuda de la prodifiosa revolución audiovisual, hemos fabricado para nuestra época.

Desde otro punto de vista, el del "principio de realidad" pascaliano, hago mi autocrítica y reconozco que lo ocurrido en Manaos convierte las teorías (que antes me parecieron delirantes y sofistas) de un Foucault y un Braudrillard en algo que empieza a tener confirmación objetiva en este extraordinario mundo que nos ha tocado. Si Wallace Souza cometión esos crímenes sólo para convertirlos en imágenes, es evidente que, para él y para sus espectadores —aunque éstos fueran menos conscientes de ello que él— la realidad real era menos importante, meramente subsidiaria o pretexto, de la realidad reflejada por las cámaras, las que, con su perfecta adecuación a los gustos del público, la recomponía, purgaba y recreaba de tal modo que fuera algo que la realidad real lo es sólo muy de cuando en cuando: excitante, terrible, divertida. Wallace Souza es la primera demostración palpable de que el hombre no es una totalidad definida sino una materia modelable y cambiante, una melcocha o greda al que la dimensión imaginaria de la vida propulsada por el sistema educativo más universal y todopoderoso de la historia —las pantallas— va dando forma, realidad y cambiando al capricho de las modas.