“I refer to the facts.” That was the response of Archbishop Luis Argüello, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, when challenged about the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual abuse. It’s a powerful phrase—but it invites an obvious question: Which facts? That question is the starting point for my latest article, published in the Spanish newspaper…
A tiger, a pope, Bad Bunny, migration, hell, the Spanish left, and the curious tendency of otherwise intelligent people to mistake agreement on one issue for agreement on everything else. My latest essay, A Tiger in a White Cassock, was published yesterday in CounterPunch and has now also appeared in Spanish translation in Nueva Tribuna.…
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…
Northlands Park was never a glamorous place. It was cigarette smoke caught in prairie heat, dust ground into shoes, racing forms folded in tired hands, and generations of men trying to read meaning into odds, instinct, and luck. In many ways, it was less about horses than about belief itself, the deeply human desire to…