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Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

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I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

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Latest Essays

The Sleepless and the Stressful

I have always been shit at falling asleep. Ideally I would fall asleep at 11 p.m. Every night. Instead, this is typically when I sit back down at my computer to read all the open tabs and unread emails that have accumulated throughout the day. The I check Twitter one...

Democracy Building 2.0: The Open Government Partnership, Game Changer or Symbolic Slogan?

Tomorrow morning, representatives from more than 55 national governments meet in Washington DC to kick off what might be a multilateral, 21st century reboot of good old democracy-building, a term tainted by eight years of George W. Bush. Activists and international...

[Review] Let the Great World Spin

The world spins by ever faster, a phenomenon not just of growing older — accumulating our own extensive, personal archive — but also a product of every generation leaving behind more for us to chew on, despite the same amount of time to chew. We mostly survive by...

[Translation] The Military and the Homicide Rate in Mexico: A Meditation

What follows is my translation of José Merino's article for this month's Nexos magazine. With clearly presented statistical analysis, he shows that the deployment of the Mexican military in the so-called "War on Drugs" has led to a sustained increase in the homicide...

[Review] Down and Delirious in Mexico City

A nini ethnography In 2009, the word did not yet exist in Mexico. Yet by August 2010, it was nearly impossible to watch the nightly news without suffering through yet another segment, interview, or monologue about the country's nini Phenomenon. Nini, ni estudian ni...

Why I still read novels

A friend asked me how and why it is I find the time to still read novels despite the fact that none of us have time to do anything these days. In last week's New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott penned an interesting meditation on Susan Sontag's consideration of...