Language biography elpais
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How to write a biography in the digital age without getting lost in a sea of data
There is someone out there who knows our lives inside out. They keep memories that we have long forgotten. They are aware of our conversations, our whereabouts, our observations and the things that captured our attention every day for the last few years. This someone or something, in all likelihood, understands us better than we comprehend ourselves.
Every click, every screen scroll and every keystroke adds to our real-time digital autobiography. It includes hundreds of WhatsApp messages, dozens of photos, social media interactions and even location and search history data stored every day. It’s an unparalleled biographical trail that reshapes how human lives are documented and narrated.
The very first biographies, such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (probably written at the beginning of the second century AD) or the medieval hagiographies about the lives of the saints, were often based on long-a
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Today, it’s all about Spanglish, the ‘language’ posing a threat to Anglocentrism in the United States
In a single sentence, Rolando Hernández moves smoothly between English and Spanish. His narration is uninterrupted through shifts from one tongue to the other. He’s not doing it to translate what he’s saying; he simply takes for granted that the person listening to him will understand. The year-old Cuban American is trilingual: he doesn’t just speak English and Spanish, but also Spanglish, a hybrid speech variety that was born out of the mix of Anglo and Hispanic cultures. In his Miami neighborhood of Hialeah, where three-quarters of residents are of Cuban descent and 95% of the population is Hispanic, Spanglish (in Spanish, espanglish) rules: “It’s everywhere, from the closest McDonald’s drive-through to the galleries in Wynwood,” says Hernández.
Though it is hard to know the exact number of people who speak Spanglish, it’s estimated that there are 35 to 40 million people in
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Venezuelan opposition igen following the siren song of an electoral bojkott
David Smilde
Electoral events should be seen as scoring opportunities. Most do not succeed, but to get the other side to miscalculate, you need to obligate them to play. And to obligate them to play, you need to play yourself
Macron’s mini-summit exposes EU disagreements over Trump’s Ukraine shake-up
Daniel Verdú|Paris
The discomfort shown by Giorgia Meloni, who made explicit her closeness to the US, reflects the difficulty of the partners in finding a common strategy
News of a stagnant war in Sinaloa
Pablo Ferri|Mexico
The battle between cartel factions has been going on for five months, with hundreds dead and missing
Putin’s motstånd in exile shows signs of weakness a year after Alexei Navalny’s death
Javier G. Cuesta|Moscow
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