This week’s Camino a Ítaca grew out of two events that, taken separately, might seem unconnected. The first was the debate in the European Parliament over proposals that would make it easier to deport asylum seekers to third countries with which they have no meaningful connection. The second was much closer to home: the decision…
Every language reveals something about the people who speak it. As an English speaker who has spent years living in Spain, one of the things that continues to fascinate me is not simply the vocabulary of Spanish, but what that vocabulary suggests about the culture that produced it. Languages do not merely describe reality; they…
Marx, Castro, Lenin and the Pope are at the racetrack. The communists are studying the odds; the Pope is down in the paddock asking after the horse that nobody wants. As the new Pope prepares for a visit to Spain, an odd political spectacle is taking shape. The same far-right forces that eagerly borrow from…
Cáceres undergoes a curious transformation every spring. For one weekend, the medieval city fills with African percussion, NGO stalls, craft beer, dreadlocks and the language of global citizenship as WOMAD, the travelling world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel, arrives in town. Officially, it is a celebration of multicultural openness and artistic exchange. In reality,…
At the beginning of my book Stories Left in Stone: Trails and Tales in Cáceres, Spain, my friend Carlos Blay takes me deep into the Cueva de Maltravieso. There, in the dark, is the oldest known expressions of art in Europe (it was in the world until a recent discovery in Asia): a handprint on…
There’s a particular kind of pride that comes from arriving late to something and still acting as if you’ve nailed the timing. You missed the drinks, the good conversation, and whatever fleeting moment of relevance the whole thing once had—but at least you showed up with confidence. And really, isn’t that what matters? Extremadura, in…
…that’s the childish logic at the heart of a great deal of very adult violence. In this piece, I examine how quickly geopolitical conflict gets reframed as a moral—or even theological—contest, and how easily people who would reject certain ideas at home find ways to defend them abroad. What interests me is not just the…
There’s a certain kind of art that appears whenever politics gets too involved in culture. It’s grand, symbolic, completely certain of itself — and often, unintentionally, a bit absurd. You see it in Stalinist skylines, Soviet statues, gold-plated presidential monuments. Different countries, same instinct: culture not as something messy and alive, but something to simplify,…
How do you understand a country that seems to contain at least two entirely different worlds? In my latest Camino a Ítaca column in the Spanish newspaper HOY, I explore a paradox I witnessed while thinking about modern Iran. In Tehran, a one-hour drive can feel like a journey across centuries — from affluent northern…
This morning’s piece came from a feeling I couldn’t quite shake: a strange, low-grade nostalgia, not for some golden age, but for a time when certain ideas, however persistent, at least had the decency to keep their voices down. The article looks at how that quiet embarrassment seems to have evaporated, replaced by something far…