Europe has no shortage of libraries and yet there is no European Library. How can that be? An internet search reveals that until 2016 there was an inter-library service called The European Library, which was then merged into what we now call Europeana. Created in 2009 by a European Commission amazed by the potential of […]

  Every 1 July, people in Portugal, Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries celebrate World Library Day by posting photos of libraries, bookshelves, books, reading, and, of course, permutations of any of these things and cats. World Library Day is a day to show affection for these supposedly unfashionable institutions. It’s also a day that doesn’t […]

Esta crónica, escrita antes de se saber o resultado das eleições espanholas, é sobre a viragem tática da extrema-direita europeia — um fenómeno que já se adivinhava há uma década e que eleições recentes, inclusive as de ontem têm vindo a confirmar, e mesmo a acelerar. Como muitas outras tendências na extrema-direita atual, um primeiro […]

This article is the second part of a digression on the relationship between memory and economic structures. The first part is a short story about your dearest memory and the money you did not know it was worth.  From the beginning and until the end, we are memory over time. That is the only way […]

O apego de muitos seguidores dos temas geopolíticos à ideia de “grandes poderes” vistos como entidades constantes e capazes de moldar a realidade à sua volta leva muita gente a uma posição na qual são forçados a permanentemente arranjar justificações retrospetivas para as ações ou omissões de Putin como se todas elas (ações ou omissões) […]

We all hold a memory, more powerful than all others, for which we are grateful. It doesn’t have to be an unusual or special memory. It’s simply a happy memory. And when we conjure it, the important part is not to recover the sequence of events that make it, but to relive the feeling we […]

On 25 April 1974 – 49 years ago – telexes and wire photos in newsrooms across the world started churning out texts and images from a half-forgotten country in the southwestern fringe of Europe. My country, Portugal, was then a 48-year-old dictatorship embroiled in a 13-year-long war in three of its five African colonies, Angola, […]

In the end, Emma Goldman never said “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”, though it’s a great maxim and she could definitively have said it. What she did say was much more interesting. Her story begins when she arrives in New York City in 1889 as a 20-year-old with three countries, an authoritarian father, and […]