Today, back home in Alberta, people are voting in a referendum that isn’t quite a referendum, essentially a vote on whether there should eventually be a vote on leaving Canada. For readers in Spain, this requires a little explaining. Alberta separatism comes with oil, old grievances against Ottawa, memories of Quebec, a dash of Brexit…
Spain is heading into a snap election, and judging by the country’s right and far right, you might think the place was somewhere between economic ruin and civilizational collapse. There is one awkward problem: reality. Spain is currently the fastest-growing major advanced economy, while employment has been hitting record highs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t…
There is a strange experience that comes with living abroad: occasionally the country you live in looks very different from the country being discussed elsewhere. That was the starting point for this piece. Over the past year, I’ve watched Spain’s Pedro Sánchez become something of a progressive pin-up internationally: articulate, pro-European, humane on immigration and,…
Cáceres is bidding to become European Capital of Culture in 2031 under the banner of Transcultura: cultures crossing borders, mixing and becoming something new. Which is an excellent idea. Although apparently nobody told the Blues. This summer in Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire, music drifting through my hotel window led me across a dirt road and into…
Some symbols refuse to stay in the past. Fifty years after Franco’s death—and after a dictatorship that ended with political prisoners still being executed—Spain is once again arguing over monuments, memory and the meaning of symbols inherited from authoritarianism. But this is not only a Spanish story. From Europe to the United States and beyond,…
On a rock face beneath the castle in Monfragüe National Park in Spain, thousands of years of human communication seem compressed into a few metres of quartzite: prehistoric figures painted in ochre, then symbols, then an Iron Age inscription meant to be read. It looks like a journey forward, from image to language, from memory…
There are landscapes we carry inside us long after we leave them, places we assume will always be there waiting for us. The Okanagan Valley is one of those places for me. Last summer, I brought my daughters back there. Then the highway closed, the smoke descended, and a familiar landscape suddenly became something else.…
Alberta has always had a taste for epic stories about itself: the frontier, the oil patch, the independent Westerner standing against a distant and meddlesome East. But lately, those old myths have begun to sound less like history than political scripture. In “Homer on the Range: From Sophocles to Danielle Smith,” I look at Alberta’s…
In 2021, Lytton, British Columbia, reached 49.6°C — hotter than Las Vegas — and then burned almost entirely to the ground. Five years later, smoke from Canada’s increasingly ferocious wildfire seasons was drifting south across the border, fouling American cities and threatening the World Cup. The response from Washington? Blame Canada — and threaten to…
“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…