There are few things stranger than watching former colonial powers attempt to market conquest as a feel-good cultural product in the twenty-first century. This month, a taxpayer-funded delegation led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso and accompanied by 80s pop-zero, Nacho Cano travelled to Mexico to stage an event titled Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje…
It began, quite simply, with reading Joseph Roth. But as I kept reading, and watching the news here in Spain fill with talk of “national priority,” something shifted. The distance between then and now began to feel thinner than it should. The phrase has been circulating in recent months, attached to new political agreements in…
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…
A new long-form essay published in El Salto Diario Extremadura traces an unlikely line from the Pentagon to a roundabout in Cáceres. Beginning with the spectacle of religion in contemporary American politics — where faith, media, and military power increasingly blur — the piece follows a broader transformation: Christianity repurposed as political identity, its symbols…
Every Holy Week, Spain performs one of its most intricate cultural balancing acts. The processions move through ancient streets with choreographed solemnity. Drums echo against stone walls. Candles burn. Brotherhoods trace routes that predate the modern state itself. For many, it is heritage. For others, devotion. For nearly everyone in Spain, it is—at the very…
I’ve got a new piece up on CounterPunch that dives into the increasingly bizarre civil war unfolding on the far right since the war in Iran. When your entire worldview is built on layered hatreds, sooner or later they start colliding. What we’re watching now isn’t strategy—it’s a movement arguing with itself about which enemy…
For years, Spain had one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Not perfect—but fast, universal, and remarkably effective. You got sick, you were treated. No drama. No billing calculations. No quiet fear about what it might cost you. Getting sick wasn’t a death sentence. And the data backed it up. Spain sits near…
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…
It’s a strange moment in the imperial timeline. A 79-year-old property developer with the diplomatic instincts of a casino bouncer—threatened to cut off all trade with Spain because Spain declined to let American bases on its soil be used in an illegal bombing campaign against Iran. This is apparently how alliances work now. You provide…