In his 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding describes what happens when the worst of human nature comes to a tiny island paradise. Rather than work together, a group of people devolves into little better than animals, descending into a savagery that undoes any attempts at civility. And so it could have been…
Blue skies, although in true tropical fashion they do give way to a brief rainstorm before returning immediately following. Azure waters. Green iguanas and brown pelicans. A ruined colonial fort, and one of the region’s leading historians and archaeologists to explain the intricacies of it to me. Yeah, in my world, this qualifies as a…
When Christopher Columbus sailed past the island we now know as St. Martin in 1493, the native Arawak and Caribe peoples had already left it. But the Arawak had a name for this island: Soualiga, the Land of Salt. While Columbus claimed the island for Spain despite not setting foot onto it, it was the…
After the 2024 election, I left Twitter. Elon Musk’s acquiring of the platform and subsequent turning it into a right-wing disinformation center was too much for me, and I just couldn’t continue. I joined Bluesky. (By the way, if you are on that platform, please find me here. And if you aren’t on it, please…