When people say Spain needs to “go back,” there’s an obvious question that rarely gets asked: back to where, exactly? Pick a year. Go back far enough and the nostalgia starts to look rather different. Married women needed their husbands’ permission to sign contracts, manage property or conduct business. Legal independence, privacy and freedoms we…
Before I properly met the river that gives The Gambia its name, I met a kola nut. It was bitter, faintly medicinal and almost comically unpleasant — but it also turned out to be a small doorway into the country itself. From the market stalls of Soma, the journey moved east: across a river strangely…
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…
I’ve spent much of the past few days watching the online reaction to Mariano Rajoy’s remarks about the French national football team. Most of the debate has centred on whether his comments were racist or if indeed racism is a problem in Spain. That seems to me to be only part of the story. What…
Travel stories often begin with a destination. This one begins with a return. My latest feature for the South China Morning Post explores Sal, the best-known island in Cabo Verde. While most visitors come for its beaches, warm Atlantic waters and year-round sunshine, I found a more compelling story unfolding just beneath the surface. Across…
This week’s Camino a Ítaca grew out of two events that, taken separately, might seem unconnected. The first was the debate in the European Parliament over proposals that would make it easier to deport asylum seekers to third countries with which they have no meaningful connection. The second was much closer to home: the decision…
My travel essay on the island of Sal, in Cape Verde, has just been published by Nueva Tribuna, making it my second travel piece to appear in a national Spanish publication. The story has an interesting backstory. I wrote it after visiting Sal, an island shaped by salt, arrivals, departures, and centuries of movement across…
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.…