What if a dream of the sea could spark a rebellion? From the high Andes to the heart of Alberta’s oil country, The Great Landlocked Rebellion uncovers how nostalgia, geography, and fossil-fuel politics collide in a surreal story of imagined horizons and real-world resentment. Curious how a ghostly mariner becomes symbolic of modern political fever…
My travel-essay, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Following Ibn Battuta Across Marbella”, has been selected as a finalist by Intrepid Times in their “A Book Led Me There” competition. Intrepid Times In this piece I venture beyond Marbella’s glittering façade of sun-saturated luxury—Ferraris, gold chains, shopping sprees—and into the old town’s labyrinth of alleys where the echoes…
🎃 Trick, treat… and tradition with a twist 🎃 What if your Halloween bucket of candy held more than sweets—what if it carried a message about identity, culture, and the absurdity of purity? In my latest column for SUR in English (“The Purity Panic: Notes from the Museum of Imaginary Nations”), I peer into the…
(English below) Hay eventos que se venden como “fiestas de la cultura”, pero huelen más a cóctel de poder y subvención.En Cáceres montaron una bienal con 650.000 € de dinero público, pantallas gigantes, discursos sobre “la libertad” y, sí, Vargas Llosa elevado a santo laico del neoliberalismo. Lo que faltaba era público.Y verdad. Mi nuevo…
There are days and nights when the world feels like a badly written sketch — part tragedy, part meme, with the laugh track slightly out of sync. “Because when the world is this stupid, only something imaginary stands a chance.“ And then, out of nowhere, a unicorn shows up. Not the corporate one from Silicon…
Banksy, Justice, and the Violence of Silence The piece begins with a striking image: a Banksy mural that appeared overnight on London’s High Court — a furious depiction of justice turned executioner, of law reduced to raw violence. Within hours, authorities erased it. But their attempt at “cleaning” only deepened the message. The ghost image…
A Secret Key: Returning to Jasper National Park When I began “On Borrowed Roads: Rediscovering Jasper,” I thought I was writing about distance — about what it means to return to Jasper National Park after so long away. I imagined readers who didn’t know the Canadian Rockies or the sound of the Athabasca River breaking…
They Call It a Pause. We Know It’s a Ban. In my latest rabble.ca column, “The lists we keep, and the ones that keep us”, I unpack why Danielle Steele’s so-called “pause button” isn’t a timeout — it’s a warning sign. What’s being sold as “reflection” is, in truth, a move to ban books, stifle…
We were crawling toward the Zimbabwean frontier—jet-lagged, half delirious, in a beat-up car straining under Africa’s heat. From the cassette deck floated the voice of Oliver Mtukudzi: joyous, sorrowful, unmistakably Zimbabwean. That music—lyrics I didn’t understand—spoke louder than passports or polite greetings. It wove us through checkpoint inspections, softened a policeman’s suspicion, and whispered stories…
The Art of Erasure — and What It Reveals In my latest Camino a Ítaca column for HOY, I begin with a haunting image: a Banksy mural that appeared one night on the façade of London’s High Court — a furious vision of justice turned executioner, of law stripped of its ceremony and reduced to…