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…
Where are the anthems of repression? If reactionary movements claim cultural dominance, mass followings, and moral certainty, one might reasonably expect a soundtrack to match. Where are the rousing MAGA and far-right hymns that people will still be singing in fifty years? Where are the unforgettable choruses celebrating racial division, exclusion, or the romance of…
My brother was named after a cowboy. That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that…
You know that glass cabinet in your grandmother’s living room that nobody was allowed to touch — the one full of “very important” things that were, in fact, spectacularly useless? Cáceres is about to build one. Only this one costs €18 million. A gleaming new museum. A cathedral of vitrines.Stuff from everywhere — except here.…