For fifteen minutes during the Super Bowl halftime show, Spanish took center stage in one of the biggest cultural spectacles on the planet. Across Spain, many viewers felt a surge of pride. But for parts of the nationalist and far-right political sphere, the moment also exposed an uncomfortable contradiction: celebrating the global success of the…
I just published two versions of the same essay: one in Spanish, from Europe, and one in English, for Canadian and anglophone readers. They’re siblings rather than twins—similar in structure, different in inflection, each shaped by its imagined audience. The piece reflects on Canada, on Mark Carney’s Davos speech, and on that peculiar comfort of…
My brother was named after a cowboy. That detail says a lot about my father, his generation, and the way America once looked from the outside: big, confident, morally certain, the man in the white hat who did ugly things for noble reasons. My dad loved Shane (Raices Profundas), and I grew up with that…
Some wars last years, flatten countries, and leave entire generations trying to remember what normal life used to feel like. And then there was the Whiskey War. Yes — a real territorial dispute between Canada and Denmark, carried out for decades with flags, polite notes, and strategically placed bottles of whisky and schnapps left on…
Banksy, Justice, and the Violence of Silence The piece begins with a striking image: a Banksy mural that appeared overnight on London’s High Court — a furious depiction of justice turned executioner, of law reduced to raw violence. Within hours, authorities erased it. But their attempt at “cleaning” only deepened the message. The ghost image…
They’ve turned “woke” into a punchline — something to mock, dismiss, or roll your eyes at. Why? Because it’s easier to discredit the word than reckon with what it actually means. “Woke” was never about arguing over coffee orders or policing T-shirt colors. It wasn’t about trends, lifestyle choices, or the internet’s latest moral panic.…
“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…
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…
Over twenty years ago, I lived in Yemen. Decades later, I found myself receiving WhatsApp messages from friends and former students in Sana’a—as bombs rained down around them. Real-time updates from people I cared about, living through hell. That experience will never leave me. What I didn’t expect was to see that same war discussed…
The deserts of Nevada This week’s Camino a Ítaca stretches back 20 years and rides the highways that line the deserts of Nevada. Wondering what went wrong and why few things will genuninely change. Read the English version below or click over to the original in Spanish in el Hoy. Tambien se puede ver el…