Twenty essays to analyze the present briefly, but thoroughly. Because, on many occasions, the big issues are hidden in the small issues. The author investigates the reasons that lead people to collect things, reflects on how nations are created or how rational economic decisions are, or wonders about the true importance of sex in these essay capsules. «Small texts on giant themes: there is nothing new about that, it has existed for five hundred years -Enzensberger warns us in the pages of Panopticon-. It was the great patriarch of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, who set the tone by writing "Of sadness", "Of the discomfort of greatness" or "Of the cannibals", always driven by his mood, at the stroke of occurrences and without exhausting himself or the reader or the subject."