God help us. The war drums are beating again. Somewhere between the tortilla and the gazpacho, the far-right guardians of Spanishness are having a collective nosebleed — purity tests for everything from ham to human beings. I couldn’t sit idly by and watch the madness. No, I strapped on my battered typewriter and unleashed a…
In this week’s Camino a Ítaca a look at how mediocrity seems to rise to power here in Spain. This of course happens everywhere, but here in Spain there seems to be a particular subset of people whose sole ability is to play the system and reach the top without having any other discernible skills.…
In my latest piece for Boston Review, I examine how Spain’s far-right party, Vox, is actively working to rehabilitate the legacy of Francisco Franco. By revisiting the brutal events of the 1936 Badajoz massacre, the article explores how historical atrocities are being reframed to serve contemporary political agendas. This manipulation of memory reflects a broader…
The Camino a Ítaca is in no way linear, it circles and loops and starts all over again. As spring turns Cáceres into the allergy sufferers nightmare, another event takes places, one that has been going on for more than thirty years. It’s quasi-religious in the way that in some sectors it can’t be questioned for…
In this new essay I follow Herodotus—the world’s first fact-checker—into the twenty-first-century war over memory. Beginning with his insistence on weighing every side of a story , I trace how today’s strongmen —from Xi’s 2024 Patriotic Education Law to Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order —use the same ancient playbook: rewrite the…
In my latest piece over at rabble.ca, I explore how Canada’s evolving relationship with the U.S. reflects much more than just political tension—it’s about identity, values, and what it means to forge a path forward in an increasingly polarized world. I take a hard look at the historical dynamics between our two countries and ask…
Nostalgia, memory, love: all powerful emotions. And what can trigger them? In this case, Pop Rocks exploding in a sensory sugar rush. In Spanish they call them Peta Zetas but it’s a story that could easily be told in German, Russian, Romanian, Albanian or Cambodian. It’s a story that will be told again in Argentina…
En un mundo saturado de noticias fugaces, pocas veces nos detenemos a escuchar los lamentos que provienen de las ruinas olvidadas. Acabo de traducir, para El Cuaderno Digital, un texto que apareció originalmente en Counterpunch sobre la catástrofe en Yemen — y aún hoy ese país arde bajo el silencio del resto del mundo. El…
Over twenty years ago, I lived in Yemen. Decades later, I found myself receiving WhatsApp messages from friends and former students in Sana’a—as bombs rained down around them. Real-time updates from people I cared about, living through hell. That experience will never leave me. What I didn’t expect was to see that same war discussed…
“For a moment, it felt like we had won. The bad guys were relics. Fascism was a lesson Spanish schools didn’t teach, and liberal democracy was what all the cool countries were wearing.” The Camino a Ítaca climbs the Statue of Liberty this week for a look around to see what is left of something…