Idleness, leisure, work, free time, entertainment: these concepts and figures, around which the themed dossier presented here is built, form a constellation inhabited by many tensions which have been given a certain movement by our time. There are oppositions that have disappeared or been replaced by others; there are expansions and triumphant positions, which is the case of leisure, as would be expected in a society that has placed work at its centre and expelled idleness, like someone who eradicates a vice or an evil. Currently, activities that were the offspring of idleness (arts, literature, sciences, philosophy, etc.) have been assimilated into work and thus fall under its regime. Our relationship with accelerated time and the triumph of the merchandised form, to the point where leisure itself has been totally captured, largely determine the types of leisure and its status in our time. At the same time, programmed compulsory entertainment has monopolised extensive swathes of culture and become a task which extends those that fall under the category of work. All this is proof that the boundaries between some of these entities have dissolved, or at least weakened.