Why nostalgia for ’the good old days’ can be dangerous — and what’s really behind the revival circus Spain seems to be caught in a weird collective daydream lately — a growing number of young people claiming: “Under Franco, we lived better.” In my latest piece for the Camino de Ítaca column, I dig into…
Here’s the blink-and-you-miss-it summary: my latest Camino a Ítaca column dives into the Groucho-grade absurdity of political morality in Extremadura — a tale of ironclad vows that dissolved in record time, the machinery of hypocrisy grinding everything to paste, and the saints of this land who may be scarred but are no longer innocent. Read…
(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…
Vivimos tiempos en los que las palabras pesan… pero a menudo se quedan en el aire. Discursos grandilocuentes, frases de manual y declaraciones que parecen diseñadas para acumular likes más que para transformar la realidad. Nos hemos acostumbrado a un ecosistema donde el gesto vale más que el compromiso, y donde lo simbólico termina sustituyendo…
We love to tell ourselves that history bends toward justice. But what happens when those who claim to defend tradition, order, and “the way things are” keep showing up on the wrong side of every struggle for human dignity? From slavery to segregation, from suffragettes to climate justice, from colonial wars to today’s atrocities —…
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” — Mark Twain Samuel Clemens, the master of irony, wrote this during his “Grand Tour” around the Mediterranean in the late 1800s. It’s a truism that doesn’t always stick — not everyone becomes wiser through travel. But even for the most seasoned travelers, the road can still…
In this week’s Camino a Ítaca a look at how mediocrity seems to rise to power here in Spain. This of course happens everywhere, but here in Spain there seems to be a particular subset of people whose sole ability is to play the system and reach the top without having any other discernible skills.…
En un mundo saturado de noticias fugaces, pocas veces nos detenemos a escuchar los lamentos que provienen de las ruinas olvidadas. Acabo de traducir, para El Cuaderno Digital, un texto que apareció originalmente en Counterpunch sobre la catástrofe en Yemen — y aún hoy ese país arde bajo el silencio del resto del mundo. El…
JD Vance comes to Europe Poor Chicken Little, after everyone ignored the little guy for so long, saying he was exaggerating, that what the fascists were saying was only electioneering, peanuts for the gallery, not to be take seriously… And then came Vance to Europe to let everyone know that they are playing for keeps.…
I’ve been writing for the Spanish newspaper HOY for almost 15 years now, but my pieces have always been in, surprise surprise, Spanish. It took a tragedy in Valencia and a chance look at a tranlated piece by my colleague J.R Alonso de la Torre to put the pieces together. Today, I try out my…