College Av. encounter, Berkeley-Oakland

Kirsten exchanged our emails with him, and he was one of many who made us feel at home from the get-go when we left Midtown Palo Alto to settle in the East Bay. He suggested a few very useful things, and we ended up going for a run a few times so he could show me a few interesting routes through the hills, with views of the Oakland and Berkeley flats down below (the Campanile, tall buildings, and avenues as landmarks), and San Francisco, the Golden Gate, and Mount Tamalpais in front of us.

So, when I saw him getting out of his car on the gently vibrant and commercial College Avenue, around the two-block shopping and cafés section of the Elmwood District (upscale, highly walkable, a bit like a shopping hub with the leafy academic allure of an old college town), I paused my run, and we chatted a bit.

That morning, I had headed to the Temescal Regional Recreational Area at the bottom of the Oakland Hills, not far from the tunnels that connect the East Bay with the interior valley of residential, upscale towns of the Diablo Valley and Ygnacio Valley, known as Lamorinda: Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda, with Danville and the San Ramon Valley beyond.

If you want to picture the area, imagine a set of American West pleasantvilles sitting on leafy, perfect-weather suburban spots not far from San Francisco, and hence prohibitively expensive to almost everyone at this point.

A summer in Europe, and what it felt like

I told our friend (let’s keep his name off the post, since we’ll talk about his home and how local regulations affect his family’s property and upkeep) that we’d been in Europe, where I’m from. Our oldest daughter, currently about to start her second year in college, had spent most of the summer doing an internship in Paris, one of the three places where we lived as a family before moving to the US in the summer of 2022 (previously, we had lived in Fontainebleau, one hour south of Paris, and Barcelona, where our three kids were born and lived as toddlers).

I told him it had been hot, but not hot and humid as it is expected in July in the Mediterranean; this time it felt sticky and unrelenting, especially at night, when temperatures around the coast didn’t drop enough to sleep comfortably without AC on most days. By then, many areas of Europe will feel comfortable only for a few weeks in July and August with air conditioning. Heat-pump producers, dealers, and installers are making a killing in places such as northern Spain, most of France and northern Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and beyond.

This summer, it’s been so consistently warm and dry in places around Western Europe that most of us have seen on social media pictures of English and Central European landmarks as brown and dry as the US West during the warmer half-year season, and that’s affected many things, from crops to people’s own health, to water management, to wildfire risk. The new normal doesn’t feel normal at all; call it whatever you want. Pick your bias, but the lived reality is stubborn.

I told him that I like to be in our habitual places in Europe in off-season periods, when the weather is nice and there are fewer people, so one doesn’t have the feeling of being engaged in some sort of hyper-competitive activity devoid of any of the natural strengths of Mediterranean culture, but our current school calendar makes it hard to achieve.

Unlike when we lived in France, where kids have two weeks off in the middle of each trimester (which we used to drive to Spain and across Europe in odd weeks year-round, an experience we would recommend to any family with young children at home), we’re now tied to a school district and calendar from the Bay Area, which means our days off and travel windows are more conventional and much more expensive: travel when it’s either too hot or too cold, and pay top money for it.

Back to the ridiculous California summer

So, it’s no surprise that during our ten-minute conversation in College Avenue, my friend and I talked about how nice it felt to be back in the Bay Area: to those not familiar with the weather of most of Coastal California in summer, when it’s too hot almost anywhere in North America and Europe, the weather is so ridiculously pleasant that it invites you to spend as much time outside and active as you can handle: you can eat out, be comfortable on long-sleeves, and do exercise at noon if you want, because it won’t be too hot. It’s unreal compared to the stickiness of the Mediterranean summer (I’ll concede that Barcelona feels nice for most of the year, but certainly NOT in July and August).

But this weather divergence for a few weeks a year in two of the places with the most pleasant Mediterranean weather, one in North America and one in the Mediterranean Basin proper, doesn’t translate into radically different patterns when it comes to fire risk: in summer, it’s dry, and it can get windy, and any spark can evolve into a dangerous wildfire.

Regarding fire risk and how to tackle the challenges mega-fires represent, things are changing rapidly, though many attempts can get controversial when they hit the ground and affect communities. So, by the time my friend and I met last Sunday to go for a run from his house in the Grizzly Peak Boulevard area of the Berkeley Hills, California had tried to tackle the risk of fires engulfing homes with the so-called Zone-Zero rules.

What’s around your house’s five-foot perimeter?

Basically, California homeowners living in areas that have been designated high-risk regarding fire, have to prepare their properties to reduce flammable material as much as possible: evidence shows that homes adapted to reduce combustion in their surroundings survive fire at a higher rate than those who have not followed any advice, piling vegetation and other flammable material within feet of the house perimeter and keeping open vents and crawl space where embers could jump and burn in the event of a general evacuation.

The rules aim to advise homeowners in creating more extensive landscaping and structural changes over an adaptive time window set at five years before full enforcement, but many owners are already warning that, strictly followed, the rules will cause a heavy loss of beloved trees and ornamental vegetation, with little potential gain in exchange for the loss.

Anyone thinking that losing bushes and trees is something negligible hasn’t carefully studied how much surrounding vegetation can affect the immediate microclimate, air quality, beauty, and even long-term health, when we consider studies linking exposure to the experience and essential oils of forests (the Japanese Forestry Agency coined a term for it in 1982: shinrin-yoku, “forest bathing”) to our health outcomes and long-term general wellbeing.

Plants really influence our mood and can be good for us, and backyard gardeners from the natural outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area have enjoyed a privileged window into a blissful indoor-outdoor lifestyle where plants, animals, and people benefit from each other. It just works most of the time, though there’s a big BUT lurking around, and insurance companies have noticed: fire risk.

What happens when the perimeter reaches the garden

The new Zone-Zero regulations have been approved unanimously, although the process wasn’t consensual (it hardly is in a state known for the historic belligerence of single-family homeowners). But what happens when the perimeter affects our beloved surroundings?

I had not thought much about this since we live closer to the flats, an area of the East Bay that’s still fairly lush and includes many green backyards and front-yard gardens and old street trees, though the area feels (at least on paper and to insurance companies) far away from the natural areas of the hills nearby.

That said, it has taken me a few interchanges to realize some of the families living in suburban areas designated as high-risk of sudden fire events, like the catastrophic Oakland Hills Firestorm of October 19–20, 1991, which was initially contained but strong winds reignited it overnight due to high temperatures and low humidity, jumping highways and consuming homes within minutes.

Southern Californians will find this black swan event from the early nineties in Northern California sadly relatable: it’s when the Santa Ana Winds roar downhill from the interior toward the canyons leading to the coast, where risk is highest, affecting people’s mood and electrifying the air, as Joan Didion famously captured.

Sunday, 9 a.m., 1,500 feet of climbing

But our mood was very different when I reached my friend’s home in the hills last Sunday. The morning was still cool, even though it was already 9:00 AM. When he came out, we chatted a bit about a few things, including a health scare in my family back home in Spain, and then headed toward the path leading to Tilden Park.

An experienced trail runner, my friend showed me one of his favorite runs: almost 1,500 feet of elevation gain, technical trails through forests and rural-looking areas, and views of both the west side of the hills and the San Francisco Bay. I can’t complain.

What’s better, to get to the top of the Berkeley Hills at 9:00, I just needed to drive a few minutes with no traffic. Then, a morning of climbing trails. First, you climb a few hundred feet before it reaches Tilden. If you’re standing on top of Grizzly Peak Boulevard looking down, you see the outer rim of a massive, hidden world with a big reservoir and, below, a few meadows and many patches of forest.

It feels a bit like having the vantage point of a naturalist painter, a peek into a dense valley with many brown and green tonalities this time of the year, a place that feels so isolated from the urban Bay on the other side of the divide that you’ll forget for the entire morning that you didn’t even leave the gentle suburban continuum with epicenter in San Francisco.

Smells like the Galicia of my childhood summers

For most of the climb, we ran through narrow paths shadowed under towering eucalyptus, an imported, oily, highly flammable tree native to another part of the world with a similar Mediterranean climate and even more remote to Europeans: southeastern Australia and Tasmania.

By late August, those trails have the color and consistency of paper, and it goes on for long stretches where one could be either somewhere in Tasmania’s Austral summer or perhaps in Galicia (minus the stone walls one can see everywhere in rural Northwest Spain).

Yet the scent they emanate, full of volatile organic compounds, is pleasant and contagious. The smell of its oil and leaves scattered on the ground is so particular and strong that it reminded me of rural areas of northwest Spain and Portugal, where small landowners planted for decades under the promise of capitalizing on the demand for fast-growing wood to feed the local paper industry.

And in areas where this introduction became a monocrop instead of an addition, the tree’s presence increased the risk of difficult-to-control fires that only lately are being addressed by bottom-up measures and policies that at least protect small villages scattered along the western end of Atlantic Iberia. As it happens there, the trees near Tilden have bark that comes off in long strips and lies where it falls, so oily and dry that it rots much more slowly than local species, which are prone to feed the soil humus right away thanks to faster decomposition.

For example, many locals have been clearing the towns’ outskirts and planting more resistant local trees such as cork oak, which also generate a highly profitable and renewable local industry: cork production, which doesn’t kill the harvested tree but its mature bark, which grows again over the years. In construction, cork is considered one of the lightest, most versatile, and fireproof natural materials, ideal for insulation and even exterior siding.

We visited one of these villages at the beginning of this decade, the small “Xisto” village of Ferraria de São João in central Portugal, talking to Pedro Pedrosa and his family, who moved from their city to the area to help regenerate an area affected by the effects of secular depopulation, the eucalyptus monocrop, and fire.

Reno was already burning

I thought about all this as we climbed, then descended. Then we left the eucalyptus trees behind, and I thought about how you don’t want to have eucalyptus trees anywhere near homes on one side and open vegetation on the other. At least, I thought, fire roads are visibly used and well maintained, and the whole area is highly monitored by rangers and locals themselves who love to walk and run all over (we stumbled upon many people).

Before getting there, I had read in the Sunday paper about fires spreading around Reno that had just started and weren’t yet controlled. That’s why I was thinking about the other recent news: zone-zero rules arriving, which I guessed were affecting him. I guessed right.

There’s no one single fire season in the American West, but wildfires can grow out of proportion when it’s windy, soil has been dry for months, and temperatures stay high.

Fire prevention is improving fast in many areas, thanks to citizen participation through tools like Watch Duty (don’t miss Kirsten’s interview with the fire prevention app’s founder, John Mills), though sometimes there’s little one can do to tackle big blazes.

Yet many communities built with backyards running into the surrounding wilderness are on the first line of defense, which can bring nature inside the house; on the downside, as states deal with fire crews and insurance companies wary of protecting fire-prone property, many homeowners are learning about ordinances designed to create so-called “defensible spaces.”

Flammable autumns in the West

In recent years, wildfire experts have pointed to the dangers fast-moving fires pose to communities, as wind increases the risk of flying embers.

The rules come after years of delay and infighting among experts and representatives who deemed them necessary, especially given the impact they could have on families and California’s continuum of street and yard landscaping. That’s why it’s taking so long, and it isn’t law yet: the proposal passed by the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection still requires state review, which could come as soon as September 2 and September 7.

Now it’s the moment for the review of public comment, which could trigger more delay, but if all goes as expected, the regulations could become effective by the end of September. When I asked my friend about them, I pictured what I had read: in the first 3 years, many things have to be removed from risk-prone properties, like leaves, mulch, and dead plants, within 5 feet of homes. In 5 years, however, areas next to homes would need to be cleared of all vegetation, and inspectors would review exceptions.

Moreover, wooden fences won’t be able to touch or run too close to the structure, whereas nearby mature trees will be reviewed to ensure they’re trimmed and limbed. So, the question many people are beginning to ask is whether the defensible spaces measure outweighs the cost it will have on private landscaping if it’s strictly enforced.

A floor, not a ceiling

Little did I know that, besides the statewide zone-zero measure, many towns, including Berkeley, have created their own ordinances around fire risk, the stricter the closer to the parks up in the hills.

Can the two measures coexist? In short, the state rule is a floor, not a ceiling, and it lets any local agency dealing with fire protection set its own defensible space requirements. The statewide law will consider local practices, provided those alternatives are set to produce similar practical effects: making property more fire-resilient.

Reading the small print in the Berkeley ordinance, however, the city will only adopt code amendments stricter than the state’s if there’s an “express finding” that the local rules are necessary due to local circumstances (read: climatic, geological, topographical). Hopefully, this could mean: only if it makes sense. But, according to my friend, who knows?

The wrong rule

As it turned out, I had been reading about the wrong rule when asking him in particular:

“What you have read about the state level of zone 0 does not actually apply to Berkeley,” he wrote to me a few days after our run. “Berkeley has made up their own interpretations for rules in zone 0, 1, and 2.”

So, while the state spent 6 years arguing, Berkeley passed its own rules and put them into effect on January 1st, 2026. Compare this to the rule that most Californians will face, which won’t reach most of them until roughly 2029.

Now the Berkeley rules. In the first 5 feet around a house (measured from the eaves down to the ground), there is to be no combustible material, period. None. No vegetation, wood mulch, wooden fence, gate touching the structure, no trellis, no pergola, no firewood, no combustible planters. Only things many people consider unpleasant to their view of landscaping, like gravel, pavers, and concrete. I can see their point.

“I am technically in violation anytime a leaf falls within 5 feet of my home,” my friend wrote as we followed up over email on this topic so I could write the article. “That is an everyday reality.”

What’s more:

“Wildfire prevention is currently the only program where city officials have enacted a law where they can enter your property, photograph it, and cite you for violations,” he wrote, “all in the name of protecting the larger city.”

The department’s own report says the program is limited by laws requiring resident permission to enter, hence the pre-authorization program. But he is describing what many see as the direction of travel of such ordinances.

Everything the ordinance doesn’t address

I was intrigued by something else he told me:

“California has spent 20 years promoting renewable energy, but should lithium-ion batteries exist in a high-risk fire zone? Was that a mistake? Not addressed. What types and materiality of windows should be allowed? Not addressed. How about materials for doors — should they all be stainless steel sheet metal, or is wood okay? Not addressed. Gas lines? Not addressed. Mandating roof retrofits? Not addressed. Wood fences? Not addressed.”

And then the line that stayed with me:

“These regulations claim science as a backing, yet have a focus to kill trees, and tulips.”

My friend has a point here. The January 2025 fires in Los Angeles left behind more than a million pounds of damaged lithium-ion batteries (around 5,000 locations mapped across the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena, sixteen times what was recovered after Lahaina in 2023). Heat-damaged cells are unpredictable and can reignite days or weeks later. The EPA spent months sifting debris by hand, soaking batteries in brine and grinding them down before they could be trucked out. None of it is addressed by an ordinance about the first 5 feet.

He also wanted to know why fire, of all the things that can happen to a house in Berkeley, is the one that arrived with an inspection regime.

“The Hayward fault has a 33% chance of a 6.7 magnitude event,” he wrote — the USGS figure is over thirty years, not twenty — “and if you live in Berkeley, it’s your neighbor. Liquefaction zones abound throughout the flats. Landslides are ever present in the hills. Flooding is a reality for 70% of residents. Persistent droughts have 100% likelihood within any 15 year period in Northern California.”

His comparison is with Loma Prieta, October 17, 1989.

“City of Berkeley response after Loma Prieta is muted and took 10-plus years when compared to what is happening with current wildfire piggybacking on LA’s unfortunate event.”

I’m also curious whether the creation of rule-enforced defensible spaces around homes and communities will help homeowners keep their home insurance with private companies at reasonable rates. My friend happens to be, too:

“We are a family that lost home insurance years ago and we are on the FAIR plan,” he wrote — California’s insurer of last resort. No remediation was offered that might have kept them out of it. When a council member argued that the ember ordinance would improve insurability, he was unimpressed. “That must have been a joke. California’s insurance market is broken beyond these efforts.”

The maple and the west window

I knew the story about how he and his wife came to love the house they own, which they visited and bought on the spot in 2012, partly on a view. The place feels quite special to them. A mature Japanese maple (fortunately, very familiar to NorCal suburban homeowners) catches the sunset glow through a west window, and every window in the house (which sits on a downslope like the rest of the street) looks at something growing.

What’s more, my friend explained to me one of those small facts that make one think about fate. Twice a year at noon, the sun clears the ridge at exactly the right angle to fill the windows over the downslope backyard. The two dates fall on either side of the solstice, and each of them lands within days of a birthday in the family.

“We live in a space in time along with our garden and have invested in its care,” he wrote. “The change in seasons, light, is a rhythm we pay attention to and appreciate. Every window has a view of something nice in our garden.”

On two sides of the property, the five-foot local rule, which precedes the new statewide ordinance, lands on his neighbor’s property, so since he doesn’t own and cannot clear, if both houses try to comply, they’ll need to remove the only screening between the two families there is.

He also attached photographs of six trees. Every one of them has an action required, and some are marked for removal.

“I did not buy a concrete bunker in the hills,” he wrote. “A concrete bunker in the hills was not for sale by the city. Turning back the clock to retrofit my home as a concrete bunker is not an option for my finances.”

“Wildfire resilience is important,” he wrote, “but the risk should be distributed, coordinated and in an effective way. Wildfire does not care about my tulips when tons of eucalyptus leaf litter exist all over Tilden.”

He asks the same question about everyone else’s ground:

“What is the actual benefit of these efforts in relation to East Bay Parks, UC Berkeley land management, Oakland, El Cerrito, Orinda, etcetera, managing wildfire risks as they see fit?”

Out of pragmatism, but also something else, cities and towns might want to regulate tulips and bushes around houses, as well as the immediate rings around neighborhoods, but it seems that serious thinning beyond the immediate boundary to control, for example, the potential destruction that eucalyptus trees may pose, isn’t something they’re interested in doing.

A house meant to disappear into its hillside

But there’s a deeper irony in the changes that fighting fire with serious preemptive tools might bring in a place that brought its own California vernacular. Kirsten and I live in a 1906 cedar-shingle craftsman bungalow with redwood bones; it’s a “small” (not by European standards, bear with me) 2-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom house that feels in part charming for its style, and also for the vegetation that grew in its front yard and backyard.

And, like ours (which is not located in the hills), those houses belong to a named architectural tradition: shingled, unpainted, wood-heavy houses form the First Bay Tradition. They were designed and built in Berkeley and promoted by the Hillside Club as a deliberate rejection of the ornate Victorian and Beaux-Arts buildings going up across the bay.

Their main idea (which I appreciate and might have inspired local architects like Julia Morgan, as well as visitors like Frank Lloyd Wright) was that a house should disappear into its hillside, among trees, built of the materials of the place.

The laudable concept of defensible spaces should account for the value of remarkable vegetation and landscaping, just like European gardens are sometimes protected, and vernacular building styles could be respected while accommodating commonsensical practices.

What a village did

My memories go back to our visit to Portugal’s poor and half-abandoned aldeias do xisto (”schist villages”).

In Ferraria de São João they pulled the eucalyptus out and put cork oak back in. It took a village deciding to do it, and years, and it worked, and the bark grows back without killing the tree. Nobody is going to do that in Tilden. Tilden is not Berkeley’s to touch, the science on thinning beyond the immediate ring is unsettled enough to stall the question, and there is no single body that could make the decision even if it weren’t.

And the hills haven’t come to their month yet. Most California fires start between June and October, but the ones that take houses arrive between September and December, when the Diablo winds turn and meet a summer’s accumulated dryness before the first rain. Reno and Spokane and Palo Pinto are all burning ahead of the Bay Area’s own window. Berkeley’s last major fire was in 1991.

Near the top of the ridge there are now families that watch the wind forecast to know which day to carry their pots indoors.

Our meeting and interview with Ford was a few days ago, yet Kirsten already published a video on our visit worth watching. As we explained to Ford Roosevelt, we had already visited another crucial location and piece of history intimately linked to the Allies’ victory against the Axis powers in World War II: the Cabinet War Rooms beneath what is now the Treasury building, Churchill’s bunkerized underground complex in London to protect key figures of the British government during the Blitz.

Ford isn’t only an excellent host: he walked us through the restored USS Potomac, sharing his grandparents’ routines and the names of many of the key hosts welcomed aboard by the President, including King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, as well as Churchill himself.

As a foreigner born in Spain, a place where the Axis forces tested their modern weapons during our Civil War before World War II, it’s difficult to put into words how special it is for me to visit such irreplaceable pieces of history, and do so with people very prepared to bring them back to life. And unlike the War Cabinet Rooms in London, where a museum spokesperson walked us through the complex, the person accompanying us aboard the USS Potomac is himself part of the story.

A frontier cowboy type of person

If this wasn’t enough, we had time to talk casually about events and references Kirsten and I have read here and there, but Ford could almost always point to a personal connection to many of those events. For example, I very much appreciated when Kirsten asked Ford about his dad, one of FDR’s sons, and hence a kid running around the White House—and aboard the “floating White House” we visited—so we could hear his account of his dad’s impressions.

We got to know that, unlike his siblings, Ford Roosevelt’s father, Elliott Roosevelt, was a less formal figure and more of a bigger-than-life character in search of the American soul and landscape, a frontier cowboy type of person. When I heard such a depiction, I couldn’t help but make the connection with a read that I really enjoyed a few years back: the first book of Edmund Morris’ biography of Teddy Roosevelt (a relative of Eleanor and, hence, Ford himself: Ford Roosevelt is Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandnephew).

We got to know that Elliott, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s second of four boys (plus the oldest sibling, Anna) who survived into adulthood, shared the very untamed, restless, adventurous soul that many Americans think their country is meant for, driving them away from conventional elite life. Instead of salons and a rather hedonistic, perpetual European Grand Tour or nepo tendencies, Teddy and Elliott drove away from Old World elite pleasures and searched for what a big continent had to offer them.

Idealistically: danger, the wilderness, perpetual exploration of the outdoors and of one’s inside, like the adventurers and transcendentalists who wanted to give the United States its own set of references, detached from the aesthetic and spiritual tutelage of European capitals.

The railroad and the ice

Morris’s account of Teddy Roosevelt’s youth in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (published in 1979, Pulitzer Prize in 1980) is fascinating, for we get to know about an initially very weak kid who showed special grit to collect animal and nature specimens and “toughen up” to overcome a propensity brought to him by nature (a reminder of the importance of the “nurture” part in all of us: according to this perspective, there’s little one can’t overcome, if effort and determination are put to work).

Morris explains how the first Roosevelt president was very adventurous in the early years and tried to raise cattle in the Badlands halfway between the Dakotas and Eastern Montana, a world inhabited by a special kind of descendants of Native Americans expelled from other lands and rough pioneer families, as well as new entrepreneurs who, like Teddy himself, wanted to take advantage of two of the revolutionary advances of their time (a railroad connection linking the U.S. heartland to the rest of the country through Chicago as both a boat and rail hub; and the industrial production of ice that made possible shipping packaged meat from cattle raised hundreds of miles from Chicago).

I also mentioned to Ford that the character I found fascinating in that first book of Teddy Roosevelt’s biography is an entrepreneur and neighbor in the Badlands who was also trying to make it big raising and sending packaged meat to Chicago, the Marquis de Morès: originally a nobleman from Southern France with a name as long as his legend in the Frontier, Antoine Amédée Marie Vincent Amat Manca de Vallombrosa.

A President’s folly over water

Then our interview moved back to reality, and since we were visiting the USS Potomac, we discussed how the vessel’s very own restoration was part of the legend. After the President’s death, the yacht fell into disrepair and eventually was in a state that risked permanent loss.

Once the beloved yacht was decommissioned, it served first as a passenger ferry between Puerto Rico, a U.S. Commonwealth territory, and the Virgin Islands. But from the sixties onwards, a new generation of historical American characters stepped up to save it: first, it was Elvis, a type of “king” trying to restore a President’s folly over water in 1964, but the task was too complex, and the singer quickly tried to get rid of it.

Another incredible turn of events turned the former presidential “floating White House” into a drug smuggling boat used by traffickers at Pier 70 in San Francisco during the 80s. It was then that a mature Ronald Reagan, the California governor turned President (so, not Joan Didion material anymore), helped save the USS Potomac from total demise by issuing a federal grant in 1983: the symbol of Republicanism rescuing a symbol of the New Deal, symbol of Democrats. Back when office was bigger than party, as Ford Roosevelt hinted (never being political about it, which we appreciate in a non-partisan project like ours).

The story was interesting enough, even wild enough at times, and then there was the charm of seeing the places where FDR and family hosted distinguished visitors, where they slept, where the captain and crew had their quarters, and even the areas normally forbidden to passengers, such as the machine room, the kitchen (where a crew of mostly Filipino sailors and cookers prepped what was needed) or the wheelhouse.

When it was time to fly the drone, I enjoyed the vessel from above as a group of California seagulls played dangerously with the robotic intruder, almost knocking it down (I could see one of them crossing the camera frame a few times). After it landed, I approached Ford and Kirsten again, and we continued casually chatting about different things, related and unrelated to the story.

Lost in Cuba

He asked me whether I was from Spain. I nodded, explaining I was raised in Barcelona, and perhaps the only connection I could find to the part of American history his relatives belong to was Spain’s recent connection to Cuba (a part of Spain, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, until 1898), and Spain’s traumatic perception of the defeat in the Spanish-American War, where many young Spaniards from the metropolis, often forcibly conscripted, died or were humiliated by young Teddy Roosevelt’s move with the Rough Riders, perhaps the beginning of his legend, and the event that propelled his reinvention in life at a pivotal moment.

Of course, I read the first biographical book by Morris from a very different perspective than any casual American reader, let alone Ford Roosevelt: like many Spaniards, I have distant relatives who either had a connection to Cuba or fought in at least one of the many military operations on the island, which sought more autonomy and even total emancipation during the whole second half of the nineteenth century.

Also, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was born in 1898, a year that gave birth to idioms in Castilian Spanish like “más se perdió en Cuba” (literally, “more was lost in Cuba”), used to put a bad situation into perspective. I heard this many times growing up, when I would complain as a kid about something not going my way. Spanish atavistic fatalism among the popular classes can be legendary, a very Iberian blend of old-school stoicism and cynicism about fate from a place that extracted metals from the Americas to trade with China in the context of the Acapulco galleon, and also to pay wars in Europe.

Visiting Cuba (before everyone else)

Ford Roosevelt didn’t disappoint when I mentioned the Rough Riders and the “Cuba disaster” (for the Spaniards of that era, that is). He recommended Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer (2022 Pulitzer Prize in American History), explaining how, in the thirties, the Roosevelts had been once in Havana; he had heard from his dad Elliott how he’d been present at the Hotel Nacional when Americans tried to mend a political crisis there in 1933. Among the people in the picture: Fulgencio Batista.

From there, our conversation turned to FDR himself, and Ford recommended another book, Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands (2008, Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009). The FDR-Cuban connection led to a suggestion from Ford: “You have to visit Cuba!” I asked how difficult it is these days, and he talked about the situation on the island, which is hurting the population as a whole more than punishing the regime. He told us that people fly from Mexico, where there are affordable direct flights to Havana.

There’s one good part of smartphones: many use them as a digital reference library of all the knowledge online, and as a storage device for our digital files. So I was glad to see many of the great pictures Ford Roosevelt, a photographer, took on the island, a bit in the style of the likes of Walker Evans.

Our conversation regarding books, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Cuba, the Cuban exile in Florida, and even Hemingway, brought us to another reference that Ford Roosevelt thought we’d like to take a look at: The Mexican Suitcase (2011, Trisha Ziff) is the story of 4500 negatives in 126 rolls of pictures taken by photographers David Seymour, Gerda Taro, and Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War.

“This here is my dad”

The suitcase vanished at the beginning of World War II, resurfacing in 2007. The documentary asks: who owns our stories? In the stories about traumatic events we tell each other, there’s always an editorial line, and also the temptation of silencing the memories that become uncomfortable. This reference was probably his response to my hinting at the need for Cuba to transform itself gradually but convincingly toward a real democracy that could accommodate all, even with the tradeoffs that such an approach implies (see: the Spanish Transition to democracy).

A little later, back at the Oakland office and little museum of the USS Potomac, Ford directed our attention to a picture depicting many men, among them one in a decorated uniform. “This here is my dad,” he said.

I asked whether he was a veteran. Then another fractal in history seemed to open: “well, yes,” he was a war pilot in World War II, flying over the Axis positions in Africa. All of a sudden, I revived the books and stories regarding the RAF pilots’ training and covering the French Résistance (among them, French writer Romain Gary, whom I heard about and read when living in France). I asked Ford whether he knew his dad’s division was in contact with Allied forces in North Africa, like the ones I knew by reference. Yes.

Somewhere in Spain, lost in a country house

I figured that not only all the pictures and media, but all these stories ought to be documented and digitized so they could be stored with a little redundancy to avoid technological failure, obsolescence, or mere entropy. Like many of you, I used to keep a few burned CDs and a couple of hard drives with many pictures and other documents on them. And before that, a few cartridges and floppy disks, which could barely hold a few text files. Now many are misplaced after many moves across Europe, many lost, whereas others were accidentally damaged by humidity during a country house renovation in Spain.

I still keep a couple of ring binders somewhere in Spain with film negatives of pictures I took before, during, and after college. There are also pictures in Ilford B&W paper somewhere. These are vestiges of a world that was barely digitizing back when digital SLR cameras and camcorders had CCDs that couldn’t compete with analog quality and texture, especially definition-wise.

After the arrival of the smartphone, I took many pictures, and I lost many of the home videos and pictures I took when playing and strolling with my kids around Barcelona’s Old City when they were toddlers. I could keep some with backups, and finally broadband internet and cloud services made it easier to store digital copies of multimedia files—at a hefty cost.

The same wafers

What’s more, two phenomena are taking place lately, almost in parallel: first, digital still image and video definition keeps improving thanks to cheaper medium format and full format cameras, but more quality comes at a cost: cameras and smartphones need more processing memory to keep up with files that hold higher resolution; and, due to the AI buildup, memory has gotten so expensive that it’s becoming quite a challenge for creators like us to simply store all the material we record, so we can retrieve it if needed. SSD drives and SD cards for cameras have over-the-roof prices, and the situation likely won’t change much in the coming years, since production can’t meet demand.

After more than twenty years of taking pictures and filming stories, we’ve lived through the transition from analog systems of video and photo production and storage to digital formats. And yes, digital photography promised the illusion of “free” image-making, because one didn’t need to store the negatives and prints. Then came the risks that go with digital files: local digital storage (say, hard drives) can fail, and the fastest and most stable options are getting too expensive, while things can also go dark in the cloud.

We haven’t found a perfect system to ensure that our work and digital memory have redundancies that prevent us from living through any black swan event that erases parts of it. Storing things in the cloud can be reliable and handy for pictures, but it quickly gets very expensive for people who use big files and have amassed big archives. But high-resolution video files are too big to upload and download often, and small producers can’t afford more expensive local alternatives.

Relying on a series of best-case scenarios

The solution for many of us is a hybrid: some things in the cloud, some on a local network for big files that need to be retrieved constantly, and many external hard drives. Whichever the blend, it all feels in need of improvement, a bit of a pick-your-poison situation, as the cost of escalating hardware has been hugely impacted by the AI buildup. SD cards are crazy expensive now as well, and it only takes a couple of searches to realize that SD cards and consumer SSD drives come from the same NAND wafers that enterprises are trying to hoard into AI data centers.

The promise of digital was freedom and flexibility, and the realization that economies of scale would make digital storage cost negligible, as compared to previous formats. But digital storage is getting more expensive and less reliable, forcing people to create imperfect workarounds that are prone to failure. When we lack film or tape, we depend on fully digital storage systems that can fail or be destroyed, fortuitously or on purpose.

The documentary about the Mexican Suitcase is a reminder that we used to work in ways that kept a physical master copy that could be stored and also lost, but left a trace (and the possibility of rediscovery) regardless of the events surrounding it: for analog documents to survive, there’s no need for cloud storage companies to remain sound so they don’t fail, remote servers to avoid damage or getting hacked, and digital files themselves to avoid corruption, especially when it’s too expensive to keep everything backed up as hundreds of gigabytes quickly become tens of terabytes, then hundreds of them.

Memory redundancy

Our visit to the USS Potomac and conversation with Ford Roosevelt got me thinking about all the things worth preserving, both analog and digital. And the possibility of meaning and rediscovery when things get preserved.

The Mexican Suitcase survived even though it never found custodians to keep it safe, but I’m not sure we’ll be so lucky with other negatives — the ones I keep, neglected, somewhere in our country house in Spain, in two or three ring binders. I think. And then there are countless digital files prone to being lost to a drive failure, a company bankruptcy, or a subscription nobody remembered to renew.

The Potomac survived because some seventy-five people kept showing up. Perhaps that’s what I have to do to ensure those binders don’t get lost, or the hard drives with videos of our toddlers don’t get wiped.

The other, half-mockingly, half-seriously, asked rhetorically, “Who reads books all the time anymore?” I thought he might have a point. I thought about how guilty I sometimes feel for reading for long periods instead of “engaging” with work and reality more directly (as if reading long-form were indulging).

Era of summaries

It’s not new that some people aren’t reading, or that competition from other media that offer higher dopamine rewards with lower cognitive effort is diminishing the appeal of serious books among occasional readers. What’s new is that this fact isn’t a cause for concern and has become almost part of the bragging rights of those who claim to be too busy to read or even listen to entire books.

There are many reasons why books are more often summarized and discussed on live streams and podcasts than read individually, for the sake of it. It’s a trend that clearly predates chatbots.

That said, AI tools are changing the way we conceptualize ideas and reality; simply asking for summaries of everything, secretly assuming that the mechanical summary of a complex text, or the automation of a task, is close enough to pass for the thing itself. I can understand that a haiku, an aphorism, an epigraph, an anagram, etc., can contain a world inside, and they are as short as you can get by design. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that a dry summary will give us what a book can.

The deferred library

I remember once, when talking to an acquaintance (a very intelligent, successful man in San Francisco), mentioning a book in the context of our conversation. He shrugged off the reference, virtue-signaling that, since he was so busy, he hadn’t read books regularly since college; in his words, the task required too much time and attention, and he could allocate that capital to his job. Then, after professional life and economic safety (in his world, a concept also known as “fuck you money”), he’d be able to read as much as he could.

Who is reading long form? And how many people, reaching adulthood, decide to cultivate the habit of reading fiction, recommended and at random, regularly and without guilt? I figured that many things have been changing for a sizeable number of people, and perhaps we’re culturally relegating reading fiction to unproductive, indulgent leisure. Is that so, and how generalized is the phenomenon? Is it happening on both sides of the Atlantic, and if so, why?

Before reaching any conclusions too quickly, I’ve also been following the latest studies and articles dedicated to a generalized shift online from web surfing (exploration of links offered by a conceptual query on a search engine) into asking for AI summaries, both in search engines (which are turning into AI tools themselves) and chatbots.

Twelve open tabs

Not long ago, if we wanted to get a sense of where to start when trying to read a book or what a movie from a certain writer or filmmaker, we performed a search, then visited different types of information to reach our own conclusion: several reviews by traditional media, some popular results by random social media users and so-called influencers, a couple of relevant threads on forums like Reddit, perhaps a listicle or two…

After visiting topics of interest, sometimes stored across different website tabs, we’d follow a lead, often by intuition, and that gut feeling would prompt action, either immediate (reaching a long-form document online, a movie available on streaming, etc.) or not. It’s the same gut feeling we call personal taste when we visit a place and enter a store at random, almost always finding some connection to the artifacts displayed, whether it’s books, clothes, food, art, building materials and finishes, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with summaries and AI, which are already changing the way we work and use the internet. But as we increasingly rely on chatbot responses, what happens if people publishing content on the internet don’t find a way to break through summaries and, as visits to sites decrease, most articles and content become worthless to people creating them?

What the trackers saw

A Pew Research study from a year ago already showed the trend. Drawing on browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, the study showed that users clicked a link in just 8% of searches that displayed an AI summary; interestingly, in searches not showing an AI summary on the topic, they clicked 15% of the time. Searches with summaries also led to more users abandoning browsing on the topic altogether after reading the summary (26%), compared with 16% on pages with no contextual AI enabled.

Visits to sources on desktop computers (CTR, or “click-through rate”) have dropped by up to 50%, according to Search Engine Land/Kevin Indig, and Authoritas reported a drop of up to 79%. The study was conducted by installing a tracker in the participants’ browsers, so it observed behavior rather than reporting it, which has led people to conclude that online search is morphing into a different tool, with AI summarization taking over web surfing.

So, we are beginning to access information, both long-form and contextual internet activity, in a different way: AI overviews and summaries showed up on 6-7% of searches at the start of 2025, whereas by February 2026, the same summaries (often devoid of visible links to follow through) existed on 48% of queries, up 58% year on year, according to BrightEdge.

Given how rapidly our behavior has changed, let’s consider an extreme case scenario. If summaries get better and better, and AI companies manage to circumvent the copyright guardrails that seem to be falling once again regarding human creation like books, music, or movies, perhaps the next content frontier attempted by corporations providing mass AI tools would be a new type of “abridged” versions of celebrated units of human knowledge like scientific studies, non-fiction and fiction books, and any other sort of digitized masterpieces.

Pushed to the extreme, overall we would then become a civilization relying entirely on summaries (long and short) and derivatives of previous human work, disincentivizing the ancient human pursuit of intellectual creation as an activity through pay-per-use and/or ownership.

The veteran with the ruined left hand

Of course, there are many incentives beyond economics, and many people create things, digitally or otherwise, because they feel the urge or call to do so despite lacking a direct reward or a sizeable audience paying attention. Now, with the internet, and also before the rise of our current digital lifestyles, only a minority of creators lived comfortably off their work, and only a select bunch reached universal recognition and riches within their lifetime: the likes of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Molière and Lope de Vega were celebrated in life and lived by their pens — Shakespeare, the shrewdest businessman among them, rather better than that — but nothing like the industrial fortunes to come.

Later on, some authors were modern best-sellers and became the most influential people of their time: Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo (perhaps the first “engaged intellectual,” influencing politics and society with his work)…

Cervantes famously wrote what’s arguably the first intended modern novel (something that would attract both cultured people and the common folk, getting to the work through read-alouds, like the picaresque genre or satirical poetry created to attack notable people of the time covertly) so he could sell enough copies to settle his accounts with the Treasury and plan a decent retirement as a maimed war veteran. More than glory, the veteran with the ruined left hand — himself a former tax collector, jailed when his accounts failed to balance — needed to eat and shake off the Crown’s auditors.

Like many other authors and creators, Cervantes was far from detached or inconsequential, and he was described as a brave infantry soldier aboard the galley the Marquesa, representing Spain under John of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans on October 7, 1571. The creator of Don Quixote was perhaps a mess of a citizen, but nobody can say he didn’t show any urge to pursue adventures in life, as in literature.

The overflow

Many authors have reflected on the profound incentives of human creation, and there’s much more to it than the pursuit of glory or mere economic need. Nietzsche’s response to the same question (”why create?”) evolved throughout his lifetime. During his youth, when he considered composer and friend/mentor Richard Wagner the most important creator of the time, Nietzsche thought that many people needed to transcend with art because their aspiration was what made an imperfect and cruel world inhabitable; later, already at odds with Wagner and convalescent, he saw creation as the affirmation of one’s existence.

From this lens, the creator doesn’t need to succeed (either economically or with the public) to reach a higher level of self-realization. According to Nietzsche’s life-affirmation hypothesis, some people need to express their overflowing energy through an act of creation that becomes an underlying life purpose and gives meaning to it all, even if it doesn’t earn public approval or pay the bills. The reductionist causality between creation and material rewards didn’t foster the first epic poems, foundational to every major culture, all of which emerged from oral tradition.

To the question “why create?”, many, like Nietzsche, think it’s a human need: there are people who need to occupy themselves with intellectually engaging endeavors as overflow of their energy and personality, irrespective of whether they’ll find an audience, let alone applause and economic reward.

An audience of One

The addressed audience is sometimes so small that it consists of one other person besides the creator, and sometimes it’s only the creator himself. When he took over the task of building the grandiose (and controversial from the beginning, given the scale and radical style) Sagrada Família, Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí expressed his determination in a way that might have scared the naysayers: his “my client is not in a hurry” showed that, to the architect, the work was above any worldly reward.

He’s seldom the only one, and we’ve certainly lost the opportunity to enjoy works and masterpieces due to the relative obscurity or zeal of some creators. Consider, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins, an Oxford aesthete from the nineteenth century; as G.K. Chesterton would do decades later, Hopkins converted to Catholicism, but, unlike Chesterton (who sought out celebrity), Hopkins, a gifted poet, had an audience of One (or two, himself and a superior being, just like Gaudí).

When he converted, he studied to become a Jesuit and, before entering the novitiate, he burned his poems without publishing them (which he called the “slaughter of the innocents”). Versions of his poems survived in notebooks and with friends. Years passed, and when, in 1875, a ship wrecked in the Thames estuary, drowning Franciscan nuns escaping from persecution in Germany, he was asked by his rector to write a poem. But the poem was so radically different, so metrically advanced for his time, that the zealots controlling The Month, a publication by his order, rejected it.

That’s when he stopped submitting, but that didn’t deter a select group (Robert Bridges, Canon Richard Watson Dixon, Coventry Patmore) from enjoying the little work they knew of Hopkins. His story is probably the closest thing in the nineteenth century we can think of to that of cult musicians, writers, or filmmakers whose quality and authenticity never guaranteed an audience, for whatever reason.

Who’s your Socrates?

Argentinian writer, encyclopedic reader, and Anglophile Jorge Luis Borges, who never wrote a big novel nor was considered a philosopher, a semiologist, or a mathematician but contributed more to those fields than most people, was a legendary conversationalist when he found the right mind to talk to.

When meeting his friend and fellow Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges would recall many of his literary adventures (the paths taken, and also those adventures and challenges not taken), and they certainly talked about the life and character of an author that they considered their literary master, a profound philosopher, and a personal mentor to both of them, poet Macedonio Fernández.

Borges explained once and again that Macedonio seemed to recite all the poems worth knowing in the world, and he also created the most beautiful ones, most of which he had annotated in a hurry on a piece of paper somewhere, kept in the pocket for a couple of days, and disposed of.

To their generation, old Macedonio Fernández was their Socrates: he cared more about real-time thinking and the purest art of creation than publishing. Borges confessed that he had imitated his master for years, to the point of “impassioned plagiarism,” yet he knew that, with the years, he would be published and remembered, and so would Bioy Casares, while their master — who published little in life, and that reluctantly, at his friends’ insistence — would survive mainly as a rumor transmitted by the people who had heard him think. Fame or posterity weren’t his drive.

The harp string

When I think of people like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Macedonio Fernández, I realize that the human need for creation, exploring truth and beauty with their own expression as an act of affirmation, can’t be fully disrupted by any process of mechanical knowledge aggregation and refactorization such as AI, even when these models keep improving and surprising us in many fields.

I presume that AI will never be capable of trembling with the intuition of beauty, purity, and personal truth as many human creators do, and that’s probably what will save us. Nietzsche, from The Will to Power (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968):

“If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event — and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

The story of Sixto Rodriguez is almost too unreal. A mysterious man living in the decomposing working-class underworld of Detroit in the late sixties and early seventies, Rodriguez combined odd jobs in construction and hauling with small singing gigs with his guitar in ill-reputed joints, where his talent for writing and unique voice were discovered by two producers out of Motown’s session world, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who helped him produce two records that went absolutely unnoticed in the United States.

Dead on stage, alive in Detroit

Somehow, one record made it to South Africa, whose population was trying to cope with being considered an international pariah at the apex of apartheid. Back then, records were censored in South Africa, yet many of Rodriguez’s songs were passed around, becoming a mass phenomenon.

Rodriguez’s debut album, Cold Fact, was so popular and so widely shared in South Africa that the bootleg success would reverberate into the future, but at the time nothing was known about the author, and word spread that he had ended his life on stage, setting himself on fire, whereas other articles and fanzines claimed it had been a bullet to the head.

The reality was wilder than the rumors: the mysterious Rodriguez, of profound voice and mystical, sorrowful lyrics, the son of Mexican immigrants, was still working for little and living in an unheated, dilapidated Detroit house. Rodriguez never stopped playing music and composing songs; only, he did it at home, alone with his guitar next to the window, as it rained or snowed outside — apart from two Australian tours at the turn of the eighties, a detail the legend, and later the film, preferred to forget.

But almost thirty years later, when a South African crew of fans and indie journalists contacted his family, he probably realized the songs weren’t meant to stay only with him. Searching for Sugar Man, a 2012 documentary film by Malik Bendjelloul, can tell us so much about the parts that machines won’t take from people who seek expression and creation for its own sake, rain or shine, to an audience of one or many. To them, it matters little.

Footnotes to an invisible text

Human creation doesn’t depend on remuneration and utility as much as incentives-obsessed economists think. There are many Macedonio Fernández and Sixto Rodriguez types in this world, and many of us are lucky enough to know or have known incredibly talented people whose drive in life isn’t status, so they can dedicate more time to what matters to them.

A writer from Barcelona, Enrique Vila-Matas, imagined a middle-aged office clerk who had published one novel twenty-five years earlier, going mute right afterward. He breaks his silence by writing a diary composed of footnotes referencing a text that doesn’t exist, which, according to the clerk’s vision, is a representative catalog of some of the most authentic writers who, for one reason or another, stalled in their careers and stopped writing altogether.

Vila-Matas’ novel, Bartleby & Co., is named after Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener (a recently hired Wall Street clerk shows an initial burst of hard, competent work, but then refuses to do any task, responding “I would prefer not to.”) The book’s epigraph is from Jean de La Bruyère: “The glory or the merit of certain men consists in writing well; that of others consists in not writing.”

The book’s initial few pages are hilarious, and they can also remind us that, sometimes, the song we’d like to listen to or the book we’d like to read was lost to time or was never written, but the mere potential of it existing in someone’s mind and aspirations is what makes us impossible to be replaced by machines. After the opening pages, the rest of the novel is a series of footnotes. The meta-text becomes the entire work.

Mourning versus forgetting

Of course, Vila-Matas (or the clerk who is the narrator and writer of 86 footnotes to a text that doesn’t exist) was onto something when writing this novel that discussed the crisis of the novel as a genre, as it has to compete with other entertainment formats.

A book made entirely of annotations to a missing text is the dignified mirror of the digital world that we are building, which is made of summaries of sources that nobody visits.

However, there’s one big difference between the thesis of Bartleby & Co. and the race to summarize the world’s knowledge and creation: the clerk writes the footnotes mourning the text that should have existed, understanding the emptiness left by its absence. What we are doing now with summaries is consciously forgetting there was one text, because it takes too much effort to go through it and enjoy it without guilt.

To the question that opens this article (who reads books all the time anymore?), I’d say: those who suspect that a summary of a book is not a book, any more than a summary of a life is a life.

Among them, they helped the Forest Service to map the still-remote areas of Northern California, which he did by mule and horse, helping his stepfather (his own father had died years before, when he was a teenager). He didn’t go to college right away but was lucky to be born in that time and place, and to look the way he did.

Because of that, he had a few good mentors, among them a dentist who, many years later, would still show his appreciation to him by inviting his family over and looking after the dental health of Kirsten and her siblings. But he also worked his way out of a more or less directionless early youth, entering the Army and studying while, among many other early missions, he was stationed in Japan.

World War II was still in everyone’s rearview mirror, although the perceived threat was now the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War. He got to study in the army, finishing his degree at Reno because he wouldn’t wait for a new year, despite having been accepted into UC Berkeley following freshman year.

A different world, perhaps more honest

I can’t imagine how many more responsibilities and adventures young postwar Californians (still too young to serve in Korea and old enough to be just past draft age by Vietnam) had. How many more life-changing and life-affirming experiences they endured before settling and having a family.

It was a different world, still brutal and perhaps more honest, one affected by the consequences of Pearl Harbor and the United States entering the war, by Japanese-American internment camps and by the rise of the new military complex across the West Coast, as he saw with his own eyes growing up in Sausalito.

When he headed to college in Reno with a friend, they stopped the car in the Sierras and went hunting. They got their deer, which they prepared upon arrival and stored in the freezer, and that was the meat they ate that whole freshman winter in that backwater college, because he just wanted the education, not the fancy title.

Tender and manly

An engineer by trade, he was (he is, bear with me) probably the least aggressive adult I’ve ever known, yet many silent generation and older American men seemed to get that you could be tender and manly at the same time. Active and strong, you’ll see no picture of that generation showing off muscle or aggression, for their era had enough of it, and they were probably more embarrassed about it than anything else.

After looking at brutality and horror in the eye, all they could think of in times of peace was to create a safe, better life for them and theirs, and so they probably understood they didn’t need to show off with pose but rein in the lives they wanted to build by just going ahead and building them.

I have the impression many more people of the GI Bill era (which had its structural injustices by favoring certain demographics over others, but that’s another story that would require its own dedicated chapter) shared many of the traits of my father-in-law, born in 1934, who is about to be 92. GI Bill beneficiary, studying partly in the Army, a pacifist at heart who worked to defend his country from the possibility of nuclear obliteration.

Defense satellites, and no war at home

Knowing him, mellow and tall, you would have never guessed that, until his late forties, he’d worked as an engineer designing first-generation defense satellites at the same time that the Space Race gained steam. When he got married, he agreed to be deployed to Germany through the company he worked for under contract with the military, and that’s why Kirsten, as well as an older and a younger sister, were born, technically, in American military hospitals, having “Munich” as the official place of birth.

Those were circumstances issued from the horror of war, yet there was nothing about war with him and his environment. This dichotomy was probably a defense mechanism that many Americans and people from other places had to endure, so they could build a better reality from scratch, a world of their own.

I thought about this when, over the years, Kirsten and I have visited people who open their houses and their life experiences for us to document, and in such encounters I discovered that John’s story was one that shared similarities with many other people coming of age within the decade or so after World War II. Instead of rejecting society with nihilism and dissoluteness, many just wanted to see the future with optimism, and created places for their families to thrive, environments that were safe to play and experiment.

Jim’s six hundred acres

When Dustin first emailed us about his family property in rural Maine, a place he had come back to spend time with his dad and his sister’s family, we knew Jim, a Vietnam veteran and also an engineer by trade, liked unconventional homes (our fit), but not much more. Upon our visit to their property in June of 2024, we got to know a genuine, creative, modest, bigger-than-life character who had created his idea of paradise for his family to live in.

During our interview across the property, which includes a 1-mile zipline that descends a hill over a lake to get from one corner of the homestead to the cluster of houses on it, Dustin sometimes talked us through the inventiveness of a man who had seen many of the dark things of the human condition, and, after all of it, managed to see the upside of life, building more than a safe shelter for him and his family.

As the day went on and we walked around the property with Jim and his son Dustin, we got the feeling that the place was less a homestead than a small family hamlet, what some people would call a family compound. It had started with Jim coming back from Vietnam in the 1970s, having no appetite for the beaten path and with little money. Finding no ready-made path to throw himself into, he bought 600 acres of dense Maine woods and began building roads where there were none, bridges, ponds, dams, and even a hydroelectric station of his own.

He also built every home on the property, first his, and as his children became adults, then theirs. Later, in his mature years, he took on a challenge he had dreamt of: building an underground home of his own design at the bottom of the mile-long zipline.

The land’s interpreter

Dustin, the son, walked the land as its interpreter, showing real connection and admiration for his dad. It really impressed me to see their easy, pure connection, a blend of playfulness and respect that my father-in-law also fostered with his kids. I thought then that, to me, those are the real men; that’s actual manliness, and not the repertoire of poses promoted as such in our present tense.

Dustin, who was doing maintenance work and building a new zipline, among other things, put it this way:

“My father never accepted the limitations society imposes,” he told us. “He questions what’s possible, then figures out how to make it happen.”

Into the Ozarks

This past May, almost two years after Maine, we drove into a region we had long wanted to visit: the Missouri Ozarks, where the hills roll deep, and strangers get treated as neighbors.

Among the many strangers who became friends, consider, for example, our visit to Zane and his kids, who welcomed us to the place that Conway, Zane’s dad, had created in the Missouri wilderness, his son handing him tools from boyhood on. For decades, Conway worked to build a one-of-a-kind house into the mountainside.

Conway is the third engineer shaped by the upside of the Cold War, another modest, family-first man formed in uniform who came home and created much more than a shelter for his family. He has been gone eight years now; it fell to Zane to receive us, and through his son’s wholehearted homage over the course of a day, we got to know Conway all the same.

As the interview advanced and we got to learn the place and its main creator, we also heard from Zane that, having been a missileer, spending countless hours underground as a cog in the Cold War machine that wanted to guarantee nuclear deterrence by upping the nuclear responsiveness game, he got to cherish being underground. So much so that Conway’s dream home evolved into a home sheltered by the earth.

Three engineers, three tenses

All three engineers mentioned in this story were, in a way, sons of the dispensation the GI Bill built, each claiming it in his own currency: John through the Bill itself; Jim, perhaps, through the plain confidence of the era — the assumption that a man could buy six hundred acres of woods and expect his hands to be enough; and Conway, as far as anyone can tell, through the Air Force and a tour crewing a Titan II nuclear missile silo, in years when the world seemed one misread signal from ending.

Perhaps all three came to this article as they seem to reinforce each other. John is alive, and his memory is leaving him, which is the cruelest thing to my mother-in-law and to his children, although his memory, and many of his stories (though he was reserved), live in them now. Jim is also alive and able to tell his own, standing on the place he built for his family as evidence of purpose.

Finally, Conway is no longer with his family, but Zane has been restoring the underground home his father built, room by room — perhaps a way of keeping his father company, and of bargaining with impermanence, which presses hardest just as our children turn into adults and our elders weaken or leave.

Jim’s and Conway’s are also father-and-son stories, for both sons decided to share their family stories as a testimony of a generation that found a world that offered many reasons to feel pessimistic about the future and decided to work in their vicinity to build a better reality for them and theirs. Perhaps things were less expensive back then for those who started with little, but they didn’t count bliss in monetary terms, either. They didn’t need to.

Wow, wow, wow

On our visit to Zane’s property in the Missouri Ozarks, we ran out of pavement and followed a well-maintained dirt road, which kept narrowing until the oak trees closed over it, and that is when the birds of prey crossed: two of them, big, hovering low, unhurried as they glided from a tree on the right side to a tree on the left, less than 50 feet ahead of our car.

I yelled, “Wow, wow, wow!” There’s only one other place where I’ve seen such big birds of prey so close in the wild, unhurried by humans: in Monfragüe National Park, at the confluence of the Tiétar and the Tagus in northern Extremadura, west of Madrid on the Tagus’s way to Portugal.

The visit showed promise. We were about to see a house inside a hill, and seeing the birds, we realized that Conway had chosen to build his house in that spot also as a way of staying in touch with such a natural force, designing a house in which one visitor could be standing on top and not know it, such was its integration.

A rocket in the leaf litter

That’s what a hunter once did. Conway had given an acquaintance permission to hunt the property. A man who had never seen the place. He worked his way up a wooded slope, stepped onto a stretch of oddly level ground, and stopped in front of a great pipe rising out of the leaf litter “like a rocket,” as Zane tells it.

The visitor reasoned it out on the spot: I see this pipe; I believe I may be standing on top of the house. He was. Beneath his boots lay five feet of packed rock and clay, beneath that a foot of steel-reinforced concrete, and beneath that the idea of a dream home of a former missileer.

Sometimes, when we visit places, we meet the people who designed them before we meet anyone living. When visitors ring the bell at the entrance (a genuine locomotive bell), they know the designer loved machinery: its mechanisms, its symbols, and the industrial culture that made them possible.

First a cabana, then a camper

Conway was, by his son’s account, a blacksmith who happened to carry an engineering license, working a profession to finance a vocation. Zane greeted us near the carport with his two adult children, who declared themselves channel followers and talked with Kirsten about their all-time favorites. Then, as we approached the natural-looking entrance of the underground home, we knew that we were about to get the story of how such a special place had come to be.

Zane had just set a fire outside, and the scene was welcoming, timeless. That quality was the designer’s aspiration since he began daydreaming about the place while stationed near Tucson, in southern Arizona. In the Air Force, living in a small trailer with no money to buy more room, Conway built more room: a whole cabana grafted onto the trailer’s flank, his first structure.

Before his discharge, he built a second, a riveted aluminum camper sized to a Jeep pickup; he and Zane’s mother lived out of it for a stretch when he came home to Missouri. By his early thirties, he had already lived underground and set out to design his ultimate place in Missouri, which would be much homier than the Titan II silo he got to know so well in Tucson.

Paid for in lead

Between his missileer years and the underground project, Conway funded the dream by working as an engineer in the nearby Missouri mines, a district geologists were calling the largest lead-producing region on earth. And, though the place looks remote, it was just fifteen miles from home as the crow flies, a mere half-hour commute.

Conway got the land in 1970, an old homestead with a hill over a valley and a year-round spring at its foot that starts a creek. What he wanted was a house at the top, looking down the valley, invisible. The first cut came around 1973 (as it happened, the autumn of the Arab oil embargo, the season America briefly fell for the buried house).

What he engineered, alone, was a building that breathes through the hill and readily adapts to weather that can be cold in winter and suffocating on summer days. Conway was precise about the building, ventilation, year-round temperature, and performance over time: Zane, who is restoring the property and the house, told us there hasn’t been a single leak in fifty years. Zane is as precise as his father was. Earth, he corrects gently, is not an insulator but a temperature moderator. “I don’t really call it dirt,” he says, standing on five feet of it. “I call it earth.”

The decade of evenings

How the place came to be is a story of a man of his era: for roughly ten years Conway worked the mine by day and the hill by everything else (evenings, weekends, holidays, whatever other men meant by vacation).

Back in those days, many people still built their own houses while holding their full-time jobs. To avoid extra expenses, families would move in as soon as the place was minimally livable, an old television glowing in the unfinished big room; which is when, in the case of Conway and his son Zane, the rest of the work began (hiring help is never a philosophy when money is extra tight; plus, if you want it done a very specific way, you’ve got to do it yourself).

Zane’s mom always worked on every project, and there isn’t (almost never) a lone-wolf legend that can stand scrutiny; there’s always a significant other pushing as much as the person leading the way. She helped raise the Quonset, a workshop that predates the underground home: eighty feet by forty-five of clear span under wooden trusses the two of them assembled on the ground and hauled upright by rope.

She also fiberglassed most of an airboat around the aircraft engine her husband had decided he could not afford to buy and would therefore build: bigger, better, faster than the friend’s boat that inspired it, because that was how he built everything. “The way she got out of it,” Zane says, “she gave birth to me.”

The smallest bedroom in the house

All these years passed, and this is also a father-and-son story. Zane wasn’t afraid to go back to his memories growing up on the property, and when his dad was gone, he decided to pay his parents the biggest homage: like them, he took on the whole restoration project on his shoulders, doing all the work. And even if he’s in charge now, he still sleeps in his original bedroom, which is the smallest in the house.

It was his as a young teenager when the family moved underground, and it is his now; he has tried the other rooms over the years and keeps coming back. “Through this threshold,” he says at the door, “this has always been home.”

The house itself required no rescue, though homesteads demand upkeep. On the slope leading to the underground home, on a length of hand-laid track that runs from nowhere to nowhere, sit fifty-eight thousand pounds of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe: caboose number 566, riveted rather than welded, which by the rivets and the number series Zane dates to about 1927.

The first thing we thought when we saw the massive caboose parked in a little meadow between the trees was how they managed to get it there, which is the question everyone visiting the property has asked since. It arrived on two cranes, frame separated from its wheel trucks, up the dirt road with inches to spare, and inside it remains a sealed jar of its working life: the conductor’s desk, the fuel-oil stove, marker lamps with their red faces turned rearward, inspection sheets from 1986 and ‘87 still on the clipboard.

One might think that Conway’s love for old cabooses came out of nowhere, until Zane tells you that his grandfather braked freights on the Missouri Pacific out of Bismarck and would have thawed out in a hundred like it. In middle age, Conway took on a project that folded in his son (and the memory of his own father).

Conway meant to make it a guest house and ran out of time; Zane means to finish the thought and cannot quite bring himself to gut the evidence. “The history is still here,” he says. “As much as I can, I’ll leave in here.”

Nothing to prove

Before leaving, we climbed back to the top of the house, to the spot above the glass that faces east. Zane takes his coffee there in the morning; an underground home is short on daylight, and the ledge, catching the sun as it comes up the valley, is how the house compensates.

The restoration isn’t finished, and it probably isn’t meant to be. The house, for its part, asks little. Air still enters through the earth, cool in summer and warm in winter, exactly as drawn. More than fifty years after the first cut, the roof has never leaked. Conway built it to outlast him, and so far it has done that, too.

Driving out, I thought about Conway, about Zane and his children. It struck me that Conway seemed to share a good deal of the character of old men I’ve gotten to know in the United States. None of them ever seemed to argue about manliness. They didn’t need to prove anything to anyone; that’s the thing.

They didn’t have to cosplay strength; they had met the real thing early (the wartime build-out John watched remake Sausalito, the jungle Jim came back from, the launch keys Conway sat beside), and wanted none of its costumes at home. Compare it to the posing of the muscular podcasters and influencers of our present tense.

What they practiced instead was a kind of competent gentleness. John, the mildest adult I have known, designed machines to watch for the end of the world and never once brought the war home. Jim strung his children bridges, raised them houses, and built them a mile of flight over the family pond. Conway put a bell at his door, oak over his fireplace, and his son’s bedroom at the heart of the hill.

This generation is on the way out, and it shows. Except where a son picked up the tools.

The term “snowbird” is well known in North America. In the United States, people who seasonally travel from the northern states to the Sun Belt to enjoy the winter are called snowbirds.

Commonly perceived as a retiree phenomenon, it also includes younger cohorts who can work remotely or choose a precariat lifestyle by working seasonally or attending educational programs down south when it’s too cold up north, and vice versa.

Many Canadians own property or visit places down south, seasonally traveling to sun-bathed places when it’s too harsh back home, though this reality is being put to the test by the perceived animosity of the US Administration towards its immediate neighbors and partners.

Europe has snowbirds too

But snowbirds aren’t only a North American phenomenon. Low-fare travel, a common currency, and an increasingly harmonized legal framework have increased seasonal travel between Northern and Southern Europe, with Britons, Germans, Benelux residents, or Scandinavians visiting spots in Iberia and the Mediterranean for days or even weeks during the harshest moments of winter, and Southern Europeans choosing to leave the heat and tourist high season of the summer to get to know places up north.

And so, if Barcelona, Lisbon, Valencia, or Rome get busy in winter with intra-European travelers escaping the cold, many places up north like Copenhagen, Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm, or Helsinki increasingly attract meridional Europeans in summer, who enjoy the comparatively mild weather, lack of massification, and cultural or culinary experience.

Reversing our own migration

Since our family moved to California from France in the summer of 2022, we reversed our travel rationale, staying in North America for most of the year and traveling to Europe for the winter and summer vacations.

And, without planning it, we’ve come to realize that our place outside Barcelona (next to a vibrant city, not far from great ski and cultural activities, as well as friends and family) is of great family value in the cold months, whereas, during summer, as temperatures rise and Northern Europeans flock en masse to the Mediterranean coast and even the interior in search of their blend of sun, gastronomy, and cultural experiences, we often like to escape the humidity and temperature rise and stay a few days in places like Copenhagen.

Consider our latest unplanned escape to Scandinavia: after we had the chance to visit my family and enjoy a few days of rest in Penedès, the wine-making valley about one hour southwest of Barcelona, we took a flight to Copenhagen and decided to rent an apartment in a conventional building on Valdemarsgade, a common street in Vesterbro, currently a vibrant district in what was once a rough working-class and red-light zone, instead of going to a hotel.

A city that still feels like itself

Many authors have explored the trend in the world towards the homogenization of urban and suburban landscapes, often through the unstoppable expansion and pervasiveness of branding, certain typographies, and muted colors.

French anthropologist Marc Augé theorized about “non-places,” spaces of transit and consumption that emanate (and generate) no identity, no relations, no history. It was first felt in airports, malls, chain hotels, highways, etc. Then it spread to exurban and suburban enclaves, as well as the outskirts of cities, but it’s now present even in urban cores.

Similarly, German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes how globalized digital culture shortens any distance and erases uniqueness: everything becomes comparable, consumable, “the same.” Things become non-things. Wary of such feelings, I enjoy the difficult-to-translate signals that make every place unique, and Copenhagen hasn’t lost its authenticity.

Life at 0.75x

To somebody who grew up in Barcelona but also traveled, read, and watched movies, it’s easy to feel that the farther north one goes in Europe, the duller the chromatism and the more textured the light seem to be.

This time, I couldn’t help but think that many people seemed to bike, walk, or talk calmly, at a speed that, if we were to measure in podcast play pace, would rank between 0.5 and 0.9x, whereas I get an opposite feeling in places like Paris or New York, where things play to Kirsten’s taste: it all seems to happen at 1.5x.

I joked with Kirsten, especially when we ventured outside Copenhagen, heading both west toward Jutland and east across the Øresund bridge into Sweden: many people looked and moved so calmly that it felt like they were missing a coffee or two.

Or is it the other way around? Is the vigor I sometimes feel in the jam-packed roads of the San Francisco Bay Area almost like a pulsion to survive, a way to culturally demonstrate one isn’t a laggard? Being “fast” or “efficient” isn’t a compliment in many parts of Europe, and that seems to be working alright in many areas.

The lived-in rental

We got the place for its price: it was a new listing and lacked any reviews, but the internal messaging with the host gave us confidence; for one, the apartment was a low pied-à-terre which probably lacked light in wintertime, but what’s an inconvenience in winter felt like a perk in summer, especially coming from our hot-and-humid-in-July place in Catalonia. Plus it was among the most affordable places to stay.

It was even better than expected: our rental ended up being obviously the shared apartment of two or three locals; we couldn’t tell how many. The ground-level flat was located in a conventional early-twentieth-century mid-rise apartment building on a small street leading to Istedgade, the vibrant nightlife artery of the Vesterbro district. It had two bedrooms and a light-filled open kitchen opening into a living room with well-sorted shelves.

There was an old-school hi-fi system next to a variety of vinyls of all genres, and an impressive assortment of books on a wide range of topics (including Noma 2.0: Vegetable, Forest, Ocean by René Redzepi, a book on Japanese knives, another on mushrooms, etc.). It felt a bit like having an assortment on par with a Taschen store in Berlin or Paris, just in an apartment inhabited by precarious youngsters.

The thing is: if this is the precariat in Copenhagen, it’s one enjoying a great quality of life. The kitchen was well-stocked with a magnetic strip of specialty knives, the pots and pans were quality, and the cutlery had patina and taste. These weren’t kids reheating premade food but ones cooking and perhaps experimenting, given the books they displayed not far from the stove.

A teenager takes notes

Our son, who traveled with the two of us while our two daughters were in Paris on a summer camp activity and a college internship, respectively, was also curious about the pictures on the walls and books (in Danish and English) he found in the room he stayed in.

He was careful not to misplace any of the many things in the place, which had been tidied up, and was especially interested in a pile of black notepads that one of the hosts had filled with drawings, texts, diagrams, song lyrics, poems, pranks, and whatnot, all in a very stylish fashion.

I’m glad he was exposed to it right before starting high school in a mere few weeks; I could feel his recognition and excitement. Perhaps a bedroom in Copenhagen, the real bedroom of a twenty-something living in the Danish capital, will inspire him more than any mentoring or adult rant, since teenagers know instinctively how to weigh the signal they are attuned to.

Streets at 22 degrees

Outside the apartment: think people packing the sitting-out terraces of cafes and bistros, bikes cruising up and down, walkable areas leading to well-stocked children’s parks and tree-sheltered gardens inside old gates (like Legepladsen i Skydebanehaven, with its impressive Neo-Gothic gate, built in 1887), and pacified transit. All at a 22-ish-degree-Celsius (low 70s) temperature and an on-and-off sunny-cloudy sky, ideal to seek the sun instead of fencing it off as a matter of survival.

Light-wise, flying from Barcelona to Copenhagen in a day would feel a bit like having an early breakfast in Northern California and landing for lunch in Alberta, Canada: daylight lasts longer into the night in summertime, though it’s a more textured, less intense light, inviting people to get as much of it as possible instead of blocking it.

A morning at the lakes

As it got late on our first day in town, I asked about a place worth exploring on my morning run, and someone recommended “the lakes” to me. Look up the lakes, he said. I imagined a set of actual lakes and wondered whether this person understood that I wanted to leave the place I was staying and start running, but it took me a quick search to understand that what Copenhageners know as “the lakes,” Søerne in Danish, is a vibrant, rectilinear 6.4-kilometer (3.9-mile) recreational loop around three interconnected artificial bodies of water.

After my search, I looked at the map and was glad to see they were 15 minutes from our place, so I headed to this haven for walking and running early in the morning; the temperature was perfect, and the gravel paths were already packed with people of all ages.

Along the banks are houses with a few charming private gardens and old buildings, and as I approached intersections, I could see city landmarks like church towers nearby. Then, I’d turn my gaze to the path and the water and see swans and ducks getting their morning bath.

It was a weekday, so I figured that many of the young people doing the loop with me were heading to work later, but I saw little rush and not a single grim face. Then I learned that most Danish bikes carry a frame-mounted ring lock over the rear wheel, a small horseshoe bolt that blocks the wheel from spinning, something nearly invisible if you don’t know to look for it. This might be part of the reason bikes lean against facades with no chains (I also know that, in other places, people would lift the bikes and get them in the back of a van, then deal with the lock).

This is the north, and in winter there’s not much light; in fact, the same “lakes” I was looping freeze in the coldest weeks of winter, becoming walking and skating areas, a bit like the paintings by the Flemish and Dutch masters, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, and Winter in Holland by Aert van der Neer.

These works are known not only for their mastery, but because they inadvertently documented for posterity the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries, a moment frozen in time like an ancient insect trapped in amber. To me, a meridional European, the scenes feel both exotic and familiar at once.

Brick facades, shared courtyards

Vesterbro, west of the central station, is one of the brokvarterer, the bridge quarters Copenhagen threw up in a few speculative decades after building outside the old ramparts was finally allowed in the 1850s. The area surrounding Valdemarsgade looks like most of the district does: unassuming five-story brick facades in muted reds and ochres, against which neighbors leave their bicycles (many of the old ones seemed unlocked, or at least I didn’t notice their discreet mechanism at first).

However, what I liked most about our street and many of the others I had the chance to explore a bit was a second, more local, degree of public use beyond each apartment: the shared courtyard. Ours had trees and many bushes buzzing with pollinators and birds, tidy clotheslines and picnic tables that I marveled to see used freely. Neighbors, mostly young, would come into the courtyard to have lunch, dinner, or a drink, carrying their own plates and silverware, then cleaning up after themselves.

We’ve lived in the city centers of very busy European cities, Barcelona and Paris, and we’ve learned the hard way that such arrangements can only work when whole communities behave.

Trust without a rulebook

I noticed that our Copenhagen courtyard had neither the rule-enforcement lists one sees in US communities with similar arrangements nor the permissiveness that ruins them elsewhere, where no one seems to want to give up the yelling and partying over other people’s right not to be disrupted. This impression is based on a few days, but I saw how every morning and evening the picnic table just outside our kitchen-living room was used by a different group of people each time, and despite having our windows cranked open, we never needed to raise our voices or close the windows.

Upon reading about the same area we were staying in, I realized that these were the same cramped workers’ tenements that had decayed into the city’s no-go area until the early 1990s, when the city undertook one of Europe’s most successful urban renewal programs. Small flats were joined into bigger ones with actual bathrooms, and back buildings came down so the courtyards could breathe. What survived is a district that gentrified without being flattened.

I enjoyed the city, but the apartment gave us a peek into the lives of local youngsters, their literary and musical tastes, their culinary preferences, the shoes and clothes they wear, the pictures they pin to the wall and fridge; that was my favorite part, perhaps because I’m aware of the magic of such early adult years, which our older daughter is already discovering.

The happiest-city question

Our experience in Copenhagen got me curious, so when we flew back to Barcelona, before finally heading to Paris for a few days before returning to California a few days ago, I read a piece by Mike MacEacheran in National Geographic Traveller (UK), written to answer the obvious question: why does this city keep topping happiness rankings?

Apparently, the author spent part of his reporting in a kayak, pulling beer cans and a stray pair of swim trunks out of the Inner Harbor while locals bathed nude off the quays. The boat came from GreenKayak, a nonprofit that lends kayaks for free in exchange for a bucket of collected litter. The detail says more than the rankings do. The harbor of a European capital is clean enough that swimming in it is ordinary, and picking trash out of it feels worth an hour of anyone’s vacation.

This tells you something: sometimes, you can afford to create shared spaces for everyone to enjoy, without hitting the so-called tragedy of the commons. And, of course, many argue that what places like Copenhagen can do is due to their relatively small size and the fact that they represent the most visible, cosmopolitan side of society that remains comparatively homogeneous and enjoys high levels of development, social coverage, and trust.

But to think that only small, relatively egalitarian high-income countries can create such environments is naïve: it only takes a bit of patience and a car to, for example, visit many small to medium-sized towns and cities in places like Spain to realize the quality of life is as high in many regards. Soria, Logroño, Pontevedra, or Palencia are no cosmopolitan havens, but people there enjoy high-trust environments at a fraction of the price, though, of course, they lack the cosmopolitanism of the more expensive and less gentle Madrid, Barcelona, or Valencia. In California terms, it’d be a bit like comparing San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles.

Tryghed, not happiness

The rankings are real, in any case. The Happy City Index, compiled by the London-based Institute for Quality of Life from 64 indicators, put Copenhagen first again in 2026, ahead of Helsinki (slightly colder and darker in winter months) and the prohibitively expensive Geneva.

Despite its latitude, Denmark has spent a decade at or near the top of the UN’s World Happiness Report (the Happiness Research Institute, the think tank that helped export the word hygge to the world’s bookstores around 2016, keeps its office in the city). Happiness in Copenhagen is almost an industry, which is reason enough for suspicion. That’s why, I was told, Danes themselves rarely use the word.

What comes up instead is tryghed, usually translated as security. Healthcare, university, childcare and unemployment insurance are covered, and the bill is also highlighted by those who argue that European countries, even the most successful ones, lack dynamism: some of the highest income taxes in the world plus a 25 percent VAT on almost everything. Most Danes seem to treat the arrangement less as a sacrifice than as a subscription that renews without drama.

Gehl’s city, Illich’s bicycle

None of that explains why the city feels so good to move through. That part has authors and dates. In 1962 Copenhagen pedestrianized Strøget, its main shopping street, against loud predictions of commercial ruin. A young architect named Jan Gehl began counting what happened next: where people walked and where they lingered. His conclusion, refined over decades in books like Life Between Buildings, was that people attract people, and that postwar cities had been handed to traffic engineers by mistake.

This is the part I most like about certain Northern European cities we’ve visited. Among them, Copenhagen listened earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else, and it shows in summer, when the weather is nicest and the days long.

Today, most trips to work or school inside the city happen by bicycle, on raised lanes wide enough that eight-year-olds pedal to class next to commuters. Ivan Illich argued in the 1970s that the bicycle was the rare tool that extends human freedom without creating dependence or hierarchy. Copenhagen is the closest thing to a capital built on that idea.

The circle closes

After a few days there, I guess that the rankings measure something humbler than joy: how much friction a city removes from an ordinary day. By that measure, everything we touched pointed the same way, from the bike lanes and the courtyard table to the swimmable harbor and the gravel path around the lakes.

Our haul was modest: a few mid-July days at 22 degrees, and a teenager quietly taking notes on how a Copenhagen twenty-something furnishes a life.

And our hosts, presumably, were somewhere doing the same in reverse, spending July in someone else’s summer. When Copenhagen goes dark by mid-afternoon, some of them will fly south and rent a flat full of strange books in Barcelona or Valencia, and the circle will close.

The European snowbird now flies both ways. The etiquette is identical at either end: swap cities when the season turns, and leave the shelves as you found them.

Unfortunately, the World Cup wasn’t the only global event this July. In the last 24 hours alone, more than 50 wildfires have been confirmed in Spain, down from 60 the day before; wildfires are also spreading throughout the Americas, from Northern Canada and the Pacific Northwest to the subtropical areas of Southern Brazil (it’s winter in the South Cone, so fires are less prevalent there now). Many of these fires are seasonal and occur every year, though wildfires are now larger and more widespread.

The Canadian smoke was the one nobody had planned for, and many only noticed because air quality in New York and New Jersey was so bad a mere two days before the World Cup final, before localized storms improved the situation. Close to nine hundred fires were burning up there that week, and the haze reached at least eighteen states, from Michigan to New Hampshire to Virginia.

Summer and HEPA filters

Toronto had the worst air in the world on the fifteenth and shut down its FanFest, canceling the England–Argentina watch party. New York handed out free K-95 masks, just in case. Philadelphia declared a Code Purple emergency day. Spain trained in it anyway, at Gotham FC’s facility north of the stadium.

Then a thunderstorm crossed the region on Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday the air was merely moderate, and by kickoff nobody was talking about smoke at all (which is its own small lesson in how we handle these things). The stadium in East Rutherford, renamed New York New Jersey Stadium for the tournament, is open-air and has neither a roof nor air conditioning. It got away with it this time. Many stadiums in the United States are already enclosed and air-conditioned due to warm weather; perhaps, wildfires will prompt the open-air ones to reconsider.

On the day Spain and Portugal played their round of sixteen, we left the Bay Area and flew to Barcelona to visit relatives and travel a bit through Spain, France, and a couple of spots in Scandinavia. We came back yesterday, five days after the competition culminated in a win our children celebrated as theirs.

Kirsten, our youngest, and I watched the final at our country house in the Penedès, an hour south of Barcelona. Our two daughters went to a gathering in Paris and sent pictures from the metro on the way there, faces painted with the Spanish and the Catalan flags, showing rather more enthusiasm than the three of us at home.

Now the tournament is over, and Spain has gone back to its everyday life, which this week means fire. The ones in Almería and Girona are contained. The ones west of Madrid are not. On Friday the three separate fires burning in the Comunidad de Madrid (threatening residential areas near Villa del Prado, San Martín de Valdeiglesias, Almorox) were merged into a single incident, the Sierra Oeste fire, and the government declared a national emergency for Madrid and for the province of Ávila.

How to deal with a new type of summer

Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated or confined across the two territories; the figure kept climbing through the day, and I will not pretend to a number that was accurate for one afternoon. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the conservative president of the Community of Madrid, the regional government, said the Madrid burn might already have doubled to twelve thousand hectares, while noting there was still no closed perimeter.

As many shared dystopian, Mars-sky-style images of dim light and a heavy smoke veil surrounding the capital, ES-Alert messages went out ordering Fresnedillas de la Oliva and Robledo de Chavela to evacuate and Navalagamella to shelter in place. The wind is the whole problem, as it always is in such situations. Many Angelenos can attest.

None of this is separable from the heat that has preceded this dire fire season. For example, Barcelona recorded its hottest temperature in 112 years on the ninth of July. Then it cooled down a bit, but temperatures stayed high across the Iberian Peninsula.

By July twenty-first, when we traveled to Paris to join our daughters before flying back to San Francisco, Spain’s meteorological agency, AEMET, had a bulletin out (number 23 of the year, which tells you something all by itself) warning that the southeastern third of the country, the Guadalquivir, the Ebro, the Pyrenean valleys, inland Mallorca, would pass forty-five degrees.

Copernicus had already counted three heatwaves in six weeks and called the relentless succession a hallmark of a warming climate, which is the sort of sentence that used to appear at the back of the paper and now appears in the weather. In Galicia, where my family is from and where the Atlantic is supposed to be the whole point, the health authority went to red alert above forty.

So: heat, a win, and then fire, on both continents. That was the shape of the summer, and I was still carrying it when I got home and started catching up on what had happened in the country I actually live in while I was gone.

What arrives while you are away

Another thing happened this July that is especially relevant to our site and to Kirsten’s channel, given our focus on housing: the United States finally passed a comprehensive, ambitious housing law that could change things for many people.

We aren’t talking about a bill, or a proposal, or a framework, but a law: nearly four hundred pages of it. The Senate cleared the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act eighty-five to five on June 22nd. The House followed the next day, three hundred fifty-eight to thirty-two. And then, on July 11th, it became law without a presidential signature at all: Congress stayed in session, the ten-day constitutional clock ran out, and the thing simply became Public Law 119-101 the way water becomes ice, without anyone in particular deciding.

Interestingly, the most complete analysis I’ve read about ROAD was written within bike distance from our house by the Terner Center at Berkeley, which is either a coincidence or the reason I read them first.

The Terner Center calls it the most significant housing reform package Congress has passed in a generation. David Garcia and Julie Aguilar, who wrote that assessment, were also careful to say what it is not. Individually, they wrote, the provisions are mostly technical or narrowly tailored, and none of them alone changes the game. The law appropriates nothing for demand-side programs. It does not touch the staffing cuts at HUD. It is a landmark that is also, in a great many places, a memo.

But somewhere in the middle of those four hundred pages, in Section 301, Congress changed a single word in the federal definition of a house. And that word is the reason I am writing this instead of writing about the fires.

Why we keep coming back to the factory-built house

Kirsten and I have been filming small, budget, unconventional, and self-built houses for going on twenty years, and in that time I have watched the American conversation about housing circle the manufactured home the way you circle a relative you are not sure you want at dinner.

For one, unlike in Europe or other parts of the world, manufactured homes make up a sizeable share of America’s entry-level housing market: they house millions of Americans and, historically, accounted for a much larger share of entry-level housing, peaking at 25% in the 1990s.

There has been enough coverage (and enthusiasm) for other entry-level housing phenomena in recent years, among them the growth of tiny homes on wheels due to their lack of stigma. There has also been enormous enthusiasm for architect-designed prefab small homes, given the market promise of secondary homes in backyards due to favorable legislation.

But, unlike those two still-marginal markets, there is the actual, unglamorous, load-bearing answer, which has been sitting in the middle of the room the entire time, housing people, and which nobody wants to be photographed with: manufactured homes.

The numbers are not ambiguous. The American Housing Survey counts about 7.2 million occupied manufactured homes in the United States, roughly 5.4 percent of all occupied housing. Analysis of Census data puts the number of Americans living in them at more than twenty-two million, and manufactured homes at about one in every ten new homes built in the country each year.

A bright future for manufactured homes?

For all the lack of glamour, shipments have been recovering faster than site-built construction: 103,300 units in 2024, running at an annualized rate near 106,000 by the middle of 2025. The Housing Assistance Council has found that more than half of all manufactured homes sit in rural areas, where they make up something like 13% of occupied homes in rural and small-town communities (though that analysis leans on American Community Survey data now several years old, and I would not swear to the decimal).

Price is where it stops being a statistic, and the main reason manufactured homes are a thing is that many families have been priced out of the market altogether. The Census Bureau put the median price of a new single-family home sold in 2025 at $417,400, with a median size of 2,194 square feet, whereas industry figures for the same year put the average new manufactured home at $115,557 (around $95,000 for a single-section, around $156,000 for a multi-section). The difference is staggering.

Those two numbers are not the same kind of number, and I do not want to pretend they are: the manufactured figure typically excludes the land underneath, which in California is frequently the entire problem. But even after you correct for that, and even allowing that the industry is quoting its own product, you are looking at housing that costs roughly half per square foot to produce.

This is the most affordable path to a new home in America; it disproportionately serves rural and lower-income households, and for 50 years, federal law has required every single one of these houses to be built on a steel frame it does not need.

Unfortunately, manufactured homes often lack quality and charm, and perhaps one of the most unseen market opportunities of the housing sector lies in designing and manufacturing a still-affordable manufactured home that has the quality and feel of high-end prefabs.

Ten inches of steel under a house that never moves

The ROAD Act could change what a manufactured home is allowed to be. Here is what Congress actually did. Section 301 amends the federal definition so that a manufactured home may be built with a permanent chassis (the steel towing frame that has been mandatory since the 1970s) or without one.

That wording matters. Nobody has to remove a frame, and nothing already standing becomes illegal. The frame simply stops being compulsory, which over time could simplify and cheapen the roughly one in ten new American homes that come out of a factory each year.

The second half of Section 301 will decide whether any of this reaches buyers. The law requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to write updated standards for chassis-free homes, and it requires each state to certify that it has changed its own laws so that a home without a chassis is treated identically to one with a chassis: for financing, for sale, for installation, and for title. Those four words are the whole ballgame.

Section 301 also establishes HUD as the primary federal authority for approving any manufactured home construction or safety standard (construction, design, performance, and energy efficiency). The point is not that federal preemption is new (the HUD Code has overridden state and local building codes for these houses since 1976).

The point is that a chassis-free home stays inside that system rather than falling out of it into the modular category, where every jurisdiction reviews the plans separately. One code, fifty states, no local plan review — and now without the steel.

Take the chassis out, turn it into a home

Here is the object at the center of this: a chassis is a steel frame, roughly 10 to 12 inches deep, that runs beneath a manufactured home. It exists so a truck can tow the house from the factory to the site. That is a completely sensible thing for a frame to do, and on the day of delivery it does it well.

The problem is the word “permanent.” When Congress passed the National Manufactured Housing Construction and Safety Standards Act in 1974, and when HUD built its code around it starting in 1976, the statutory definition of a manufactured home required that it be “built on a permanent chassis”. Not delivered on one. Built on one, and left on one, forever. The frame stays. The house sits on top of it for the rest of its life, which complicates things unnecessarily for those who are not planning to move their manufactured home.

As it turns out, most manufactured homes never move, making the mandatory chassis useless and expensive. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy estimates that the share of manufactured homes ever relocated after initial placement is 5-7%. Over 90% of these houses are set down once and never touched again.

A requirement that doesn’t square with reality

Adding a steel base to manufactured homes is not free. The Niskanen Center estimates that removing the requirement could take $5,000 to $10,000 off the price of a manufactured home (on a hundred-thousand-dollar house, somewhere between five and ten percent of the total cost, which in this market is the difference between qualifying and not qualifying. But the money is honestly the smaller half of it).

The amendment legalizing chassis-free manufactured homes could also speed innovation. Up until now, the frame wrote the architecture. A house sitting on a 10-inch steel deck is a house lifted off the ground, which is why manufactured homes have skirting, and why they have that particular hovering profile, and why a second story or a basement has historically been a nightmare to engineer.

That silhouette — the one an American eye reads instantly and unkindly as the culturally stigmatized “trailer” — was never designed by anyone. It is a towing fitting that outlived its purpose and hardened into a style. Then the style became a stigma.

Then the stigma became zoning, and thirty-odd thousand jurisdictions wrote rules to keep those houses out of neighborhoods, and the cheapest housing in America was legally confined to the places that would take it.

Manufactured homes and exclusionary zoning

There is a further consequence: because the chassis is what makes the house “theoretically” transportable, most states treat manufactured homes as personal property (chattel, like a boat or a car, which tend to depreciate over time) rather than as real property, like a house (which tends to appreciate over time).

That classification pushes buyers toward chattel loans, which carry higher rates, shorter terms, and fewer protections than a mortgage.

The Housing Assistance Council found that borrowers with loans secured by the home alone had a high-cost loan rate around 90%. If a steel frame, on a house that will never move, adds cost, dictates an unloved silhouette, invites exclusionary zoning, and helps push a family into a worse loan, why not get rid of it?

What the four hundred pages actually say

Only Congress could do this. The requirement lived in statute, at 42 U.S.C. 5402(6), which is why HUD could never fix it administratively no matter how many people asked (and why Terner’s write-up, which describes it as a HUD rule, is the one place I would gently correct an otherwise excellent summary).

Section 303 updates FHA lending rules so that home improvement loans can be used for manufactured homes deployed as accessory dwelling units. This is the provision we expect to matter most to the people who watch our videos: a factory-built unit in a backyard, financeable through a mainstream federally backed product. The same section directs HUD to study the cost-effectiveness of supporting housing finance for factory-built housing generally, and Section 302 directs it to identify what is blocking insured lending for modular builders.

Section 102 lets HUD establish federal guidelines for point-access block buildings (single-staircase apartments, which is to say the ordinary way Barcelona has built housing since before anyone reading this was born, arriving in the United States in 2026 as an innovation).

Section 107 has HUD writing zoning and land-use best practices for localities, non-binding, nudging toward reduced parking minimums and ADU allowances. Section 205 expands NEPA exemptions for most infill housing.

Section 204 allows cities to allocate up to 20% of their Community Development Block Grant funds to new construction, a change previously prohibited outright. Section 208 creates a $200 million innovation fund. Terner also notes that the chassis change lands alongside a recent HUD rule loosening restrictions on multistory manufactured homes, which is the other half of the same lock.

How fast can it go?

Now the part that almost nobody is saying out loud, and that I would rather you hear from us than from a dealer.

None of this is available: not this week, not this month, possibly not this year. HUD has to write the standards, the labels, and the documentation for chassis-free homes, and that is rulemaking, with everything rulemaking implies.

Then the states have to move: each one has a year (two, if its legislature meets only every other year) to certify that its laws treat a chassis-free home the same as a traditional manufactured home. A state that fails to certify cannot allow these homes to be built, installed, or sold within its borders at all. Then the FHA has to issue guidance, and then lenders have to update their own.

The most honest source I found on the entire subject was a mortgage broker’s blog, which told readers plainly that anyone offering to finance a chassis-free home today is making it up.

And the law does not preempt local zoning. It never claimed to. Every jurisdiction that currently keeps manufactured homes out can keep keeping them out. What has changed is that the excuse got weaker, because the thing they were nominally objecting to is about to stop existing.

The house we would draw

Which brings me to the daydream, and I will admit it is a daydream, because I have been carrying it around since the flight. Give me the eight thousand dollars and the ten inches back.

One could start with a single-section footprint to keep it affordable. Then you could set it low. That is the first thing the missing chassis allows: the floor comes down to within a step of the ground, and suddenly the house is not perched; it is sitting. No skirting. No shadow underneath. It reads, from the street, as a house, because it is one.

Orient it. A factory can build the same shell a thousand times, but nobody in the factory knows which way your lot faces, so the design has to be a kit of two or three orientations rather than one plan stamped out blind. Deep eaves on the south. Small, high, cross-ventilating openings. Enough thermal mass on the interior (and here the lost steel weight is a gift, because you have budget and payload to spend on something that stores cold instead of something that carries wheels).

Then make the design survive extreme events like strong winds and wildfires: metal roof, Class A assembly, ember-resistant vents (which cost almost nothing and are the reason houses live or die in a California fire), closed eaves, no combustible material in the first five feet.

The trailer that turned into a home

None of this is exotic; all of it is standard practice that the manufactured sector has historically been priced out of because too much of the budget was already committed to steel. And a foundation that qualifies the house as real property in a state that has done its certification, so the family buying it walks into a mortgage instead of a chattel loan and stops paying an extra three points for the crime of having bought the affordable thing.

Ninety-five dollars a square foot. Under $100,000 for the structure. Sited by someone who has looked at the lot, financed like a house, insured like a house, taxed like a house, appreciating like a house.

This shouldn’t be a fantasy. Every single element of it exists today, separately, in a factory somewhere. What has kept them from being assembled into one object was, in significant part, a single word in a definition written in 1974 by people who assumed these houses would keep moving.

They never moved. We are the ones who moved: out of a heatwave and into a fire season, twice across an ocean this summer, home to find that the country had quietly stopped requiring its cheapest houses to pretend they could follow.

Now somebody has to draw the thing. We are going to spend the next year finding the people who are trying.

Yet there’s always been a type of misfit working ahead of time to help adapt local systems to a new reality, improving the dysfunction at the intersection of human and natural habitats, rather than patching short-term ailments over remediation.

This is why Brad Lancaster began “planting rain” in his area of Tucson in the Arizona desert, so not only he but the entire neighborhood would benefit from the shade and fruits of the native trees and vegetation thriving on the sidewalks that had been barren in the past.

Turning inhospitable places into an oasis

Not long ago, things were very different there. When the monsoons arrived every year, the aging bungalows built onto small lots in the neighborhood were something to avoid and shun, and the water from the sudden summer storms rushed down the streets, washing away instead of feeding gardens and filling the soil and aquifers so plants can regulate the quality of life at the scale that is needed.

But the improvement didn’t come easy in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood, a few blocks north of downtown Tucson. Thirty years ago, Brad Lancaster had to break the law on Sunday mornings with a concrete saw to allow water to enter the sidewalk basins he planted, so his neighborhood could harvest over a million gallons of stormwater a year.

Over time, neighbors and even the city recognized the benefits of such a small, economical intervention that could be carried out by local volunteers; what was then illegal is now encouraged, and the city offers rebates for stormwater reuse. Finally, “planting” and “harvesting” rain aren’t the rogue proposition of a bunch of idealists.

Though for that to happen, people and representatives needed to see the change firsthand. Because once things are banned, they enter the realm of “perceived reality you can’t change,” even when those same rules hurt communities.

Laws made to be outgrown

Many laws have criminalized gathering what nature gives away for free; the British Raj banned Indians from collecting the salt their own sea left on the shore, and a municipal code can do something similar with the rain that falls on a public street.

But, from Gandhi to Thoreau, there’s also a lineage of people who broke those laws and were proven right, and Brad Lancaster recognized himself in it. Rain on a street is perhaps the purest commons we have left, and when the code rushes it to the storm drain while the city pumps a shrinking aquifer to sell water back to its citizens, we aren’t talking about neutral engineering anymore, but about a monopoly with a permit. Some laws exist to be enforced, and others exist to be outgrown; judging by what happened in Msipane and in Dunbar/Spring, the fastest way to outgrow them is a shovel and a Sunday morning.

Brad’s approach to radical rainwater harvesting in homes, streets, and at city-scale environments suffering desertification came to be in an environment hostile to innovation and holistic approaches to life in the desert; instead of learning from the techniques that the Hohokam and their Tohono O’odham descendants had used to create edible abundance for centuries by channeling monsoon runoff, most of Tucson was a dusty and hot oven lacking any shade or habitat.

So Brad and others went the way of Gandhi’s Salt March. His bet (that the local ordinance would end up catching up with reality once sidewalk adaptation was recognized as a way to plant shade and retain water in the soil) was risky at first, but he understood, like Thoreau, or like NYC’s Green Guerillas planting vacant lots into community gardens in the seventies, that when local ordinances turn people into the agent of injustice, it’s legitimate to break them and build a better alternative to broken, outdated techniques.

127 degrees F on the tarmac

The first thing that hits you in a place like Tucson when it’s not pouring rain in summer is not the heat. It’s the tarmac. The dry air hits you at 108°F, and you want to drink something cold. The bare pavement makes the environment even more threatening, radiating at 127°F, which is why solar ovens like the one Brad uses at his small home (he calls it, among other things, a “shondo,” or a hybrid between an old shed and a condo) are popular: 127°F is roughly the temperature at which you can slow-cook a brisket and get your sun herbal tea ready.

At such temperatures, most people move fast between air-conditioned environments, paying little attention to the fact that, as it happens in Western Europe each time there’s a sudden, prolonged heat wave, many people with underlying conditions don’t make it through. In 2023, one heatwave in the already hot Arizona desert contributed to nearly 800 extra deaths.

Brad has demonstrated that, when you keep the soil unpaved along sidewalks and plant trees and understory in the curbside basins, the place becomes safer and more habitable for animals, pets, and people. Instead of destroying watersheds and draining the rain into storm sewers while keeping sidewalks paved, pumping aquifers that don’t get replenished and are used to water lawns, Brad Lancaster and others are pioneers trying to prevent our cities from killing us when it’s too hot and desolate out in the tarmac dystopia.

Goats, a shondo, and a decade between visits

When you visit Brad, there’s no dystopia anymore. Approaching his “shondo,” the street narrows. Mesquite and ironwood canopy over the footpaths. The soil in the shaded basins beside the curb runs up to 30°F cooler than the exposed street.

There are birds, actual songbirds, in downtown Tucson in July. And there is Brad Lancaster, on foot as always (he has been car-free for decades), walking two small Nigerian dwarf goats down the block like a man walking the thesis of his life’s work on a leash. It all makes sense once you experience it.

It feels cooler, more livable, more active, less 24/7/365 AC-driven. It’s a declaration of working with the urban fabric to make it more habitable instead of living isolated and in fear, jumping from AC bubble to AC bubble.

We visited Brad for the first time a decade ago, and dropped by again this late spring to see the updates at this place, in the neighborhood, and in the entire city. The goats are new since our first visit. They are pets, milk supply, and brush control, in that order, or perhaps the reverse, depending on the day. They have their own adapted place in the backyard that Brad shares with his brother’s family next door, but he walks them around the vicinity on a leash. When we do it with him, few people find it strange or even pay attention to the scene, though the miniature goats, naturally adapted to heat and scarcity, are no dog.

His “shondo,” the small structure on the eighth-acre property he shares with his brother’s family, has been improved again; nothing on this lot is ever finished, only iterating. The property itself, a run-down 740-square-foot adobe when the brothers bought it in 1994 because, as Brad puts it, it was all they could afford, now harvests around 100,000 gallons of rain and stormwater a year, on a lot and adjoining public right-of-way where the sky delivers barely 12 inches annually.

Other things have changed, too. In between our two visits, Brad Lancaster’s name kept surfacing in the places we filmed, and we heard countless times how much of an inspiration our first story with him had been. When we recently covered the Milagro cohousing community outside Tucson, whose walkable food forest turned a development into a village, its founders told us that Brad had consulted on their water-harvesting design. Such a small watershed design reminded us of his hands-on work and philosophy, indeed. Things flow toward him and out of him.

Sunday mornings with a concrete saw

The origin story deserves retelling because it inverts everything we assume about how infrastructure happens. In 1996, Brad and his neighbors started cutting holes in the city curbs. This was illegal. “We started on Sunday mornings, when no one from the city was watching,” Brad once told a University of Arizona alumni tour.

Then, in 2006, Brad published the first comprehensive practical guide to rainwater harvesting in the American Southwest. When he first contacted us through our website, the book had already reached a cult following, mainly local and small-scale. Once we understood what he was after (cities like Tucson benefiting from summer storms instead of suffering flash floods and runoff), we went to pay him a visit.

From the very first moment when we pulled up on his street, we knew there was a story to tell that could change people’s lives. Brad didn’t disappoint: tall and energetic, he welcomed our family and made our three kids, then very young, comfortable and seen since the very first instant of interaction. You can watch our first video with Brad to notice how engaged our children were, and they remember that experience to this day, because, like every good life lesson, it felt like purposeful play.

The water farmer of Zvishavane

The whole neighborhood was lush and hospitable, despite being a summer day in the desert. We learned that the idea of taking advantage of the monsoons by making small street interventions wasn’t his, and neither was the crime.

In 1995, recently out of university, Brad traveled to Zimbabwe and met Zephaniah Phiri Maseko, a farmer from the arid district of Zvishavane. The Rhodesian regime had detained and blacklisted Phiri for his politics years before, so he had to feed six children out of a poor plot at the edge of a seasonal wetland, and he did it by studying where the rain went and digging pits, terraces, and channels to keep it. For this, he was arrested three times, charged with “farming a waterway.”

The case ended in the most literal way possible: the magistrate wanted to see the land with his own eyes, walked among green terraces in a district of dust, and ruled against the government’s own land officer. A few years later, the same government was busing farmers to Phiri’s plot so they could learn his methods.

Phiri liked to say that he married the water to the soil so the land could raise a family of life, and that one has to plant the water before planting the trees. Brad returned to the Sonoran Desert carrying, in essence, an African technology: while the American Southwest kept betting on engineering hubris and concrete aqueducts, one of its most replicable water solutions came from a smallholder that the experts had prosecuted first and studied later.

Once sidewalk basins started collecting water, plants like mesquite and palo verde trees, as well as many local flowers, shrubs, and cacti, began growing at the fastest rate anyone remembered, and shade and habitat replaced barren, runoff-prone, dusty streets.

Can established realities adapt? From crime to code

The curb cuts worked. The city noticed and came to look, and instead of prosecuting anybody, it started a dialogue that lasted years. Today, the practice Brad pioneered illegally is legal, rebated, and in some cases mandatory, and in 2008, Tucson became the first city in the US to require commercial developments to harvest rainwater. What had been guerrilla work turned into ordinance language.

That thirty-year arc from crime to code was my first question for him. Walking those streets today, what does he see that even he didn’t predict?

His answer surprised me because it wasn’t about water at all. It was about parking.

“One of the things I see today, but didn’t predict,” he wrote, “was how these rain gardens would make the neighborhood much more walkable and bikeable.” In the old days, many neighbors (his own household included) parked their cars on the bare-dirt public pathways, so pedestrians had to walk on the street, and the street, emptied of parked cars, felt wider than it was, which invited drivers to speed through. When the basins and their vegetation went in, they became an accidental barrier: cars went back to parking on the street, the parked cars and the growing trees narrowed the feel of the road, traffic slowed down, and the plantings buffered the footpath from the vehicles. A hydrological intervention had turned into a traffic-calming device, a pedestrian amenity, and a wildlife corridor, all at the same time.

No line item for rabbits

“These rain gardens create a protective topography that harvests and holds seed and leaf drop where moisture collects,” he went on, “so they become mini-pocket forests of dense sheltering life where native rabbits, birds, and pollinators reside. We predicted the rain gardens would be more inviting and supportive of life, but they are far more effective than we predicted.”

This is what tends to happen when we work with living systems instead of against them: the returns compound in directions nobody had budgeted for. There was no line item for rabbits in any civil engineer’s spreadsheet.

Novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, known as the dean of Western writers, wrote that to appreciate the landscape west of the Mississippi, you first “have to get over the color green.” Decades later, in 1986, Marc Reisner, an environmental writer in the tradition of Stegner and Aldo Leopold, documented the modern obsession with taming the brown West into an irrigated utopia at taxpayer expense: damming, draining, diverting, and canal-building. The title said it all: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water.

Brad’s work reads like the counter-thesis to that book: no dams, no canals, no water imported from a river three states away, just gravity, soil, and patience.

From shovels to backhoes

But the method has evolved, and the new generation of earthworks along Tucson’s 3rd Avenue, which Brad has been filming these days as the summer storms hit, shows how far it has come.

“When we began in 1996, all was done by hand by volunteers with shovels,” he told me in the interview for this article. “The early basins were much smaller because you can only push volunteers so much, and digging in our compact urban soils is very difficult.” Now a backhoe does the brutal work, the basins are far larger, water-harvesting contractors stabilize the banks, and the volunteers arrive for the part that matters most, which is the planting itself. “The volunteers grow deeper roots in their community as they work with their neighbors, all the while literally planting roots in the ground.”

Once accepted by local codes, “planting rain” is a thing in places like Tucson, centuries after the Native peoples of this same desert, the Hohokam and their O’odham descendants, as well as pre-Columbian civilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andes, had used similar techniques to stretch the little water they could get. Ancient “low” tech turned into “low high-tech,” as efficient, redundant, and repairable as it can get.

A neighborhood that metabolizes its own waste

The materials have changed as well, and in a direction I find quietly radical. Instead of trucking in mined rock to stabilize the basin banks, the neighborhood now uses “urbanite,” broken chunks of demolished sidewalk and concrete, along with storm-fallen logs from neighborhood trees. I asked whether that was cost-cutting or philosophy, and it turns out it’s both, though mostly philosophy.

“Using salvaged urbanite and storm-fallen branches turns ‘wastes’ into resources,” he wrote, “and shows the community that there are free resources we can use that do not need to be purchased and imported from elsewhere. What we need is already here, freely available, if we can just learn to see it and use it. The logs are also better habitat for lizards, insects, and soil-life.”

A neighborhood metabolizing its own waste stream; the same sidewalk that once sealed the watershed, broken up and repurposed to hold open the basins that heal it. If I had to choose a single image for the whole project, it would probably be that one.

Institutional judo

The part of Brad’s work that fascinates many people most, including us (perhaps because we spend our days looking at how land regulation shapes what gets built), is the institutional judo. Water-harvesting basins in the street double as traffic-calming chicanes and roundabouts, which means that the same hole in the ground answers to two city bureaucracies that famously don’t talk to each other: the transportation department, which sees stormwater as a nuisance to be drained, and the water department, which in a drying Tucson increasingly sees rain as supply.

How do you sell one piece of infrastructure to two agencies with opposite definitions of the same water?

“By looking at the larger whole, ‘problems’ can become solutions,” Brad answered. Stormwater directed off the street stops being transportation’s flooding problem and becomes the water department’s free irrigation. The vegetation it grows then shades the asphalt, “reducing vaporization, cracking, and potholing,” which hands transportation a maintenance win it never asked for. Surplus water sinks past the roots and recharges the aquifer everyone shares. “When speaking with city officials, I try to understand their challenges, and then help solve them with our community planting efforts.”

It sounds almost too diplomatic coming from a man who started out with an illegal saw, though it describes the full arc of any effective subversion: first you break the law to prove the concept, then you learn to speak fluent bureaucrat to scale it.

“We need to make it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing,” he wrote when I asked which fight comes next. “Legalize and incentivize life-giving practices, while making it much more difficult to continue with life-taking practices.”

Sun-baked parking lots that pave the watershed and drain away the rain don’t make sense; lots shaded by native trees irrigated with their own runoff make more sense; retrofitting car-dominated neighborhoods until fewer lots are needed at all makes the most sense of all.

Why pass the hat after thirty years

Which brings us to the fundraiser, and to the question I felt slightly rude asking: after three decades, books translated into Arabic and Turkish and soon Spanish, an international lecture circuit, and a model so proven the city wrote it into law, why is Brad Lancaster crowdfunding?

His answer is a small civics lesson for 2026. “The city is under-resourced and making cuts to its budgets, and rebates are shrinking,” he wrote. The crowdfunding, run through the Ma Earth platform under the banner Plant the Rain, is a workaround and a demonstration at once: independent money lets the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters build cheaper, more progressive designs than the city’s own standards allow, which then become pilot projects the city can copy. “It enables our community efforts to scale up and prove how much more effective we can be, in a way that shares the designs, process, and knowledge with other neighborhoods so they can do the same or better without having to reinvent the wheel.”

Unlike most campaigns of this kind, the $100,000 goal is itemized down to the detail: new basins, chicanes, and roundabouts built with urbanite and storm logs; advocacy for parking-lot canopy mandates and simpler greywater ordinances; three new books, including a children’s book; multilingual plant signage; wildlife surveys; and pre-paying local native-plant growers to raise rare species, which removes the grower’s risk entirely. Even the plant procurement is designed as a regenerative loop.

There’s also a deadline that matters: donations up to $15,000 made by July 21 are doubled by a matching grant, enough to fund the next phase of water-harvesting traffic-calming in the neighborhood. The campaign continues after that date, but the match doesn’t.

I’ll say plainly what Brad is too courteous to say: the ideas that fill our feeds with hope, the videos of curb cuts and desert food forests that channels like ours, Andrew Millison’s, and Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t have carried to millions of viewers, are made by a handful of people working on shoestrings while the ideas travel for free. Every once in a while, the shoestring deserves reinforcement.

Two people, one shovel, one tree

I’m writing this from the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia, a landscape that has spent recent years lurching in and out of drought emergency, where reservoirs made the evening news the way stock indexes do, and some towns had to truck in their drinking water. Tucson’s 12 inches of rain a year is an extreme case, but the logic of Dunbar/Spring is not exotic here, and it isn’t exotic anywhere people have paved their watersheds, which nowadays means almost everywhere.

So I asked Brad the question I’d want answered if I were reading this in Barcelona, Lisbon, or Phoenix: what is step one, and what is the mistake everyone makes?

“It only takes two people, one shovel, and one tree to start a community tree planting project,” he wrote. But the tree must be native to your area and microclimate, and its reasoning goes beyond survival rates and sounds almost like an ecological syllogism: over 90% of most baby birds’ food is caterpillars, and the caterpillars of native butterflies and moths cannot eat non-native plants, whose chemical defenses they never evolved to handle. “If you do not have native plants you will not have baby birds, nor the adults they become.” Planting an ornamental from another continent is, in this sense, like planting a statue.

As for the universal mistake? “They don’t plant the rain before they plant the plant.” Shape the earth first so the sky becomes your free irrigation, and you’ll never need to buy the drip lines, the timer, or the water bill that comes attached to them. It’s Phiri’s old lesson, one generation and one hemisphere later, unchanged because it was correct.

An oasis at the expense of none

Late in our second visit to Brad last spring, somewhere between the goats and the improved shondo and the cisterns, I thought about the word oasis, which the Southwest has abused perhaps more than any other. In Scottsdale, a swimming pool passes for an oasis; outside Las Vegas, a golf course does. Every one of them is a transfer: water taken from a river, from an aquifer, from a future, and displayed as if it had been conjured out of nothing.

My last question to Brad was about abundance, what the word means to him after thirty years of harvesting a desert sky. His answer is the closest thing the movement has to a creed, and I’ll leave it nearly whole.

“Regenerative abundance is joy,” he wrote. “It is the joy that comes from knowing I am contributing to the life around me at the expense of none. I am not taking water away from others to have an artificial oasis. Regenerative abundance is helping grow, steward, and learn from a TRUE oasis that takes from no one, that does not extract and import resources from elsewhere, but instead nudges and leverages what is already freely at hand to grow its potential and capacity for the benefit and greater health of all.”

An oasis at the expense of none: in an economy, a politics, and a climate built almost entirely on oases at somebody’s expense, that may well be the most subversive thing Brad Lancaster has ever cut into a curb.

Brad’s fundraiser is called Plant the Rain. Donations up to $15,000 made by July 21 are matched dollar for dollar, and the campaign continues after that date. Our new video from this latest visit with Brad is coming soon; the first one, from a decade ago, is where this story began.

I remember going to the beach nearby on a hot early summer day, the five of us in our yellow Renault 12: no AC, all windows down, gasping for some air when the traffic stopped as we tried to reach Castelldefels, the town down the coast just outside Barcelona, later chosen by players like Messi to set their roots.

People knew how to hydrate, and perhaps temperatures, if high and humid in summer, were less likely to reach the dangerous levels of today’s occasional heatwaves.

Arconada, Sócrates, and a room thick with Ducados

That early summer, all I remember people talking about was the blunder by Arconada, the usually spotless Basque goalkeeper, which complicated Spain’s chances. Real Sociedad dominated Spanish soccer back then, believe it or not, and I wanted their jersey. Those were the days when Brazil played like the angels, and Sócrates’ Brazil was probably — along with Johan Cruyff’s Mechanical Orange — the best team to ever play a World Cup and not win it.

Sócrates, what a player. Perhaps we didn’t deserve it. A dancer on the field with a medical degree, as towering as exquisite, playing the “jogo bonito” like no other, before or after.

Of all the matches played, all I remember is adults smoking and drinking cold beer and “clara,” Cinzano, Kas and Schweppes soda, and my siblings and I trying to get as much cold Fanta as we could. And an Italian player, Marco Tardelli, running as he shook his fists after scoring the 2-0 against West Germany in the final, perhaps the most endearing goal celebration I’ve ever seen. Things become more intense when experienced for the first time.

And so, the memories end here: a t-shirt with a happy-looking anthropomorphic orange, an unfortunate blunder turning off adults in a room thick with Ducados — the local dark tobacco — smoke, the long trips to the beach nearby, and a dramatic goal celebration by one Italian player.

Another World Cup, this time in our backyard

As I write this, there’s another World Cup playing in our backyard, this time in North America, where I live. And Team U.S. is playing near us today at San Jose’s Levi’s Stadium to try to beat Bosnia and Herzegovina and advance to the Round of 16. The other two organizers, Canada and Mexico, have already secured their advance, and you can feel the excitement in their press and throughout social media.

These memories emerged as I recently saw people commenting on no-AC Europe, and this was somehow related to many Western European fans coming to the US for the World Cup, plus my son getting excited about the game, like I had not seen him do before.

That’s what the World Cup does: once the ball is rolling, most people forget about debates over the sport’s relative position in the United States, the price of tickets, the animosity towards political leaders, or any other contingencies.

FIFA adapted the format to make the show even more palatable to the global audience that cares about the sport all season, especially to engage with the American public, which is only fully interested every two years (for those following the successful Women’s team) or every four.

A tournament played by the rules of the Americas

The changes were brought in for the show, and it seems to be working so far, as we are all talking about what’s happening on the pitch, not off it. Underdogs are already attracting skeptics to the World Cup, with emotion and drama, as the knockout matches often end in close scores and penalty kicks, allowing Paraguay to beat Germany and Morocco to prevail against the Netherlands.

So far, European teams are struggling to adapt their technical, strategic, and speculative game to a World Cup that seems to be played by the philosophy and rules of the Americas: intensity, physicality, counter-attack, and some room for improvisation.

There were more and arguably weaker teams at the group stage to increase the opportunity for stars to shine early on; there is a hydration pause dividing a sport that evolved from having two halves — with the strategic path laws that it requires — into effective quarters (taken advantage of by TV to show ads) that break any focus and momentum; and a focus on individual stars rather than overall team performance.

The time is ripe to get the pulse of this early summer with World Cup competition, hosted in North America, no less, as well as the United States’ semiquincentennial on Saturday, the 4th of July. We’ll be celebrating also Kirsten’s birthday on the 3rd, but don’t tell anybody. I hope you feel invited and accept our telekinetic invitation. So far, the tournament’s accommodations in North America are holding up fairly well, with stadiums full and fans having a good time overall, as the meme machine shows online.

One can see South American fans trashing each other when talking about their respective national teams, then joining in to cheer together the victory of Paraguay against Germany; also, Uruguayan fans and commentators were surprised to see so many supporters wearing shirts of Spain in Guadalajara during their match against Spain, to realize most of them were local fans used to following Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. The tensions between a supposed Latin American allegiance over the perceived historical ties between Mexico and Spain were being debated on X, Reddit, and other platforms.

World Cups also play with long memory and generational curses. The Moroccan team, through their coach, (who said, speaking flawless Spanish to the local press, that Morocco, one of the organizers of the next World Cup, will give the support back to Mexico when it’s due) and also some of the players, thanked the local public for their warm hospitality, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, as many remember when The Netherlands kicked Mexico out the 2014 World Cup.

No news is good news, and Cape Verde ties three

First thing I’m glad to highlight, much in the vein of old school reporting, is the motto “no news is good news,” which reminds us all that a lack of big updates regarding the World Cup celebration (with its many geopolitical and logistics-wise challenges), which seems to go on with no important hiccups for most teams and supporters, even when they had to travel from one country to another to attend any given match.

Many people liked that Cape Verde, a small island nation off the coast of Africa, managed to tie its three group matches — those with Spain and Uruguay included — and advanced to the knockouts for the first time. It was just the beginning of many surprises and debates, among them the animosity towards the supposed self-importance of European teams and fans who have claimed the sport’s Eurocentrism, and the realization that taking down any team from the Americas (especially from CONMEBOL, the physically ruthless South American teams) is no easy task.

No question these Cinderella stories, which happen in real time and sometimes cause real upsets, are a part of the magic of a competition that is less about actual football and more about emotion and sporting rivalries, sometimes — along with the most iconic competitions in the Olympics — as big as they can get without having to settle things in a war.

Besides some upsets happening even before the competition (I hear you, Italian and Italian-American fans who still remember or were told about the passion that followed Roberto Baggio and the rest of the squadra azzurra in 1994) and on the pitch, there were other news items worth mentioning, though not deal-breakers.

Where the welcome runs thin

The competition hasn’t been as welcoming for all, however. The Iranian team, and especially its technical staff, didn’t have it as easy as they envisioned, and they at least had the chance to express what had happened, which reminds us how important it is to appreciate when we feel welcome somewhere; often, when one doesn’t feel welcome somewhere, there’s a reason for it, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatantly in the open.

Iran was ultimately eliminated when Austria scored a last-minute equalizer against Algeria, perhaps relieving some fears among the central delegation organizing this event. Nothing beyond what was expected. As with the Olympics, the World Cup can always be read as a show of cultural and political alliances and animosities, or as a display of outright belligerence.

Among the “not good news at all” popping up these days, amid the sports event and the special 4th of July celebration: the last group matches observed a minute of silence before the game for the other big event happening in the Americas in the latest few days, which brought everyone back to reality (but perhaps not for the time it should deserve, as some people might still be alive, unrescued, under the rubble after the earthquakes in Venezuela.

When the gesture wasn’t observed by a section of the public before Uruguay’s World Cup clash against Spain in Guadalajara, Mexico, it prompted widespread criticism online; at least some people will leave the jokes (often shockingly harsh and funny).

The magnitude, measured in World Cup terms

That said, the World Cup has really taken over the most vociferous side of social media, as the death toll rises over 1,700, and over 50,000 people might be missing. Just to understand the magnitude in World Cup terms: Curaçao, the least populous contender, has a population of 158,000 people, and the tiny island nation (already eliminated) happens to be also the closest geographically, located in the southern Caribbean Sea, just about 40 miles off the coast.

Worth noting as the party goes on, and two other Venezuelan close neighbors, Colombia and Ecuador, are still in competition — both very capable of delivering a shocker that won’t probably rival Paraguay’s victory in penalty kicks against Germany, at least right away, but they’ve shown they could outcompete any team in the world. After eliminating Germany, Paraguay’s coach talked poetically about the true meaning of it all:

“I was telling you: the opponent we had in front, with all my respect, were formed in first-rate European academies. We come from the red dirt [soccer fields]; the shirt we wear shows that red dirt on a stripe. [We come from] playing barefoot in that dirt, thanks to the sacrifice of many parents struggling to bring the kids to practice, and thanks often to those parents who make a huge effort despite lacking enough money to make it to the end of the month, so their kids can have a chance to realize their dreams.”

Meanwhile, the tweet of a young German fan just landing in the US, passport in hand, hours before the match, was used by many, including the famously passive-aggressive X account of the Irish low-fares airline Ryanair, to pick at the symbolic wound of a historic defeat. It won’t be the last one among the big names.

And so, this brings the “no news is good news” (that is, “no news” outside the pitch) to a comfortable, but far from ideal, terrain: the organizers delivered, and the public in the United States, Mexico, and Canada is showing their genuine enthusiasm and welcoming character, staying out of any political tensions that preceded and will outlast the event.

Showing a bit of magnanimity and goodwill can go a long way, and so, most teams and foreign supporters have expressed online that they’ve felt welcomed and cared for in every single venue, no matter which of the three countries. Or, as said by Mike Bloomberg: “The World Cup is more than a tournament. It’s a reminder of how sports can bring people, cultures, and communities together.” The funny thing is, it’s mostly true, even if it sounds a bit like some statement pre-cooked at some fancy consulting firm’s HR department.

The stereotypes each side keeps of the other

Events like the World Cup also bring high-caliber trolling and social media confrontations among random people who usually avoid engaged participation online for obvious reasons. As a European living in California, married to an American, and father of bi-national kids who speak more than one Romance language who feel, at least in part, Catalan and Spanish, what I’m most enjoying is the commentary that the competition is bringing regarding stereotypes and realities (often distorted) faced on one side and another of the Atlantic.

The tournament’s kickoff coincided with a heat wave in Western Europe, and many European fans arriving at the last minute in the US to support their respective national teams commented on the relief of arriving in a culture that has relied on the convenience of Air Conditioning for decades.

These “perceptions of suburban affluence” from international supporters were met with both irony and pride. I read about “Europoors” and our stubbornness to endure the pummeling heat, even during increasingly dangerous heat waves.

What the “Europoors” joke leaves out

There’s a point of truth in the erratic approach of Europeans towards the use of modern HVAC systems, even if most of the commentary was infantile and biased, missing crucial parts of the context that explains this particular situation: most European environments are more dense, more people live in old apartments and brick-and-mortar constructions with codes that protect their facades from having AC appliances hanging from the walls or windows.

There are also other considerations. If possible in the past, dangerous heat waves remained rare in most of Western Europe until recently, and, in Mediterranean Europe, many vernacular styles developed complex and effective strategies to combat heat, especially in non-humid areas where evaporative cooling techniques (for example, by watering interior gardens twice a day) are efficient and palliative.

That said, today’s summers require more radical approaches, and being late to AC could also be one advantage, as it is the more regulatory environment of the European Union when it comes to adopting radical, top-down approaches to emergencies: today’s heat-pump HVAC systems aren’t only cost-efficient and have less impact, they are also less noisy and don’t get people sick as they don’t turn indoor areas into freezers.

One of the first cultural shocks I experienced during my first visit to New York City in the middle of a sticky heat wave was the noise from the leaky AC systems in the building we were staying in. It wasn’t as hot inside, but I couldn’t sleep anyway, unaccustomed to the noise of always-on appliances next to the bed. It felt a bit like trying to sleep on an airplane. I certainly didn’t perceive it as paradise, and I would have gladly swapped it for my bed in Barcelona (no AC, window open, a cold shower before bed).

Also, coming from any city in Western Europe, it’s hard for me to believe that most visitors coming from places like Paris, Milan, London, or Amsterdam are going to gasp in disbelief as they see American suburban homes, with their lawns and multiple cars, or any Costco or Wal-Mart, or any fast-food joint.

The old supermarket propaganda, updated

Americans should be wary of social media accounts that oversell the many good things about American culture and the American experiment overall: some of those “people” might be paid to sugarcoat their way into your feed, while at the same time dunking on their apparent countries of origin. Who would do that among people who pay thousands of dollars (or tens of thousands) to support their own country?

Stadiums, supermarkets, and convenience at reasonable prices? Most people have those things over there, and many, many of our friends in Western Europe prefer to walk to buy a few groceries at nearby stores rather than drive to a huge Carrefour (or any other big distribution center overseas). Besides, one of the fastest-growing grocery chains in the United States, with high customer satisfaction rates, is Aldi, the German distribution company that also owns Trader Joe’s, another brand that cultivates customer engagement.

To me, these quarrels are at best funny and contribute to the big party of the World Cup, but at worst, it can feel a bit like the public campaigns contrasting Western affluence vs. privation in the Communist Bloc of yesteryear, picturing Western well-stocked supermarkets versus the material poverty of the population of the Soviet Union and the rest of Communist Europe, depicting people waiting in line to get any of the few generic products they had the right to before they were out. Older Europeans remember them because many of them experienced those privations themselves (including millions of Germans, as depicted in the 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin!).

It’s all a bit artificial, like two kids comparing their parents’ houses or cars due to some deep insecurity. Europeans can certainly see the affluence of many places across the United States, and many might even marvel at the beauty of some stadiums (including those in Mexico, like the impressive Estadio BBVA in Monterrey, Mexico); many of them are informed enough to understand that, comparatively, the European Union has stagnated in the last two decades, at least from a macroeconomic perspective, if we compare the trajectory of the respective GDPs. But comparing the feelings of German, English, or Dutch fans in the US with the equivalent of North Korean peasants being dropped in some ideal Pleasantville feels a bit off-point and prefabricated.

I’m sure most Americans following the World Cup are aware that many of the problems experienced by European countries also apply to their own, from the concerning increase in the cost of living relative to stagnant median salaries, to more abstract trends that end up affecting their lives: public debt ratio with respect to actual economic activity, low fertility rates, etc. There’s also shared overall dissatisfaction regarding household economies or a negative perception of political institutions or elites.

What the kids will remember

Seeing how the World Cup brings people together to celebrate, curse, argue, and meme-ify, we’re reminded that the game is much more than a sports celebration. As it happens also with some moments at the Olympics, the World Cup blends organic, bottom-up emotion and high diplomacy, and it can be cruel, unfair at times (seen that second German goal, disallowed by VAR?), and surprisingly majestic.

Everything that comes with it, even if it’s about the “AC wars,” is part of the show. In context, all the current World Cup shows is how prepared every team is, which means any team can leave unexpectedly early. Many Europeans will see the rest of the competition from home, perhaps with no AC. But saying that people coming from Europe feel how poor they are as they set foot in the US smells a bit like paid AgitProp.

To me, it feels like magnifying US travelers flying into Paris for the first time and seeing a street “brocante,” and an improvised flea market full of animation and precious old things under the shadow of Haussmannian buildings and tree-covered little squares, and gasping at the day-in-the-life beauty of it, as they compare it to a bland, utilitarian yard sale somewhere in the suburban area of the US where they come from. You can’t compare apples to oranges; both continents are complex and prosperous, and to many, prosperity can mean different things.

We’d better focus on the celebrations and hope for the best. When we feel that the “no news is good news” applies, we have one more thing to celebrate.

Let’s remember, these things leave memories, moments to share with others. Also opportunities to be kind and magnanimous, and others when epic, relentless competition applies. Adults should also be aware that some kids will remember those moments well into their middle age. Perhaps forever. Let’s enjoy and let others enjoy.

Update: when I started this article’s draft, Ecuador was still in the competition, but by the time it was published, Ecuador had already been eliminated by Mexico. Colombia and Brazil are the only close neighbors of Venezuela (epicenter of the recent earthquake) still in the competition.

The young GenX (people born from the late seventies to the late eighties) and old millennial cohorts became adults during a transition period of innocence on the Internet.

We are old enough to have extensively used rich media applications when the only way to do so was to resort to external drives, CD-Roms, and DVD-Roms. And, sometime between the release of Doom II and Quake, we realized the personal computing and the online world were about to converge really fast.

In that moment, right before Mac OS transitioned to the Unix-based NeXT architecture — when any Windows system, even the fairly decent iterations (NT, patched 98, etc.), painfully crashed if we were too ambitious opening browser windows (before tabs were a thing, mind you) or concurrent applications —, things could have gone either way usability-wise.

Before tabs were a thing

Everything was possible, but things were so painfully primitive that some people’s job at the office was to babysit their email inbox (I’m old enough to have used Eudora), a few spreadsheets, a word processor, and any of the quirky, very-primitive corporate interfaces back then, real proto-CRM monstrosities.

One of my first paid jobs, still at college, was at a Poble Nou (Barcelona) call center where we helped people connect to the Internet via modem; it wasn’t pretty, and I learned a lot about human behavior just by handling people over the phone.

It was a temporary and miserably paid job, and many of my managers and co-workers looked and behaved like characters in a Kevin Smith movie arranged in a cubicle maze: the overly cynical, alienated Philip-Seymour-Hoffman type next to me, the silent girl ever so close to crying in silence when a call hit too hard, the goth boss with The Cure’s Robert Smith-inspired hair and looks, the bachelor who hasn’t noticed yet that he’s hit 45.

The cubicle maze

I couldn’t say we were friends, but we silently felt like brothers and sisters in arms, a bit like ancient privates rowing in unison in a vessel if they wanted to make it another day. We “knew” what it took to handle nasty calls for hours at a time. But it was also because of how hard and soul-crushing the work was sometimes — even when your immediate superior wasn’t listening when things got really rough with a customer — that some interactions that one of us turned around felt like victories silently cheered by the little clusters of co-workers who had been aware of the interaction in between calls, or during them.

One of those late 90s little victories (perhaps the summer of 1999) arrived when some hard-working bootstrapped boss from somewhere in the middle of Spain; I believe he’d been paying for a service he hadn’t been able to get to work, probably one of the first DSL packages offered, in several locations. At the beginning of the call, I was so sure he was leaving the Internet provider we were taking calls for, and I was trying to figure out how to strategize, getting as many hints as I could about his level of outrage over the situation.

Surprisingly, I felt the person on the other side of the line was quite a rational and decent person, probably middle-aged, as I am now. He just wasn’t going to take it anymore and wanted either the service he was paying for, or a refund. So I talked him into a compromise, after scaling the conversation to our technical and logistics departments and getting back to him with a clear path to realistically solve the case.

There was only one big problem, however: we all were among the canaries in the coal mine, among the first helpdesk clerks trying to appease people (”customers”) who were getting used to a new reality that demanded instant, unequivocal answers; a culture appealing to instant gratification circuitry was in the making.

Nevertheless, I finally tasted the waters in the conversation and told him his connection would not get back right away, nor in a few hours, because there was a missing preinstallation between his telephone connection and the most immediate communications node, which required some servicing.

“You know you can sell me whatever you want”

So I improvised and told him that I would personally follow up on the case and call him, breaking one of the golden rules: I told him my name, the odd hours I was there, and how to reach me. He finally hung up, but before doing so, he said: “Come on, Nicolas, you know you can sell me whatever you want.” It could have been a critique, but it wasn’t.

That was my interaction with someone who happened to be a big shot in his area — I would find out a little later —, and knowing I had turned the thing around just by basic decency and instinct told me a thing or two, in retrospect.

I obviously made the call to fix this customer’s issue because I could afford to lose that job, which I only had because it was compatible with my last year at college and because it started late, going sometimes until midnight or one in the morning, and the area the office was located meant I sometimes finished the day (after a day of class in Bellaterra, outside Barcelona) and some of my buddies were partying nearby. Sometimes it was hard to say no, and I stayed if it was a Friday or Saturday night.

Two browser windows

One of the things you could do in that job, as long as you and your colleagues were taking calls as they were coming in, so we avoided managers hovering over our necks, was to open a couple of browser windows (you didn’t want to crash the computer, already fuming with the customer support application) and: “surf” the Internet at random on one window, for pages were fairly miserable (let’s not romanticize too much); and look other opportunities on the other browser window by seeing which jobs got posted on Infojobs.net, the local online recruiting site.

That’s how I got to know about a small publishing company opening a magazine about technology and lifestyle, much in the style of Wired, which was looking for an editor-in-chief. I was young and underprepared, but I got that job a few weeks later.

Like many, one of the first times I realized the potential of online resources was when one of those customer center colleagues recommended that we switch from Altavista to Google to perform web searches, abandoning any taxonomic page like Yahoo! and the myriad of knockoffs altogether. It felt refreshing and game-changing in many ways, because it sort of “worked,” and many of us were glad when they were soon integrated within Yahoo! as their “search engine.”

Many of us were still crashing our computers when we were trying to do anything unconventional, or when some page’s entering a loop would mean you needed three or four minutes to get things back to work again. If you’ve seen co-workers or college mates so angry at their computer terminal as to stand up and think about ripping it apart from the desk when a useless Macromedia Flash animation crippled their computer’s RAM memory due to the limitations of pre-Chromium browsers, you know what I mean.

A social experiment

In those early days, when people still checked into newsgroups protocols outside the World Wide Web, not even blogs seemed inevitable, let alone pervasive broadband, always-on smartphones, or 99.9% uptime webapps, let alone heavily subsidized AI.

That’s why things were more innocent, and many of us had the feeling that, by choosing which amateurish page we were visiting, we were contributing to some sort of positive social experiment run by nerds, half cooperativist, half Wild West, with an optimistic allure, a bit like the early attempts of turning hypertext into a learning utopia capable of exponentially augmenting knowledge, as if it were the second coming of Vannevar Bush’s Memex and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, this time for real.

Among the things that seemed to start working was that search engine that seemed to be designed to load fast in your shaky browser without crashing it, serve you a decent response, ranked by actual measurable relevance, and facilitate the click to send you packing as soon as possible.

Designed to send you packing

It was probably the first time I realized the actual potential of the web, just as it was still very difficult to create anything at all that carried complex graphics, let alone JavaScript tasks, embedded high-definition video, etc.

It didn’t take much time for that apparently innocent company to serve ads in the most efficient, global, and decentralized way ever seen, and just as I was finishing college with a degree in “communication sciences,” classified ads were beginning their meteoric transition from print, local media, into the Internet.

And so, much as AI coding tools are beginning to affect the prospects of computer science graduates, we entered adulthood knowing that the world was about to change big time.

The world didn’t end a few months later in 2000, and soon enough, I wrote many stories about how many dotcom companies were going belly up. Just as a prairie fire spreading in a flash gives way to better grass right away, we were soon enough writing about the incipient advances that would lead to the mobile internet and the so-called Web 2.0 wave. Overall, the Internet was maturing into a commercial, more corporate juggernaut, and sites failed less, while expectations were higher.

Still complementary to analog life

Until the arrival of smartphones and pervasive broadband, however, the internet felt complementary to analog life, unable to replicate books, magazines, and high-definition multimedia. The whole web felt a bit like the early Google, you could do a query and get to visit a few places and do some things, but much of the meaty stuff was still offline. But to many people, it was already clear that things were about to change. And they did; in fact, things changed so fast that, if I explain this text to my kids, they are going to believe it, but they’ll also look at me funny, not capable of picturing how things were.

Perhaps the change they are experiencing now, as our older daughter is roughly the age of that call center me I was picturing, feels to them a bit the same way I sensed things were about to accelerate when I found myself returning over and over to that quirky site with the nerdy math-graduate name from a peripheral country. Only that company now has a valuation of over four trillion dollars and is once again among the ones rewriting the way most of us will get to do things, both casual and extraordinary.

Still, one thing among many of the ones that have changed in the paradigm, caught my attention. That first search engine blank box that seemed to finally work for the benefit of many wanted to send you places.

Now, AI chatboxes are causing the opposite, intentionally or not: as they entice you to ask things in the blank space, it’s fairly easy to get used to their effective summarization and skewed knowledge “allocation.” And so, there’s a risk of staying there and not visit other resources. What this behavior will culturally create, we’re about to find out.

Many kids are alright so far

Personally, I try to fight the temptation by reminding myself that I can do better by double-checking and thinking about other possibilities on my own. What worries me is that, for a generation that hasn’t seen an analog way of setting up, say, a hypothesis or an arc for something one wants to write, there’s a temptation not to develop a sense of critical thinking that takes some time and effort to develop, and that I’m afraid can atrophy.

Then, I start talking to our kids, and after a couple of conversations and an incredible show of their witty, skeptical selves, I conclude that I might be portraying a worst-case scenario and not what I see happening. But is everyone as well-equipped? Or am I taking the optimistic perspective my kids see about the future?

A part of it comes with age, that’s sure; it might also have a cultural part, now that they live in California and their everyday friends are from here. Perhaps not everything is rosy in the Bay Area, especially housing and cost of living, but once you’re in, it’s overall a dynamic, fairly positive society to be in, which I’m not sure I fully share, coming from a place where you’re supposed to cultivate a sense of cynicism about existence, which also helps people grow more resilient and developing a certain sense to also see life from a more existential, less materialistic point of view.

The verb that outlived its act

It’s interesting to see how things have evolved. In 2002, which in internet time is just prehistory, the American Dialect Society (ADS) called “to google” — a verb already then, not just a company — “the most useful word of the year.” It was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006. That said, people were already using the gerund, “googling,” right after the company was founded in 1998. That’s four years before the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the neologism slip in one of its episodes, when Willow asked Buffy, “Have you googled her yet?”

It’s interesting that, as of today, Google keeps in its /philosophy section, their founding creed, which now holds less and less as people spend more time asking Gemini and less clicking on results:

“We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web, you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second.”

The turnstile becomes the destination

Older millenials and young GenXers were the last cohort that grew up in a world in which online search was to leave as quickly as possible, because search was built and meant to work as a turnstile, a threshold you crossed and exited: it didn’t answer your question, nor fabricated it à la carte for you, and the verb encoded promised that, to google was a round trip that became more bloated with ads and dysfunction over time, although it stayed so much more relevant than any other possible alternative.

Now, as the success signal isn’t leaving anymore, younger generations are getting so used to enter an AI chat and stay to get answers, that the mere framework of thinking that knowledge self-reinforces by contrasting different sources is beginning to feel like a byproduct of another era. The turnstile becomes the destination, and so the verb “to google,” which was one of passage, may outlive the act it names, the same way “to dial” survived the rotary phone (a device that our children would struggle to ace intuitively).

So, if the first Google and imitators bypassed local print by sending readers onto the open web, the company’s second incarnation aims at keeping them engaged in the chat, enriched by its own ecosystem of tools and user-generated entertainment. Competitors may follow suit.

It’s clear we have entered a transformative moment, and we’ve been in a similar spot many times before, even though this time might be a bit different, for it’s not only mere acceleration, but a change that could turn human cognition into a commodity for most tasks, leaving only a small group of people capable of differentiating their added value through craft that might be either difficult or silly to replicate, or associated to its creator.

What Maine and Texas had to say after all

Perhaps, among the first to see the very beginning of this trend was Henry David Thoreau, no less. Thoreau wrote Walden in the era when Samuel Morse’s telegraph went commercial. It was a device to deliver information not only faster but also reliably. Though, he thought, no investor seemed to be interested in the content of those messages and the ultimate purpose of speeding things up:

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The risk, Thoreau mused, was making technological progress; things ought to be ever faster and more efficient across a country that expanded coast to coast, and from North America to the rest of the world through submarine cables. But prioritizing speed of communication over what to communicate was conceding the victory of efficiency over substance and quality.

Almost two centuries later, we know that speed doesn’t necessarily make a message worse, but it certainly looks like it at times.

I’m sure Thoreau’s friends and relations ended up benefitting, directly or indirectly, from using the telegraph. Certainly, his persona grew and he became a popular intellectual of his time, just as his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson did.

Which drummer, at what pace

What AI is going to suppose to the new generations is also about us deciding what our role will be in it. By looking at what happened with the telegraph and later with mass electrification, with the telephone and mass media, and finally with the more recent combo of broadband internet and interconnected devices, we can guess what could happen: with great technological change there’s always a backlash and, at the same time, mass adoption of the advances.

Thoreau was, in part, wrong. Maine and Texas did indeed have things to say to each other, and the wire he suspected of carrying nothing turned out to be capable of tilting markets and wars, as well as spreading knowledge. If the new invention could announce in an instant an armistice or tell a family that their son was alive, or the price of raw materials to produce goods, the realization that the world had become interconnected, suddenly smaller and quantifiable, didn’t escape some people.

That said, Thoreau’s warning was also a realization: things were about to accelerate quite a bit, and it was up to people to decide the sound of which drummer to follow and at what path. What’s plausibly different this time is where the change lands, because the telegraph, mass media, or the pervasive internet dictated how fast, how far, how many. Now it’s also about the very message that those advances carry, the part that used to be human cognition itself: the forming of the question, the building of an arc.

The machine offers to do the choosing

That’s not acceleration, I’d argue to my unpreoccupied kids. It’s an offer to do the thinking for us. The imaginary deal of many was to get AI to cover all the menial tasks so we could do the thinking, and so far it’s going the opposite way: AI offers to do the thinking, leaving nothing other than the menial tasks on the table.

That reversal scrambles the bargain we expected from every prior technological advance. With the telegraph, electrification, the telephone, pervasive internet, we got an improvement over a similar type of bargain: the machine does the carrying, we do the choosing. The agentic web does something entirely different. It offers to do the choosing itself, while it leaves us the carrying.

Many are already handing it over with little hesitation — not the errands but the thinking, even the strategy, which is the one part of the day worth protecting.

What I want to make sure my kids hear is that the easy version of this bargain is the one to be most suspicious of.

My dad’s family comes from a hamlet of a few old houses clustered around an ancient tree that actually stood on someone’s property, though that family, self-conscious of the symbolic importance of the tree for late-spring and summer gatherings, never used their little meadow exclusively.

A tree at the center of the hamlet

Every summer when I was a kid, all the adults of the hamlet gathered under that big tree, under which there was an old millstone they used as a table to play cards, checkers, or dominoes. It looked a bit like one of those Flemish and Dutch paintings of harvesters collecting grain and resting in the shade of a tree at noon, some simply gathering, others eating, and others napping.

Take, for example, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565).

Such images are soothing to me, and I have the intuition that my visceral attraction to them has a lot to do with those summer scenes under the big tree at the very center of a small, forsaken little hamlet in northwest Spain, where all the adult residents (many of them elder and each other’s relatives one way or another) had their little chat, or played cards, some of them napping with one eye and looking after the noisy children with the other eye.

Entropy, and the awe that fades

This is also a story that has a lot to do with entropy. As I grew up, the tree looked less majestic and towering to me, perhaps because I had grown and also seen more places, perhaps because, as we grow, our ability to connect and feel in awe with other living things fades away as we are forced to be productive and associate casual leisure with something to reduce, optimize, or be ashamed of.

Finally, as I became an adult, another transformation happened to that little hamlet around a big tree with gathering powers: the old people who had stopped by every single day of the summer, talking and sleeping, snacking and playing with the kids, or playing cards or checkers, began to fade away, and the newer generations were too busy to stop by anymore.

The last time I revisited the place, now a tiny part of a whole administrative town where a cousin of mine (one that I used to play with growing up, whom people confused with me when we were kids) happens to be now the mayor, I saw that little private meadow that in summer welcomed all the neighborhood fenced, and the tree heavily pruned, diminished.

But this is not an allegation against private property, for the owner of that particular country house where the old big tree partially sits as a natural hedge between the meadow and an old, narrow road (a first cousin of my father, indeed) made the changes way after the old magic of the place had dissipated like the morning mist in a dream.

Coming back to an emptied village

No one on the street; most of them, simply gone of old age (many past 90), my own grandmother and aunts and uncles included; and the rest working and even living in the cities nearby, too busy to step out of their routine, treating the houses of their ancestors as weekend solitary retreats at best.

Also gone are the improvised soccer games that many kids from the whole village used to play in summer at the church fields and the nearby gathering area on a hill with a stone cross, as Spaniards have fewer kids, since the country has dealt with a birthrate below replacement levels for decades now.

There’s nothing more shocking for the kid we all preserve inside us than seeing a place that looked so alive and magical with adult eyes. The landscape, the houses, and the trees- everything seems different, and we suddenly realize that the physical places we feel connected to at one stage of life won’t stay like we perceived them forever, encased inside an amber ball; places evolve, and we do, too.

The Yellow Rain, and the two faces of country life

Many years ago, when I was in college (I think), I read a little, unassuming book by Julio Llamazares, called The Yellow Rain, which is of course a poetic depiction of big deciduous trees in the fall, which in France pop culture associates with a Jacques Prévert poem set to music by Joseph Kosma, and taken from there by singers like Yves Montand (which my two grandmothers loved, when the Spanish radio played him) and (figuratively) Serge Gainsbourg. Anyway, the book is an extended, poetic monologue of Andrés, the old and only surviving inhabitant of Ainielle, a crumbling, isolated village in the Aragonese Pyrenees.

The book is an archetype of the “España vacía,” empty Spain, the hollowed-out areas being left behind by depopulation following the mass exodus of the young to the cities. As the story is told from the perspective of the village’s last dying inhabitant, he is visited by the memories of his former neighbors and friends, reliving the past as the “yellow rain” of autumn leaves falls around him.

It feels once again like the old Flemish and Dutch paintings that European kings fought for during the Age of Discovery: there are the innocent scenes of humble but noble peasant life, a childlike way of being in the world, being the happiest being in the universe if, during harvest, one can have a bit of shade and an improvised meal in good company. And there are those other Flemish depictions of excess and damnation, like The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day or The Triumph of Death, both also by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which I’ve seen many times at El Prado in Madrid. Or, of course, the depictions of Hieronymus Bosch, aka El Bosco, also in Madrid. Those aren’t contemplative, aspirational scenes of innocent country living, but crazy hellscapes, half Burning Man and half a cage fight streamed to your phone.

One imagines young Salvador Dalí in the 1920s, studying at Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes, where he coincided with future poet García Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Buñuel, using his leisure time to study the works of the masters at El Prado, and paying special attention to Goya’s Black Paintings and the intricate hellscapes of the Flemish masters.

The Major Oak, and the argument over how it died

These memories came tumbling down as I read about England’s loss of an old, majestic tree, some say to old age, others to soil disruption from visitors and climate change. I also read comments from some skeptical readers pointing out that the same tree, known as the Major Oak, survived shocks such as Europe’s Little Ice Age and warmer periods in the past, so climate can’t be the whole picture. Others claim that misguided efforts to preserve this living memory of other times in England backfired. Many, in the end, reach a similar conclusion, pointing out one inescapable reality in our universe: entropy; perhaps the Major Oak has died of old age.

Perhaps. The tree that just died lived through relatively warm medieval centuries and endured the Little Ice Age did not die because a handful of English summers ran hot, an informed gardener may say (or, at least, that’s what I hear when I ask one I know about this). Old Age is part of the answer, and human impact (compacting the soil and applying various treatments to slow its accelerated decay) may also be counted. Whichever the combination of factors, the Major Oak is no longer alive, and such news makes some of us a bit sad, perhaps because we’ve come to see these events as a symbolic way of gauging the health of our surrounding natural landscapes.

It was between 800 and 1,200 years old, and its twisted trunk measured 36 feet in circumference. Here’s Lynsey Chutel’s first paragraph as she reports from England:

“The Major Oak, a tree that grew to tower over Sherwood Forest as the Black Death swept England and the Wars of the Roses sundered it, shading huntsmen who spoke of Robin Hood and outlasting the reigns of six Henrys, six Georges and two Elizabeths, among others, has died.”

Wired like a patient

To me, it feels a bit contradictory that its magnetism among people, as it became a landmark, could have sealed its demise, especially because of the symbiotic relationship between people and big trees ingrained in me since childhood. But yes, as a few become a mass, overcrowding can tip any idyllic scene into a story of accelerated demise.

In its last years, the Major Oak had been wired and held the way a hospital takes over a person whose heart doctors no longer trust: dendrometers were clipped to the trunk, reporting this silent being’s signal to a screen. Through 2025, the needles barely moved; this spring, the buds did not come, and the caretakers waited for nothing but a miracle that didn’t come. In the end, all they could do was pronounce it dead.

As one reads about the care the tree received, one can’t but agree with the preservationists who keep the locations of some majestic trees in the natural world as secret as they can, as disclosing their coordinates would certainly draw people to them and disrupt the area, or worse. Sometimes, however, keeping a symbolic tree’s location undisclosed is nothing but impossible.

Sycamore Gap tree, felled overnight

On September 28, 2023, Gary Pickles, a British park ranger, drove to the place to certify that it had indeed been chopped down after the Park received a call. Later on, he explained how his feeling of impotence quickly turned into anger as he approached the place, seeing the 100- to 150-year-old tree that had stood by Hadrian’s Wall, fallen to the side, discarded like a worthless, overgrown piece of wood.

The tree had been featured in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, bringing international recognition to that corner of the surviving Hadrian’s Wall. That it had been felled overnight with a chainsaw was a testimony of the risks of putting a living landmark in the spotlight.

Like many others, I remember the news not for its actual importance but for the absurdity of such a prank: who wants to carry in their conscience (even if not discovered) with such a display of stupidity? Sure enough, it was soon discovered that two men — Daniel Graham (39) and Adam Carruthers (32) — had driven 40 miles from Cumbria in the dead of night, under the cover of the storm. Both Graham and Carruthers not only did not regret their act but also bragged about it, which led to the footage of the act on their phones. Because of course.

The Sycamore Gap tree was in the Northumberland National Park in Northern England, some 170 miles (273 kilometers) from Sherwood Forest, yet its popularity after its appearance in a movie also made it a target of our worst instincts as a species. It’s fair to say that the Sycamore Gap tree perished due to a contagious contemporary malady that spreads through mobile phones, using the meme and selfie virus variants. The felling of Sycamore Gap turned a gloriously pleasing tree for any landscape observer into a sad tale of contemporary nihilism, going from the old Flemish and Dutch dreamy paintings of idealized country life to the hellscapes of El Bosco.

Loved to close: the price of fame

Perhaps massification was only a tiny factor in the less traumatic — but tragic, regardless — demise of the Major Oak, and it’s no coincidence that its popularity and association with the same national pop-culture myth, Robin Hood, attracted too many people, too often, too close. And then the care arrived a little too late and was perhaps too deaf to the tree’s signal.

A few people can be a blessing for a tree, for they’ll take care of it and spot any concerning sign, and will mulch and water it when needed. Though this isn’t always the case: the old tree of the Sherwood Forest met a different type of human connection, one that can be more superficial and predatory, one that only seeks the event, the picture, the checkmark in a list:

“The footfall from millions of visitors had compacted the sandy soil to a depth of nearly four feet deep, making it rock solid and starving the roots of water and nutrients, said Reg Harris, an arborist who specializes in ancient trees.”

What the trees leave behind

And yet neither tree is quite done with us humans. Lynsey Chutel’s article announcing the Major Oak’s death let slip an inspiring sequel in a single line: we are a species that can quickly regret our excesses and be moved into action.

We know we can’t undo entropy but are also inspired by the regenerative cycles of nature; and so, after its death, the acorns of the Major Oak have already been planted all over Britain, so that the majestic organism that accelerated its decline in the last years can go on, in a way, through many anonymous saplings that will likely have a chance to grow old, casting a big shade at the edge of a meadow somewhere.

But these aren’t the only celebratory saplings giving some continuity to the landscape after a loss. When Sycamore Gap was cut down, locals and park rangers were resigned to coping and moving on, but then something unexpected happened: the tree stump was healthy, and new shoots quickly sprouted from the base.

Trees of hope

From seed gathered from the tree, the National Trust raised forty-nine healthy saplings: one for every foot of the height that the felled tree had reached, giving them away to be planted across the country. Though there were not as many saplings as people interested in giving the Sycamore Gap tree’s offspring a chance: nearly five hundred schools, hospices, and families wrote to ask for one.

The saplings went, among other places, to a children’s hospital, a center for motor neuron disease, a refuge for abused women, a small school near the gap, and to all fifteen national parks. Read the list of who asked for a sapling, and you are looking at the harvesters again — the people who gather under a tree and understand the tree’s needs, not the ones who film themselves while gathered in droves near their roots, or those who film themselves felling it.

As for the largest piece of the original trunk, it didn’t go to pulp either; it was carried indoors and set on display. Though many will wonder why they didn’t let it lie where it fell, nurturing the soil. Fairly enough, over the years we’ve fortunately met many people capable of celebrating a tree’s beauty by turning a stump into a piece of art, or a key piece of furniture, or the structural part of a house.

The stump, the trunk, and the millstone

Perhaps there are also “little trees of hope” for villages that once gathered around a centenarian tree. Those trees are still around, but they don’t shelter moments of conviviality the way they once did, sometimes in the name of progress and life acceleration.

It turns out we can see impermanence with different eyes; perhaps instead of trying to revive what is gone, we can create new ones from the old, like seedlings growing from a fallen tree.

We can find inspiration in what we saw or what someone told us a place was once, to get the same inspiration somewhere else, or in the same place, under the same tree, next to the same millstone — despite the fact that many things won’t be the same as they were decades before.

It encompasses three countries at odds; it chastises the North American fans of a sport that never quite took off here with outrageously expensive tickets; and it was bound to feel unwelcoming to international fans, wary of traveling to a country that decided to unilaterally start a war not long ago and publicizes a crackdown on both local immigrants and many visitors it preemptively sees as a potential threat.

Now that the ball is rolling, however, there’s also the show, the drama, the irresistible pathos of seeing, once again, the world-scale popularity of the main soccer event. Even though soccer isn’t among North America’s top sports at the professional level, the World Cup is different.

Conceived for a different moment

Our son plays soccer and has become genuinely interested in the sport, but we live in the Bay Area, one of the 16 co-hosts across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and we didn’t have luck with the teams in the group stage. He doesn’t want me to buy tickets to the early-stage competition, and the other matches for teams advancing are simply too expensive.

Other parents I know from soccer practice told me they got tickets early on despite the high prices; I doubt we’ll invest in going to see any of the matches near us, and I’ve hardly seen any excitement. It’s also true that we’re fairly far from Santa Clara at the heart of Silicon Valley, home of Levi’s Stadium.

It’s early on, but so far, one would say that the place isn’t feeling it with the intensity that FIFA would have achieved had it chosen a single country as host, and that the tickets are more affordable. Things can change fast, but if the event isn’t delivering yet the way it could have, it’s because collective events of such caliber aren’t built in boardrooms — they also need to be felt on the street.

The dissonant opening ceremony in Mexico City is a symptom of that, as gimmicky as it is soulless, at a moment when the three organizers show contradictory views of themselves and have to scramble with the fact that one of them, the United States, has ditched soft power and prefers to show America First muscle, which the world reads in and on itself as a collective crisis of self-esteem, not the other way around.

Paradoxically, other celebratory ceremonies happening this week (no, I’m not referring to SpaceX IPO) felt different, more positive and universal, and under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been the case. As always, take this highly personal analysis with a grain of salt.

A show with a soul

Mostly through scrolling social media, many people will stumble upon the blessing of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, a masterfully choreographed show that blends liturgy and audiovisual narrative to convey emotion in our time. It’s worth dedicating ten minutes to watch the whole live event.

The city and the surrounding backcountry wanted to showcase their commitment to a civilization-scale project started by architect Antoni Gaudí in the 19th century and still ongoing, and everyone, from the organizers to the choir singers to the technicians coordinating lights and drones, was up to the task as one.

Music, video production by the Catalan broadcaster TV3, and Barcelona’s ability to transmit collective emotion through a carefully planned narrative. Many people commented on social media that they had first watched a two-minute video, finding it delightful and emotive, while many others preferred the longer version even more, a testament to the post-TikTok moment we’re already living in.

Whether we are pragmatic or we think that symbols are important to create a sense of collective purpose, one doesn’t need to be a Catholic, or a Christian, or any sort of religious believer, to understand that Gaudí’s task in the Sagrada Família, as well as Barcelona’s civil society commitment to privately fund a 144-year project to finish the mammoth endeavor, is a testimony of human vision and perseverance.

Beautiful, cathedral-like things get built because there’s an enchanting and enchanted, otherworldly pursuit of a bigger-than-oneself endeavor that requires collaboration, coordination, a shared vision, and leadership, both symbolic (Gaudí’s) and real (Barcelona’s and Catalonia’s civil society). One can say many things about such a temple, and minimalists will pinpoint the exuberance of ornaments, while the purists will decry that, after the genius architect’s death and the destruction of his models during the Spanish Civil War, the temple’s continuation was subject to interpretation by those in charge of carrying on.

I’d say: that’s the beauty of collective endeavors. Or, as put by a history professor at Germany’s University of Bonn, Evrim Binbaş:

“For a society to hold onto one end of a task without ever tiring or wearying of it for 150 years, and once the job is done, to show not just gratitude to the Creator of the universe but also loyalty to the artist without falling short. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I admired that.”

Intrinsic tensions of great places

Born and raised in Barcelona, I went to college with some of the people who helped put that live video production together, and I had heard for a long time that the June 10th event was a milestone that virtually everyone wanted to contribute to make special; in that sense, few places can assemble people together to put up a show when the situation is due, like Barcelona does. Perhaps this is because the city, dynamic and cosmopolitan, learned to prosper without a State, just as many Italian cities did early on, before the country’s late unification in the 19th century.

The lack of a strong public apparatus led Catalans to scramble for collaboration through guilds and early mutual funds, and agricultural gains from wine and grain funded an early, homegrown industrial revolution. Since then, an educated middle class has built a sense of self that can be as constructive as it is sometimes destructive (a few years back, we moved to France when our kids were toddlers, as there was only one topic of discussion on the streets and it was getting tiresome; yet, I’m a product of the place).

Some Catalan-affected (often chauvinistic) brains would try to simplify by appealing to the local tension between the concepts of “seny” and “rauxa.” Nietzscheans would say that this is merely a near-perfect crystallization of an old European story that propelled the most sublime and the most obscure moments of an entire continent, the tension between the rationality of Apollo and the aggressive sensuality of Dionysos. And Barcelona is an old Mediterranean harbor of humble merchants turned industrialists.

A Sagrada Família-type of endeavor: The Cathedral of the Sea

Since the early Middle Ages, many European merchant cities like Barcelona, with a clear epicenter at the Italian Peninsula but also beyond, competed against each other by trying to produce, through their craft and merchant guilds, temples and venues that looked beyond everyday reality, and that’s how Santa Maria del Mar, a Barcelona precedent of the Sagrada Família church, came to be in the merchant neighborhood of El Born.

An example of Catalan Gothic architecture, Santa Maria del Mar went up faster than the Sagrada Família (1329 to 1384) and was physically constructed by commoners: people from the nearby sea market, sailors, and merchants from La Ribera. It was built primarily with stone from the Montjuïc quarry; the church was funded by merchants who came to realize they needed a solution to transport the stone cheaply, as the boats couldn’t approach either site.

They carried the blocks in carriages, mules, and, according to chroniclers, on their very backs. As for the question of who paid for such a magnificent church, which would rival Barcelona’s also-unfinished cathedral (funded by the monarchy and the religious elite), Santa Maria del Mar was financed by the residents and local trade guilds, from the rich merchants to the very sailors and craftsmen volunteering their free time to finish it.

That’s why, for humble Barcelonians of the time and the backcountry people coming to town to buy and sell, that temple was their ultimate place, their Cathedral of the Sea (also the title of a 2006 book by a local lawyer digging in that early golden age for the city, when, in between plagues and invasions, it emerged as a powerhouse with no kingdom, scrambling around to make decisions in a proto-democratic Parlament, the Consell de Cent, or “Council of the One Hundred”).

A wedding and a banquet

When it comes to talking about Barcelona, it’s impossible to stay unrelated or completely impartial to its reality, for I’m from there and Kirsten and I started our family there; our children were born in the city, and our very wedding happened at the place where the Council of the One Hundred gathered in the early middle ages, the Saló de Cent in Barcelona’s City Hall. For that, and for the fact that the city also allowed us — just for the mere fact of being local residents — to use for our wedding’s banquet another symbolic building, Lluís Domènech i Montaner’s Castell dels Tres Dragons (Castle of the Three Dragons) in the city’s Parc de la Ciutadella, built for the 1888 Universal Exposition, we’ll always recognize the many amazing things the city can give.

But those were more innocent times, right before an economic crisis, a hurried, opportunistic local putsch for independence, a sense of being overwhelmed by unruly tourism, and a deep crisis rooted in tensions within the city’s kaleidoscopic reality and sense of self.

Putting on a show like the Sagrada Família’s highest point’s christening by the Pope is healing for the city in many ways; for one, it gives its inhabitants a mirror in which to see its amplifying collective talent in organizing world-scale events like World Expositions and the 92 Olympics, which brings a type of pride that can be transversal and shared, no matter the people’s credo, origins, political leaning. It also reminds people (often feeling bombarded by negative and contradictory, chaotic events like wars, nationalistic and fanatic tensions of different signs) of the power of celebratory events that show loyalty to a bigger-than-life, multigenerational idea that brings people in instead of excluding, and decides to highlight a message that is as profound as it is simple.

Proof of this: the music-and-light ceremony, presided over by the Pope and local dignitaries, from Spain’s king and queen to the president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the regional government), reached its apex when music and light built up in a crescendo leading to a top-to-bottom light up of the temple, followed by a masterfully produced hover-over aerial image of the temple’s towers symbolizing key biblical figures; then, a musical transition told us something was about to happen.

And there it was, Antoni Gaudí’s three-dimensional figure drawn by drones, turning his sight to the temple’s main tower’s top, followed by a message as if it were hand-drawn by the architect himself: “Primer l’amor, després la tècnica.” First love, then technique. A message that showed a kind of magnanimity toward my home city, which I admire, and I’m glad it’s still around.

A way of towering over the noise of today, using choreography, high-definition video and sound, the best local team of TV producers to deliver the international signal to the planet, and light and drones. Just to deliver a message that transcends and forgets two local sins: opportunism and chauvinism. ‘Nough said.

The need for rehearsed pathos people can share

The show has proven that people want liturgy, choreography, solemnity, and high-stakes mise-en-scène when it’s due, and the moment was ripe in Barcelona: 100 years since the death of the architect who had projected the temple, the completion of the tower that makes Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world, and the visit of the Pope for the occasion.

Now, the cynics love to hate things that go well and can be conciliatory and magnanimous, rather than the short-term divisiveness that has taken over many high offices, aided by today’s fragmented, dopamine-inducing media consumption. It’s true that Antoni Gaudí’s life and personality (born in Reus, a proud small city that rivals nearby Tarragona in the back-country of coastal southern Catalonia, where merchants turned the benefits of selling wine and little else into an industrial powerhouse) was complex, encompassing both religiously traditionalist convictions — to the right of the Catholic church then — and technically revolutionary ideas. At the end of his life, he was profoundly pious (of the populist and mendicant type) and frugal. He was also a fanatic of symbols, anti-liberal and anti-modern. In a way, he was one of the most original Iberian Romantics.

It’s also self-evident that, as the sentence showcased in the June 10th show on the prioritization of ethics and humanism over technique, his construction was innovative and original to a fault. But no matter how divisive the aesthetic he embraced can be, with shapes and materials digging in Nature and Mediterranean syncretism, at times Orientalist, his work reminds us of the importance of sticking to a purpose and a vision, rain or shine. When taken to extremes, Gaudí’s all-in zeal and rationale can be divisive, but they deliver and defeat any agenda that tries to instrumentalize his commitment to Barcelona and his old-school interpretation of Catholicism.

Barcelona can do one thing extremely well, and it doesn’t need to invoke the magnetism of the city’s main sports club, FC Barcelona, to pull it off. It manages to include everyone in town, from working-class families to the professional class, to its diminished bourgeoisie if compared to the power of the nouveau-riche up-and-coming establishment in Madrid; also, unlike Central Spain, Catalonia lacks a powerful nobility and has organized itself around a transversal and educated civil society, and this structural difference shows in big events.

Self-sufficient wholes

That said, Spaniards can be generous and know how to put a party together, and Leo XIV’s visit was an opportunity to display that, in Madrid, Barcelona, the Canary Islands, or anywhere else. Spaniards can make people feel welcome, and they can do the opposite too, especially amongst themselves.

We are also good at ruining moments of potential self-pride by getting into the extremely boring, never-ending regional infighting, described by none other than José Ortega y Gasset, the only towering philosopher contemporary Spain has given (the other Baltasar Gracián, a witty Aragonese Catholic priest revered by Schopenhauer, belongs to the Empire era). In his book España invertebrada, written in 1921 as the country was fraying, Ortega gave the affliction a name, particularismo, and a definition that has aged with unfair accuracy:

“Particularism is that state of mind in which we believe we have no reason to reckon with others. Sometimes out of excessive esteem for ourselves, other times out of excessive scorn for our neighbor, we lose the sense of our own limits and begin to feel ourselves as self-sufficient wholes.”

There’s also a type of online nationalism that seems to be curated by bots from foreign powers trying to destabilize the Western world with self-destructive infighting and a defeatist rationale that doesn’t quite square with reality. Among the many self-inflicted wounds: adult males seem to have lost the appetite for reading fiction. Isn’t this documented fact off-topic? —one might ask. Yes and no: the wave of negativity that seems to plague their feeds could be countered by a narrative that seeks a harmonization of non-toxic collective and individual purpose, and events like the Sagrada Família’s inaugural ceremony or the World Cup are a reminder that energy can be channeled before it turns self-destructive — or simply atrophies, leaving people numb, dealing in alienation with one addiction or another.

The currency that compounds

In today’s world, haunted by digital tools and institutions favoring the quickest possible return on investment and instant gratification, symbols that spread collective purpose over the long term are particularly powerful, and the Sagrada Família, like once did Santa Maria del Mar in the same city, is an endeavor supported by many fighting as one for one set of goals that feel bigger than themselves, which is a purely “emergent“ idea: the whole accomplishes a level of beauty and consciousness that is exponentially superior to the simple addition of its parts.

Gaudí’s architecture, especially the church funded by the people of Barcelona, many of whom were of humble origins, as well as visitor tickets (yes, the decried tourism), has also emergent qualities, the whole accomplishing more than its parts, and irreducible to them as a consequence.

Barcelona, of all places, just demonstrated the alternative on a global signal: conciliation over confrontation, a multigenerational idea that gathers people in rather than sorting them out, and a four-word benediction in Catalan — primer l’amor, després la tècnica — that towered over the noise without humiliating anyone to do it. That is the whole lesson, and it is not a soft one.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. The Western world is exhausted (genuinely, bone-deep) by dysfunctional messaging, by the daily theater of division, by leaders who mistake the flexing of muscle for strength and read the resulting fear as respect.

Afraid of unleashing goodness

Whoever truly understands that conciliation, and not the muscle, is what the moment is starving for stands to win the only currency that compounds: soft power. And let’s not forget what soft power actually is. It is not the decoration laid over real power once the real work is done. Over any horizon long enough to matter, it is the foundation real power is poured on — the reason people, and the men among them, choose to stand behind you at all, instead of merely getting out of your way.

It’s an interesting zeitgeist; the message should have come from a unifying World Cup opening ceremony, but none of the three main dignitaries from each organizing country were there to begin with; each will attend a different opener in their respective countries (Sheinbaum decided to give her ticket, the symbolic No. 00001, to a fan of the sport that couldn’t have attended otherwise; a populist, lower-risk gesture over sitting in a stadium that has historically booed her predecessors when given the opportunity). There are ways of connecting with the collective unconscious that can be summed up constructively; this time around, it won’t be one of them.

Here’s an unpopular opinion: there’s a hunger for optimism. People are tired of manufactured division, but politicians and leaders of civil societies are too entrenched, too shortsighted to see it. Perhaps too afraid of unleashing goodness.

Soft power is currently underrated, but it could come back stronger than ever.

None of the people I’ve talked to since I’ve lived in the Bay Area have mentioned Point Richmond to me, which I find surprising, particularly because there’s so much to like about the little enclave frozen in time, so different from today’s cookie-cutter suburbs that resembles one of those idealized village scenes inside a West Coast edition of one of those Christmas water globes.

Or, described by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Margot Patterson Doss in 1968:

“[Point Richmond] sits on the Contra Costa (shore) like a little piece of yesterday that floated across the bay and stranded itself when the tide went out.”

Point Richmond isn’t an island, but its cul-de-sac character, tucked away on the Contra Costa bayshore and surrounded by communication arteries that isolate it from the rest of Richmond and the East Bay, has preserved it as amber sometimes does, with prehistoric insects trapped in time.

The Bay Area has changed much over the last century, but this residential and post-industrial inlet, often forgotten, retains its mixed-use character and architectural allure, as well as a triangle-shaped historic downtown where mom-and-pop businesses survive.

One of the Bay Area’s genuine deep-time portals

Many families from the East Bay take an always-busy stretch of arteries separating the hills and flats from the Alameda and Contra Costa shorelines, an area in which industrial waste gave way to marinas, sports facilities, park trails, and also many of the convenience landmarks of our era: a few miles down the shore from Point Richmond, near the old promontory of Point Isabel, many cars exit or cross highway 80 and highway 580 to get to Costco and its packed gas station, more busy than ever after the Iran-war price hikes.

This massive non-place, a beloved temple of convenience where many families spend a part of their dwindling leisure time, is the latest reincarnation of a distribution warehouse that opened on October 16, 1986; it originally started as Price Club (itself a reincarnation of Sol Price), a pioneering members-only discount warehouse that opened its first facility in San Diego. Originally serving small businesses, it merged with competitor Costco in 1993, and so, a few old-schoolers from the Richmond area have been crossing the divide to reach the backwater of Point Isabel for quite some time.

How many of them are aware of the existence of an old Bay Area community the way it was in the early 1900s at Point Richmond, without having to leave the same East Bay town, is a matter of speculation. So, this week I decided to travel in time and explore the main trends that have shaped the United States and the Bay Area since the early industrial era: from the irruption of commercial downtowns of lively streets of Queen Anne, San Francisco Stick, Neo-Classic, Eastern Shingle, Brown Shingle, Craftsman Bungalow, and California Bungalow-style houses, like the one surviving in Point Richmond, to the big distribution areas where many families buy the bulk of their groceries, like the Costco center, also on the Richmond shoreline.

Interestingly enough, my trip will always keep in the background the changing skyline of San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge to the north and the Bay Bridge connecting it to the East Bay; I’ve seen glorious golden-hour sunsets while waiting on the traffic light to turn into Point Isabel, and also understood the name of “Contra Costa” county while standing in Point Richmond’s streets: “contra” costa means the other side of the then-occupied coast (the town of San Francisco and Mission Dolores), the same way “Alameda” County, to the south, is named the way Spaniards called the tree-lined pathways they designed for leisure outings.

Pasturelands across the bay from Mission Dolores

It turns out the first Spanish explorers in the area couldn’t take their eyes off a prominent creek across the bay from San Francisco, which was lined by a thick riverbank of willow and sycamore trees that reminded them of the famous shaded, tree-lined roads of New Spain and places like Cádiz, back in the distant metropolis.

Preserved Point Richmond is quite the contrast to the way San Francisco, or even Oakland, developed after the 1906 earthquake. Unlike the two nearby cities, which invested in designs and ornamentation in the same architectural styles, from craftsman-style houses to California bungalows to Victorian buildings, the buildings of Point Richmond are more frugal in ornamentation, lacking the colors and shapes of Italianate and Stick-Eastlake buildings in more affluent areas nearby.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Point Richmond looks so timeless and even elegant, evoking the styles of local contractors and self-builders from a century ago. According to the National Register of Historic Places, which recognized the value of Point Richmond in 1979, only a few buildings standing today in the old marsh and pastureland named Potrero, then dubbed Point Richmond, required professional architectural design, among them the brick-and-mortar Hotel Mac and the Richmond Fire Station No. 1 (both with sheet metal cornices that include dentils and egg-and-dart moldings), as well as the four churches built during the railway-and-refinery era:

“Most dwellings and business buildings were likely constructed by small contractors or carpenters who had practiced their trade in the earlier building booms of Oakland and San Francisco with the help of mail-order plans or pattern books, and the ever-available selection of prefabricated structural and decorative building elements from the local mill. The commercial storefronts likewise indicate a carpenter adaptation of the styles of the day interpreted in either wood or brick, typically a two-story, flat-roofed building including parapets, upper bay windows, storefront windows and doors with clerestory and ‘light shelf’ above, and retractable awnings over the sidewalk.”

Donna Roselius, who founded the Point Richmond History Association in 1982 and then relocated to Oregon, explains how the place grew at boomtown speed, then stalled:

“Tents provided temporary housing for Santa Fe and Standard Oil workers while hastily constructed hotels and boarding houses popped up from semi-solid land. The first really permanent building was the Critchett Hotel, at the corner of West Richmond and Washington Avenues (now the site of the Point Richmond Market). When the Critchetts were settled, Mr. Critchett considerately provided a way to get his wife acquainted in her new community. He sent invitations to an afternoon tea to wives of the men he had met here, assuming that the women they had seen in the new town had accompanied his fellow pioneers. Only one guest arrived, the wife of Lyman Naugle, who was publisher and editor of the Point Richmond Record Herald. She was the only other “lady” who had arrived. Boarding houses, bars and bawdy houses were replacing the tents, most of which blew away in the first winter’s storms. Insufficient fill on the flatland made streets spongy all winter, and some of the first structures also blew off their shaky foundations. Women who came to join their husbands found it difficult to travel from their new abodes on foot, without high top boots and skirts pulled up beyond usually allowed limits.”

Evolving vernacular: from craftsman bungalows to non-places

Since we moved to the East Bay from a year in Midtown Palo Alto near Mitchell Park, and before that Europe, I had grown accustomed to seeing the mismatch of single-family housing styles of the Bay Area from the early twentieth century to our days. Point Richmond is a survivor of the 1920s’ styles and solid, high-quality construction as opposed to the styles and buildings that quickly went up with the postwar boom.

This switch towards more modular, lower-quality structures can be seen in Richmond itself. As the working-class town grew away from the water at Potrero-Point Richmond, tract homes and wood-frame houses finished with stucco took over the area; in Richmond, as in many other urban areas of California, many of the vacant lots included low-rise apartment buildings with carports underneath, which lacked any style and long-term aspiration. Low quality and lack of design became so pervasive that today Point Richmond, a working-class community developed in an earlier era, is a little mixed-use village that blends coherence of style with the high walkability rates that new urbanists dreamed of from the Jane Jacobs era onwards.

But, as any San Franciscan interested in urbanism could assess half an hour from home, the dream of the New Urbanism pundits already existed; it only got cornered by convenience, car reliance, and housing prices, prompting people further away from areas where housing availability didn’t keep up with economic dynamism, and the Bay Area is the poster child of such an affordability and commuter-trap phenomenon.

Take a trip with me to the forgotten, unassuming enclave of Point Richmond, first stopping at today’s temple of convenience, also in Richmond by the water, Costco Wholesale. From most of Berkeley, you drive down to the bay flats and get on I-80 heading north (signs read Sacramento/Vallejo), basically tracking the shoreline northwest as the San Francisco and Golden Gate skylines shimmer out west to your left, making you appreciate the natural beauty of this bay, perhaps only rivaled, in my experience, with the breathtaking Sydney Harbor.

Then the freeway forks: I-580 West peels off to the left towards the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, but we want to take I-80 and continue to the north, taking the first exit available almost immediately. We look at San Francisco and the Golden Gate once again as we sit in the light, turn left over the bridge, and head into the Southwest Annex, where the Costco mole sits. It’s an ugly non-place like countless others, surrounded by equally impersonal freeway-adjacent warehouses. But hey, cheap stuff if you buy in bulk, which is one of today’s universal sports.

Driving through the tunnel into Point Richmond

After a visit to the pump to get some gas on our 2017 Subaru Outback 3.6R (the extra kick of the bigger engine and 6-cylinder engine instead of the current 4-cylinder for the whole model range, facelifted as yet another SUV), I leave the marina flats of Point Isabel to get back on I-580 West toward the bridge. With no traffic (which you may encounter unless you time your trip on the few windows in which nobody is trying to get around this clogged artery), it will take you ten minutes to get to the place where you can cross over the Richmond inner harbor channel. Take the Canal Boulevard - Garrard Boulevard exit, and you’ll soon have the feeling you’re going to an island instead of a little peninsula, for you have to cross the Garrard Tunnel to get there, driving under Nicholl Knob, a 371-foot peak fencing the area from the rest of the East Bay and preventing any further development.

Getting in and out the Garrard Tunnel makes one feel that time travel is possible, especially as, on the other side of the tunnel-view threshold, one is expelled directly into the old village, with the menacing presence of the Chevron refinery on the ridge above it, a reminder of the working class roots of a place that at times could feel a bit like a chunk of the now-upscale Sausalito or Tiburon (Kirsten’s California side of the family settled in Sausalito before World War II).

It’s time to find parking, for Point Richmond invites this Southern European transplant of Iberian roots (just like Francisco Castro, the first rancher settling in Potrero as the owner of the Rancho San Pablo, granted in 1823, a mere two years after New Spain seceded from Spain) to do the tour on foot. I have no mule or horse, and the pasture times of the Potrero era are long, long gone, only a few names of roads, streets, and accidents remaining.

I left my car around the triangle where Washington Avenue, Park Place, and Richmond Avenue converge. From there, one takes a look and believes again in gentle urbanism, far from impersonal sprawl but not too crowded, interested in perspective and craftsmanship, the utilitarian beauty of yesteryear that ages well in the Bay Area, once the fog’s influence settles as patina over the decades. If Washington Avenue feels like a real downtown straight from the past, it’s because it actually is: Point Richmond was Richmond’s actual downtown from the late 19th century until the 1920s, when the town expanded inland.

First, I take Washington Avenue (whose name reminds me again of Australia, where everything seems to be named after Sydney or Macquarie), and stumble upon low brick-and-stucco storefronts, as well as a couple of bars, antique shops, and the Hotel Mac, a 1911 red brick building that could appear in some story about the Bay Area beatniks depicted by Jack Kerouac in The Subterraneans.

A long time ago, workers’ songs inside the Baltic

There’s a wee, almost frontier-style building that hosts the little Point Richmond History Association Museum, which I find closed. It’s tiny and volunteer-run, and it reminded me of the hippie ethos still present in backwater places like Bolinas.

I decide then to walk up the gentle slope to reach the foot of the knob, where another surprise awaits. What I see brings back an article I read about the derelict, out-of-proportion Sutro Baths, a mammoth saltwater swimming pool complex built on the West Side of San Francisco by Adolph Sutro as a turn-of-the-century engineering and technical marvel with a classical exterior that decayed over the decades and burned down in 1966.

Adolph Sutro’s engineering marvel didn’t prevail nor ever live up to its public-service promise (for one, it’s always chilly in that part of San Francisco), but it turns out Point Richmond has its own classic-looking Municipal Natatorium, locally known as The Plunge: a beautifully restored 1920s indoor pool that’s not only the enclave’s architectural jewel: one can actually swim in it, imagining how, three generations ago, neighbors would be doing the same, only in bathing suits of the Roaring Twenties.

I read somewhere that the Baltic, a tavern where I’m headed now, survives from the early years, when Santa Fe Railroad and Standard Oil operations built the neighborhood. At that time, Point Richmond must have been rugged and influenced by the old school camaraderie that shaped Jack London’s early working-class ideology; to the point, I learn, that London himself was one of the habituals at the Baltic.

I rejoice with the mere feeling of evoking London in the area, as I face the reality of the Bay Area: like many other picturesque places in a region that has grown more affluent and is about to create, once again, the fantastic riches of a new class of tech titans thanks to AI, Point Richmond is now an affluent, rather upscale district, perhaps the aspirational place for people from Richmond in search of a still-rugged-yet-polished charm, much in the way of Sausalito and other places with a working class past.

Too difficult to replicate on the cheap?

With its unassuming pre-war, movie-set aesthetic, Point Richmond tells us that there’s no such thing as a walkable, charming neighborhood in the Bay Area that can stay affordable to everyone. So, as if it were a Pacific reference to the archetypal messages from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes between the city and the mansions of Long Island, today’s Point Richmond, while affluent, still abuts the menacing Chevron refinery, still the inescapable symbol of the broader city’s industrial identity.

Today, however, if you visit Point Richmond, you’ll get more of a Sausalito or Carmel-by-the-Sea vibe (minus the snobbery) than refinery-neighborhood roughness. Not surprisingly, the enclave’s working population is overwhelmingly employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. Perhaps, one thinks, the white-collar population that replaced its early working-class inhabitants.

Earlier, I mentioned one of the area’s beloved activities, a Costco visit, mandated by convenience and grocery prices; there’s another, very contemporary activity when it comes to the Bay Area, or anywhere else in the United States at this point: as we imagine a place described by someone, we go on and try “Zillow surfing” the premises. Doing so in the tiny, tucked-away, protected, and unable-to-grow Point Richmond makes one realize that this is a place where people don’t sell often. The only listings seem to refer to small buildable lots, which — not surprisingly — are far from affordable.

With relatively small single-family homes, often with two bedrooms and one bathroom, Point Richmond’s median price is unequivocally over one million, which can appear to be a lot anywhere else in the world, but yet again this is the Bay Area, and nearby Albany, Berkeley, or even El Cerrito and the Oakland Hills are also out of reach for many.

Lunch at the Hidden City Cafe

If you think the tale of Point Richmond is not a part of the living tale of the Bay Area or America, for that matter, consider the birth of computer-animated films: in 1990, an obscure animation studio that wanted to involve computers in storytelling, Pixar, moved from San Rafael in Marin to the Point Richmond Tech Center, staying there for ten crucial years and creating the entire arc of Toy Story, from the 1991 Disney deal through the November 1995 release.

At the time the company moved to the quaint Contra Costa enclave, Pixar was a struggling hardware-and-software company, personally bankrolled by Steve Jobs at a loss. In early 1991, a layoff of 30 people cut the company to 42 employees; right around then, with Jobs’s support, the company secured a $26 million, life-saving deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated features.

That’s how the first fully computer-animated feature film in history ended up being conceived in an industrial park between a railroad point and an oil refinery.

It was the same ground the Spanish had called the Potrero, a point joined to the mainland by tidal marsh long before any refinery or rail yard existed. The settlement that grew up around the Santa Fe terminal and its tracks, amid the abandoned farmlands, was first known as East Yards, and only afterward took the name Point Richmond.

One of the local gems is a lunch that happened on Washington Avenue. In the early summer of 1994, with Toy Story nearly finished, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft sat down for lunch at the Hidden City Cafe, not far from Pixar’s head office. That lunch was used to sketch out the films that would carry the studio for the next decade, beginning with A Bug’s Life.

Back to the future

The lunch is somehow connected to Jobs, who had designed Pixar’s headquarters as an open structure with an atrium everyone had to pass through: Jobs believed the key to creativity was serendipity, and so he maximized interaction amongst different roles by design. In a way, the Hidden City lunch represented that philosophy spilling out of the building and into the village.

That lunch had been preceded a few years earlier by another, between Jobs and Lasseter, in which they talked about Pixar’s destiny. Lasseter made the case for filmmakers having a final say on creative decisions. Jobs agreed; Jobs understood that Pixar needed him as an investor and strategist, but the company was better off if he didn’t participate in the filmmaking.

On the way out, one crosses back through the Garrard Tunnel. The threshold towards the Bay Area dimension works in reverse, propelling you back into the hyper-competitive present that gave birth to all the technical tools we use today. The present rushes back, the freeway, the warehouses, the packed pumps promising “cheaper” gas at barely under $6/gallon.

That’s why it feels as though the town one just walked, built by carpenters with pattern books and mail-order plans, was merely a mirage of a more innocent time, a slight glitch in the matrix. Perhaps places like Point Richmond are more than that: their walkable, fine-grained, human-scaled streets, the kind you wander like an old-school flâneur, are testimony to the simplicity of it all. It’s not rocket science, just human-scale, simple, enchanting design.

As new waves of opportunity come and go in the Bay Area, the most dense innovation hub in the world, many wonder how come gentle environments like Point Richmond became the exception and not the norm. It’s hard to imagine the place as flats of pasture and marshes, disconnected from the rest of the East Bay during high tides. The industrial past is still present, with the Chevron towers watching from the ridge like the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg over Gatsby’s valley of ashes.

Down in the village, someone will be doing laps in a pool from the 1920s, thinking about the boom-and-bust cycle much like the neighbors who saw the San Francisco skyline from a distance a century ago, right before the Golden Gate went up.

In the Old World, symbolically, rivers are borders and connections, rites of passage from one borderland to another, and head-and-tail rites of passage between the living and the afterlife. The Styx river was the primary boundary separating the living from the Underworld.

In the old Mississippian cosmos shared by many Native American tribes, rivers were a doorway connecting the visible world inhabited by humans and a more chaotic Beneath World, home of the Underwater Panther and the horned serpent, among other creatures. These beings, and their unleashed forces, entered the human world through springs, rivers, and lakes.

Untamed riverways and the American soul

T.S. Eliot, an American poet with an Anglicized accent that many relate only to the East Coast and London, was born in St. Louis, a mere four blocks from the river on 2635 Locust Street.

He opens his poem The Dry Salvages with a reference to the river force as an ancient, powerful, “strong brown god.”

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot

The Mississippi at St. Louis is famously silt-laden and brown, unlike the blue or green New England rivers. Yet he never forgot the muddy, fertile, time-bound American river of his childhood, never completely tamed, civilized, a blend of all the tributaries and their peoples from time immemorial.

The river, like the fields, ruined factories, dams, cities, and growing forests around it and its tributaries, recognizes the force of the ancient god but also carries a different stewardship strategy from pre-Columbian times to the present.

The portrait is hollowed out in some of its symbolic elements but always present, one way or another: the forgotten original Native American cities, surrounded by trails and fields interplanted with different types of corn, beans, and squash (three sisters), arranged on the river shores as some sort of early (original?) permaculture experiment, the constant fires to promote pastures and hunting grounds, the arrival of the first European travelers, the pioneer settlements and the subsequent Trail of Tears to displace 60,000 natives from the “five civilized tribes”… Finally, modernity transforming the big old river into the biggest navigable artery of a new country, spanning from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, the river St. Lawrence and the Atlantic shores of Terranova (a Latin name that checks with me, buried nowadays by the use of a more proper Newfoundland): agricultural and industrial heartland, first; monocrop empire and decaying Rust Belt in a later incarnation.

All happened around the river as the people, the cuisine, the music, the stories, the travels (on canoes, boats, steamboats, shantyboats) kept pushing their actions downstream, like sediment, down to New Orleans and into the sea.

Secondary roads and old calendars

In the past few months, we’ve traveled extensively across several US states, both in the West and also across a decent chunk of the core Mississippi Basin region between Appalachia to the east and the western downslope of the Ozark Mountains, a rugged area that has shaped the character of both natives and settlers later on. The trip got me thinking about the complex, convoluted, polarized narratives of the United States in a year that should be celebratory, yet so far looks anything but.

The Ozarks, and also the Ouachita Mountains, another ancient fold-and-thrust mountain range with occasional rock formations, are their very own world of greenery, rolling hills, and varied accents that I only knew about through a few loose cultural references. Their tree-covered, deer-and-armadillo-packed, tick-infested, crumbled appearance is best described by a line from a mountaineer character in Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills (1907):

“Ain’t nothin’ to a flat country nohow. A man jes naturally wear hisself plumb out a walkin’ on a level ‘thout ary downhill t’ spell him. An’ then look how much more there is of hit! Take forty acres o’ flat now an’ hit’s jest a forty, but you take forty acres o’ this here Ozark country an’ God ‘lmighty only knows how much ‘twould be if hit war rolled out flat. ‘Taint no wonder ‘t all, God rested when he made these here hills; he jes naturally had t’ quit, fer he done his beatenest an’ war plumb gin out.”

I was glad to right that wrong and get to know an area that still appreciates the rituals of analog living, where things feel slow and affordable compared to virtually any other outdoorsy region of North America with stunning, raw natural beauty.

One such reference I got from the travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, which mainly skips the region for good but has one reference that got me thinking. I recall Least Heat-Moon’s “calendar rule” when it comes to finding authentic venues to make meaningful stops when one travels, like those dusty cafés with memorable owners that don’t feel like one just keeps hitting the same bland non-place, for they all are one and the same.

I wonder whether his method for finding actual venues back in the seventies would hold today, perhaps using another tenet; for example, he sorts good small-town cafes from bad ones by counting the number and variety of wall calendars, recalling one time (from a pre-trip experience) when he got lucky passing by:

“One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since.”

Reading the room in the heartland

Unlike with many other places I’ve also visited, I gladly realized that the old formations of crumbling rock west of Appalachia preserve a local character despite the universal advancement of the colorless, predictable array of businesses sprawling strategically all over.

During our travels, I rarely need to look for the long-gone mom-and-pop businesses where Least Heat-Moon was trying to get the pulse from a country, as many of the ones remaining are there just to commemorate what they once were. Nonetheless, we also visit places to document their people, and I’m also in the dubious business of trying to put stories together: there are many other ways to find and enjoy what places have to offer in particular. So, even as I try to focus on our work as much as possible, there are always parts of the experience that make us feel connected to what we see, read, hear about.

I wonder if Least Heat-Moon would make sense of it all in a book about America as rounded as Blue Highways, were he to start his journey in Columbia, Missouri, at the time you’re reading this text.

During the trip to an area that has fallen mostly in Republican hands, I’ve come to realize that this is an odd year to many people; and, wandering around the core of North America’s biggest river basin, the small towns we went through didn’t seem to be getting ready for something to cheer for amid cost-of-living hikes and many controversies, big and small. I saw little display of enthusiasm, little bragging. Fortunately, I met many worthy people, and we didn’t waste a second talking about all the things going badly, getting to know instead the places, gardens, flora and fauna, and the people (the salt of the Earth, as Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado reminded us) above all.

After driving quite a lot across small towns and on “blue highways,” I’ve seen little to zero references to the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which in rural America feels like what it is: an event agreed upon before our present delicate geopolitical moment, trying to bring together the three organizers (the US, Canada, and Mexico), and not setting them apart, each one with its own agenda, uncoordinated with the other two.

The apathy may vanish once the event starts, for it brings people together in a similar fashion that only the Olympics can do at such a global scale. Not surprisingly to anyone at this point, initial projections of international visitors attending World Cup matches in the US won’t be met amid a climate of fear, strict immigration policies, travel bans, and high costs.

The lack of references to the World Cup didn’t come as a surprise. What’s perhaps more extraordinary is that I’ve also seen little enthusiasm or preparatory buildup around the country’s 250th birthday, which will happen on July 4, 2026, which I read as a giant “read the room” sign to anyone trying to be overly celebratory ahead of time.

The other St. Louis

The cost of gas or groceries seems more important to many, whereas the word “celebratory” doesn’t fit the zeitgeist amid the quagmire of the Iran War. Whatever it is that concerns people in the areas we drove through, as we moved across secondary roads for hours at a time, we saw few signs that display celebration or concern (or protest).

I’m always glad to visit places from the American heartland, so I get to know people and walk forests and towns, check which magazines and papers are passed around at local grocery stores, and just try to get a pulse of things going before my eyes. I learned a good deal of trivial things, among them that the Spanish national team will set up their base camp in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Baylor School.

We drove near this place during our travels, though we soon headed northwest through Nashville and then Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi River, taking small roads to the west and into the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas to the south. I was impressed by the vegetation, which reminded me of the tree-covered routes across the East Coast and South: the never-ending woods, slope after slope, the shades of green, and the almost vicious will to live and push forward of insects and life. And yes, some venomous snakes on the Tennessee River banks early on during the trip, and ticks, many, many ticks in the Ozarks to the west.

The forests and insects of today in vast areas of North America, which behave much more aggressively than, say, in the European wilderness, explain the story of the country celebrating its 250 years of existence. Curiously, we didn’t meet any Native Americans on our trip, but the thick forests and wildlife of today in many of the areas we visited are the byproduct of the controlled burns they performed on many of their prime hunting grounds like the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains.

And so, the hollowed-out shape of their absence is felt everywhere: by managing the game on the mountains and valleys along the Mississippi basin, they allowed the megafauna to thrive and roam around, creating the largest cities before the arrival of Europeans not far from the places we visited. Cahokia, in Illinois facing St. Louis on the eastern shore of the Mississippi, was at its peak (1100 CE) larger than London at the time, boasting a population of 15,000 to 20,000 residents, with advanced urban planning and over 100 earthen mounds.

Hernando de Soto’s Ozarks

During our trip, we met several people who navigated plants and trees from the surroundings with such a command that I felt immersed in a field trip each time I stepped outside. It was easy to blend the references of the early Spanish expedition to the area by Hernando de Soto (especially as I learned that he died of fever beside the Mississippi in 1542, also in May, or 484 years ago) and their encounter with the local tribes (after reading books like Charles C. Mann’s 1491 or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’m sure European infections had preceded De Soto’s greetings to the already decimated locals), the French nameplaces reminding Americans of the Louisiana Purchase…

This trip got me thinking of whether I have a personal perspective on the US’ 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as I decided to marry an American and raised three dual Spanish-American kids. So, now my very patchy, biased part of the story, which has to do with Northern California more than the American heartland.

As the old Revolution discourse gets vindicated, it’s safe to say that no one will be concerned on highlighting the different souls of this country, as well as its old traces of the French Louisiana or Spanish America parts that merged into the Union; people like Whitman (see The Spanish Element in Our Nationality, July 20, 1883) didn’t have any issue recalling this heritage and wondered whether Spanish and other elements present then in the continent were also a part of the American experiment:

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents.”

Maybe Whitman was woke “avant la lettre,” y’all?

However, this debate closed a long time ago, and the fear of immigration (contamination?) has also affected the language of Cervantes. Make no mistake, the semiquincentennial celebration will be very East Coast, very English-language, very “heritage” driven. But only the right kind of heritage, it seems, which isn’t something new, only now it’s blatantly clear.

Back to the West Coast

My version of 1776 is more nuanced, and I once wrote a historical fiction book called Triskelion to explain it. It dwells in the simple fact that European Empires didn’t give much importance first to North America, as it was more dangerous and difficult to manage cash crops as it was in the Caribbean (for a while, Saint Domingue—current Haiti—, the most productive colony for a long time, provided France with the biggest part of its GDP), but then fought strategically to control the possible routes potentially opening navigable passage to the Pacific Ocean, as well as the fur trades.

So, when in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress declared the independence of the then Thirteen Colonies, the Spaniards were just a few weeks from founding the Presidio of San Francisco, just half an hour from our current residence. They registered it on September 17, 1776.

Three weeks later, on October 9, Mission San Francisco de Asís—Mission Dolores—was founded inland, not far from there. Same year, same continent, two opposite political acts: one nation being born by separation from a still-rising empire; another empire, a dwindling one, reaching its northern California limit to avoid incursions down the coast by the Russians (from the north) and the British.

Now, as it happens, Kirsten’s California side (her dad, of full German heritage) has its roots in Sausalito, whereas her mother’s side (Anglo-Saxon roots going back to the early colonial era, settled in New Hampshire) is a part of my skewed perception of this celebratory year.

Back to the Spanish early settlement of San Francisco in 1776: The expedition that founded San Francisco was led by Juan Bautista de Anza, born in Sonora to a father from Hernani in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa. His lieutenant, José Joaquín Moraga, raised the Presidio (always a church first, then a jail) in September of the same year. They quickly named many memorable places and accidents, so it doesn’t surprise me that, as they looked across the strait from the new fort, they spotted a nice little willow grove, a “Sauzalito” in Spanish. The toponym has outlived every government that owned it since.

Semiquincentennial

Spain entered the war in 1779 as a co-belligerent, since any enemy of Britain was potentially an ally of the French and the Spaniards in North America. Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of Spanish Louisiana, opened a southern front and took Mobile and Pensacola from the British. So there you go: Spain was, in those years, the only power simultaneously settling new ground in North America for its own crown and fighting Britain alongside the rebels. Yet, to the country’s collective unconscious, it’s France the only actual significant ally.

Of course, those three consequential events (Philadelphia in July 1776, San Francisco in September and October of the same year) are never in the same textbook, for they don’t belong to a sole narrative. But my family doesn’t belong to a single narrative, either. Not even Kirsten is fully the type of “heritage” American poised to be the poster child of the celebration next July 4: descendants of the Anglo-Saxon population of the Thirteen Colonies, for she’s half German (Frisian, very close to Denmark) from her dad’s side.

Our children will end up tapping into the mentioned stories and many others, for there’s nothing exclusive or exclusivist about the American experiment, no matter the efforts to make it so.

Following the intermingling paths of both the official history of this country and our family history (the people we come from, the places we’ve lived). In a way, the three stories I mentioned meet now in a Berkeley kitchen, when a father from Iberia and a mother from the Sausalito-German and the New Hampshire-Yankee lines are raising children who carry, in a way, every leg of the triangle.

That’s why it made sense to end this article from San Francisco, standing on the Presidio bluff and looking across to Sausalito.

By the way, the secret treaty that transferred Louisiana from France to Spain in 1763, which set up Gálvez’s whole southern campaign as an American rebel 16 years later, was signed in the Palace of Fontainebleau, a prequel to the Revolution nobody references, with ties to a village where we lived as a family for a few years.

History is never only on the books, as many families know in way more painful circumstances than us. Imagine being wiped out, walking across the Ozarks during the Trail of Tears; imagine having been brought to a new continent as a piece of property; imagine descending from the people who built the first transcontinental railway and remained non-citizens for generations, as it happens now with many people whose ancestors were probably in US territory before the first Columbus travel, before the Basque and English cod fishers that kept Newfoundland to themselves for generations, before the Norse trips to Vinland.

Those and many others and their descendants, as Americans as you and my wife or kids.

People from work, or those who had the time and money, kept a seat warm in the busy café Condal downstairs, a classic breakfast-and-tapas place that back then still hosted more local professionals doing their eternal brunch while in office hours than tourists.

I liked to have a coffee there before noon when I could, seeing more or less the same faces from one day to another. The cafés in the area must have appealed to a certain type of customer for over 100 years, after the city demolished the old medieval walls and expanded to the hills in the north and towards the two rivers that enclose the city east and west.

I remember those mornings in early June 2001, a quarter of a century later, as I just realized we’re heading to a milestone that tragically includes the same boulevard I mentioned, Gran Via, this time at another busy intersection to the east, Carrer Bailèn. Time travel: I imagine myself sitting at a café when an old man, thin and frail, walks down the sidewalk, lost in his thoughts. Something’s about to happen.

A walk to confession

After leaving his office inside the temple he was designing and building using nature-inspired parametric design (without computers, mind you) a little before 6:00 PM on June 7, 1926, a white-bearded old man walked in a hurry down Bailèn in the direction of the Gothic Quarter, Barcelona’s old core, to attend his daily confession at the Baroque church of Sant Felip Neri, located in a medieval square with a little fountain in the middle sheltered by a centenarian linden tree.

Coincidentally, our kids went to Elementary School in that same old little square at Escola Sant Felip Neri, and the experience must have left some imprint: our middle daughter submitted a drawing of that same square for her art project as a high school junior in California: in the drawing, one can see the tree, the central fountain, and the surrounding buildings. Most interestingly, one also infers the quiet and convivial ambiance from the soft, yellow lights in the old apartment windows, and the casual encounters portrayed: a few occupied café tables to the left, two girls chatting while sitting on the fountain’s rim.

The old man’s routine of walking daily from the Sagrada Familia work-in-progress to the Oratory of Sant Felip Neri had solidified around 1915, when he experienced a deep spiritual crisis that prompted him to stop taking on any commercial or private architecture commissions.

On one such walk, he resolved to dedicate the remainder of his life to building a temple that would rival grand cathedrals in ambition and scope: in size, in the resources required, in societal participation, and in the time needed to complete the works. He wouldn’t see it finished, but that fact didn’t bother him the least.

An old man and two trams

On that day of June, 1926, the old white-bearded man didn’t make it to confession at the church next door to meet Father Lluís Maria de Valls. According to police and historical records, the man, hard of hearing, jumped into the busy Gran Via intersection, lost in thought.

He saw a packed tram, the 30, approaching in one direction and stepped backward to avoid it. But his hearing problem didn’t warn him about another tram coming from the other end of the Gran Via, which struck him.

People surrounded the old man and tried to help. He looked like a beggar more than one of the first starchitects: his attire was old, dirty, and worn-out; his pockets were fastened with safety pins, and his shoes were as old and torn as the beggar character Charlie Chaplin played in movies since 1914.

The old man’s unkempt appearance — a frail physique and long, untrimmed white beard — was much in the style of old John Muir. A lack of documentation other than a little book of gospels didn’t play in his favor, and many of the first responders believed he was a homeless beggar, to the point that multiple taxi drivers refused to transport him to a clinic.

Who is Antonio Sandi?

After several minutes lying unconscious on the street, a police officer finally managed to take him to the Hospital de la Santa Creu in Barcelona’s Raval, an institution housed inside an ancient building that had been left to treat the poor.

On that same night of June 7, the night watchman at the Sagrada Familia noticed that the old, taciturn man had not returned from his evening walk, so he alerted Father Gil Parés. Realizing the old, forgetful master was missing, the priest Parés contacted one of the man’s disciples, Domènec Sugrañes. Together, they spent the night and early morning asking the police and looking for any clues at local clinics.

When they finally traced an event involving an old bearded tramp run over by a tram, they hurried down to the Gothic hospital in the most crowded and poorest part of the old city. They saw that the admittance slip had mistakenly recorded “Antonio Sandi.” Then, Sugrañes assured the hospital: “Gentlemen, the tramp you’re talking about is Illustrisimo Antoni Gaudí.”

“My place is here”

Soon, prominent figures of the civil society and city officials rushed to the hospital and offered to move him to a private clinic, but Gaudí, who had recovered consciousness, refused: “My place is here, among the poor.”

He passed away at the dark, medieval hospital, a marvel of Catalan Gothic style, simple and timeless, which contrasted with his equally timeless way of seeing nature as a godly part of nature; the ensemble’s cloister has some significance to our family, for we used to bring our kids to the public library inside.

I can’t help but remember an article I read about the equally tragic death of one of America’s first universal authors, the author of The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe, found hurt in a Baltimore street in September 1849, and also initially treated as a beggar, then sent to the local charity hospital in Maryland, Washington College Hospital.

For nearly 20 years, from 1905 to 1925, Gaudí’s official home was a generous pink chalet inside Park Güell, designed by him as one of the models for a future development around the park that never happened. He lived there with his father and niece. Rejected by the love of his life, a liberal schoolteacher from nearby Mataró, he’d never married or had children. Once his father (1906, age 93) and niece (1912, age 36) passed away, many things shifted. Gaudí’s beliefs, architectural style, and very life transformed into a bolder proposition: he developed a mission and set out to accomplish it with determination.

Once his health began to decay, Gaudí doubled down and left the Park Güell home, which felt now like an empty carcass. His legs were weak, and the one-hour commute from the park to the construction site of the temple he had envisioned wasn’t feasible anymore, so he arranged a small bed in his studio workshop inside the Sagrada Familia itself.

There, surrounded by masterful models of the cathedral made with weights to accomplish the parametric marvels of the natural realm, Gaudí lived the last six months of his life, in a feverish battle against the clock, half monk and half genius architect, with the aspect of John Muir and the determination of Thomas Edison.

When the models burned

Many things happened after his death in early June 1926, almost a century ago. His pioneering parametric “hanging chain” (polyfunicular) models, which used strings, chains, and small sacks of lead pellets or sand to calculate optimal architectural arches using physical gravity, didn’t make it to the Spanish Civil War, and so a group of anarchists, mistaking freedom of thought with anticlerical vandalism, entered the workshop and smashed his large-scale plaster models, burned the archive of architectural plans, sketches, calculations, and photographic records. The work of a genius for the world to preserve and study for generations to come, lost forever.

The incident happened just ten years after the architect passed, and things were going to turn much, much darker in Europe back then, with the Spanish Civil War as a test field for guerrilla warfare on the Republican side and state-of-the-art weaponry on the Francoist side provided by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Also, Gaudí’s work and Modernisme in general, a distinctive movement centered in Barcelona that merged European Art Nouveau’s organic aesthetics with traditional craftsmanship akin to the Arts and Crafts movement, became out of fashion, and so the city’s intelligentsia, especially as industrial power first and then democracy, the Olympics, its biggest sports club, etc., associated the works with the wrong side of history.

The moderns come back

But sooner than later, the same young architects and intellectuals who had initially championed rigid international rationalism, from Oriol Bohigas to Josep Lluís Sert or Ricardo Bofill, finally recognized the work as structurally revolutionary and inherently vernacular, so they began restoring interiors and lobbying to protect many of the works that risked decay or even demolition.

And so, from the late sixties and early seventies onwards, those same youngsters decrying the old master not only embraced him but protected his work and set out to help accomplish a gigantic, civilization-scale collective work: the Sagrada Familia, a building built by a foundation backed by the regional civil society, as collective and voluntarist as the construction of early Gothic cathedrals.

A few years back, when Kirsten and I visited architect Ricardo Bofill’s La Fábrica, an old cement factory transformed into his iconic home-studio, I couldn’t help but marvel when we entered what Bofill called precisely “the cathedral,” a massive room built inside the old factory’s kiln that opened to a garden and had seen many gatherings over the years. Among the many pieces of furniture, there was an array of them designed by Gaudí, most notably his ergonomic wooden chairs. The moderns had come to love the master.

One hundred years on

One hundred years after the tram incident with the old tramp that turned out to be the city’s most universal figure, things are looking different at the Sagrada Familia. On February 20, 2026, the tallest part of the basilica was finally crowned with a gigantic cross of metal and concrete perched over the city at 172.5 meters, making the old tramp in shabby clothes’ temple the tallest church in the world and completing the otherworldly external profile of the temple’s central spire.

On June 10, 2026, the church will look almost completed, and the Pope is expected in Barcelona to consecrate the central tower, a technical feat that Gaudí dreamt of using inverse models hanging with weights upside down, knowing that, in the best-case scenario (which didn’t materialize), he would only live to fund, help build, and see a tiny portion of the work. That was perhaps what moved the whole enterprise, kick-started in 1916 after his spiritual crisis in 1915: cathedral-scale works got built by many generations of entire civil societies; he was more than fulfilled in lighting the flame and keeping it on as long as he could keep going.

It’s a story about Gaudí, but also about a city; four weeks out from a ceremony as I write, and we imagine the old man walking from school to the church located in the same tucked-away medieval square where our kids played after school until a little over a decade back.

If Gaudí were to walk back from Sant Felip Neri to the basilica of the Sagrada Familia now, he’d see a different skyline, and his organic temple towering over it, but not squashing it: Gaudí deliberately designed the tower to be 5.2 meters lower than the mountain of Montjuïc, the epicenter of the 92 Olympics, a symbolic hill behind the city that has both protected and sieged the city from the vantage point of its military fortress.

Five meters below Montjuïc

Gaudí didn’t think of Montjuïc as the hill from where the city heard the cannons in the past, but as a landmark created by God, a humble 177.7 meters tall hill. So, the temple’s tallest point was about 172.5 meters; Gaudí, an architect with advanced civil engineering skills, could have dreamed of a taller feat. He chose not to.

Not long ago, I read a comment somewhere about somebody visiting Barcelona who, upon seeing the Sagrada Familia, experienced the same feelings he had for the Strasbourg Cathedral; to him, both temples, very different aesthetically and from diametrically opposed eras (medieval and modern), represent a similar approach toward human endeavor.

The construction of Strasbourg Cathedral began in 1015 and went on and off for decades, then relaunched in 1190, and after many events that stalled the works several times (among them, the Black Death), it was finally finished in 1439, even though it’s still missing one spire, which reminds us that, many times over, cathedrals were built in a similar fashion to the collective endeavor of the Sagrada Familia, often left “unfinished” many generations after the first masons, carpenters, and sculptors had begun their initial works.

Standing at the center of the Place de la Cathédrale, the Cathedral of Strasbourg is still among the tallest churches in the world at 142 meters (466 feet), and was the world’s tallest building from 1647 to 1874. Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia is a contemporary, folly-looking version of such a breathtaking type of building, one of those few collective works that reach civilization-scale.

Those who, on June 10, 2026, will step inside the Sagrada Familia once again, or for the first time, will see the effect of sunlight streaming through the windows and hitting the vegetal towering columns and ornaments like the cones of light as they filter through the leaves and branches of a forest canopy, one of the most astonishing visions I’ve experienced inside any building. If, like many ancient philosophers and then Christian theologians, one thinks that experiencing beauty can bring one closer to god, then it’s more than recommended to visit such a place.

Seventy-three years before the tram

If Gaudí was 73 years old when he died, numbers play their infinite game of coincidence again: 73 years before Gaudí stepped backward into the wrong side of an intersection, leading critic and polymath of the Victorian era John Ruskin talked vehemently about the need to capture real truth and beauty by observing nature and bringing back medieval craftsmanship. His 1853 chapter The Nature of Gothic (from The Stones of Venice, Volume II) celebrated Gothic revival, a style that required workmen to put all their senses into the work, flourishing in the process.

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. (…) Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.”

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. II, Ch. 6, The Nature of Gothic, 1853

And so, years later, when artist and textile designer William Morris sought to promote British craftsmanship to survive automation, he reprinted a chapter of Ruskin’s book as a standalone tract that traveled through the Arts and Crafts movement in the Anglo-Saxon world into Modernisme in Catalonia. Ruskin believed that the imperfection and inefficiency of Gothic ornament wasn’t something to suppress but a statement of the mason’s freedom. Like Gaudí later, Ruskin and Morris took sides and embraced a way to integrate technology that preserved the man instead of erasing him.

Collective works such as Gothic cathedrals can represent much more than the assembly of their stones, carpentry, and ornaments, as many people realized when on April 15, 2019, a structural fire broke out in the roof space of Notre-Dame de Paris; contributions from all over the world, big and small, helped restore a place that had made generations dream and think about the enchantment of the world through works such as Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and later pop culture adaptations.

A drawing made in California

And so, when I saw my daughter’s day-in-the-life portrait of Sant Felip Neri, I couldn’t help but make the connection of the many layers of reality connecting us to the tragedy, and also the beauty, of the world: Sant Felip Neri’s church, the same little Baroque temple squeezed in the small medieval square that preserves the etched wounds of the 1938 Fascist Italian bombardment of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and the place where a decade before Gaudí was trying to reach after work on a tragic day of early June, 1926, next to the school that my daughters attended as little kids in the early 2010s.

In the middle of the square, a little fountain preserving the ambient freshness in late spring and early summer, as school is about to end for the year and the yellow flowers of the big linden tree fall, covering the ground in yellow and filling the air with a fresh scent.

The summer solstice approaches, and everything is yet to be done, and everything is possible.

No other domestic animal exists in such radical morphological extremes. A Chihuahua and a Great Dane are members of the same species.

I don’t want to play the tiny violin of life remorse, but one of the downsides of traveling often and spending long summers abroad, because we have family and friends on other continents, is that our family has purposefully missed out on something: having a pet.

Dogs walking owners

And, when it comes to domestic animals, there’s one species above all others, so loyal to us and noble that it can sometimes border on annoyance: dogs.

I’m not talking about online trends showing how people can mistake pets for people and overspend, let alone force society to put up with their animals, as they often want their dogs allowed inside public establishments. If some people can barely tolerate dealing with other people’s children around them in restaurants, should they be forced to have other people’s dogs by their side as they buy groceries, travel, eat out, or go to the movies?

I’m referring to the broad relation inter-species since the dawn of time. For some reason, our ancestors and the ancestors of dogs, wild canids most closely related to today’s remaining wolf species, chose to “collaborate” rather than have humans domesticate passive wolves to turn them into a food source, as humans did with many other species.

We all know a few dogs

Kirsten, who has six siblings, grew up in the Bay Area without a dog. My family didn’t own one when we were young either.

I still remember how one summer, as the vacations came to an end and, like many people in Spain, we had to go back home to the Barcelona area from the small town of one of my parents’ ancestors that we visited every year, a relative gave us kids a puppy, and we tried to convince our parents to take it home with us to our place in the city. It didn’t go our way, and the experience must have left its mark, for I still remember it vividly.

Finally, we got a dog when we were already teens. Our dog was a small one, a rescue Yorkshire-ish puppy, and she grew to be part of the family, seeing us leave the family nest and cheering our weekend visits as only dogs can. Then she died when we already had children, and my parents decided not to have any more pets.

Dogs in mythology, dogs in memory

My parents’ official reason was somewhat cold-blooded and pragmatic: dogs are a responsibility, and they suffer from travel, which they also do once or twice a year. Years later, I got the real motive: their pet had been a part of their family, living with us as we left the house, and it reminded them of that part of life, which Kirsten and I are now entering, when one has achieved financial stability and still feels young and energetic, though other people might not consider you “young” anymore.

My parents didn’t see that particular “dog” as just any pet that could be easily swapped for another; it was much more than that. So perhaps one way to stay loyal to those memories was not to adopt any other puppy. I wonder if there are any studies on how people’s relationships with their pets relate to the idea of impermanence: pets’ lifespans are much shorter than ours, and we also face our own mortality when we see them fade away four times as fast.

Many stories — known and private — about our intimate relationship with dogs abound across cultures and eras; dogs are present in mythology and in archaeological remains. The Odyssey, a book memorized and recited by Rhapsodes and hence close to cultural tradition, skilfully expresses the symbiotic relationship as Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, so transformed that nobody, including his wife and son, recognizes him. But he doesn’t trick Argos, the old neglected dog he’d left as a puppy to go to war. Upon arrival, the dog lifts his head, wags his tail, and dies.

But dogs’ ability to stand by their owners isn’t a matter of mythology. There are many stories about dogs’ loyalty (even after their owners’ deaths) and their ability to sacrifice themselves to protect their human companions. Social media companies know that, and there’s a reason why AI videos are trying to replicate this deeply ingrained, reciprocal empathy of dogs and humans: people just fall for it because they’ve been around dogs, and also because our society —many sociologists would argue— often tilts towards alienation and hostility, so a companion whose only purpose is showing unconditional affection may feel at times a better fit than scrolling on screens or abusing antidepressants (or any other substance) just to cope.

Hachikō, and the dogs who refused to leave

When we visited Japan in the early summer of 2016, one day, we stumbled upon the bronze statue of a dog outside a big transportation hub in Tokyo’s center: Shibuya Station. Intrigued, I looked for any mention in the guide I carried or online, for that matter. And there it was: the statue celebrated Hachikō, an Akita, a spitz-type dog renowned for its protective nature.

Though Hachikō was not any Akita dog. His bond with his owner, university professor Hidesaburō Ueno, became a symbol to early-twentieth-century commuters. Born in mid-November 1923, one year later, Hachikō began to go outside the busy station to wait for the professor, but when Ueno died unexpectedly in 1925, Hachikō didn’t stop going to the station, which he continued to do every single day until his own death ten years later, in 1935.

Many would weigh whether the Akita dog’s loyalty had emerged from habit (a developed trait of smart dog breeds) or if one could attribute the behavior to the dog’s conscious agency, unable to lose all hope upon its human master and companion for as long as it could go on its own to the meeting point they had shared. The story seems shaped for a particularly developed (and successful), feel-good type of social media story.

Pay enough attention, and you’ll hear some story or another that may remind you of Hachikō, even if this Japanese dog was an especially stubborn, loyal member of its breed. In Edinburgh’s nineteenth century, Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye terrier among many — until his owner, John Gray, died; the dog ended up sleeping for fourteen years on Gray’s grave, until he himself died. A statue at the corner of Candlemaker Row commemorates the animal, even though some argue the story was exaggerated and has since become part of local folklore.

Other dogs weren’t lucky enough to know where to go to meet their gone human companion. Consider Shep, a sheepdog from Fort Benton: when the owner died in 1936, his coffin was loaded onto an eastbound train. From then on, Shep, who couldn’t understand the random cruelty of such machines, met every train —four a day— for over five years until he died, struck by a locomotive like Don Quixote had been dispatched by the windmill blades.

Finding the way back

Some dogs are also separated from the people they grow up around, yet they manage to find the way back, or die trying. Bobbie the Wonder Dog was one such animal. In 1923, the collie was stranded in Indiana and managed to find his way back home… all the way to Oregon: 2,500 miles in six months. To reach the West Coast, as the Oregon Humane Society documented later on, the dog embarked on a canine Odyssey: there were sightings of the collie walking alone across the Great Plains and the Rockies in winter.

In the town of Borgo San Lorenzo, Tuscany, Fido, a mixed-breed dog, was rescued from a ditch by Carlo Soriani in 1941, and since then, the dog waited for the bus bringing Carlo from the brick kiln where he worked. When in 1943 Soriani was killed by an Allied bombing, Fido kept meeting the bus, every evening, for fourteen years until he died in 1958.

There are many more outliers, including those animals that not only stood by their owners but also decided to sacrifice themselves if it came to that point. Ruswarp, a 14-year-old Welsh Border collie, accompanied Graham Nuttall on a hike in the Cambrian Mountains, but on that day in 1990, Nuttall had a heart attack and died. Ruswarp stayed by the body for eleven weeks in winter until the owner and the dog were found. The dog didn’t have much energy left, but made it to Nuttall’s formal funeral, dying a few days later.

What dogs may not understand about death

These stories, and many others, would bring back memories of our eldest, and many family conversations end up unearthing one such act in their vicinity. Although we may not be as shocked by the fortitude some dogs show as proof of their commitment to the people who welcome them into their lives, we are struck by their inability to comprehend the complexities of grief. It’s as if dogs couldn’t understand that the people they loved and protected are gone, and so they decide to stand guard by the place that either keeps their remains or signifies their daily bond.

Perhaps a growing inability to show real affection and build meaningful relationships with other people can make many humans keen to see the one-sided, unconditional loyalty of domestic animals, especially dogs, as ideal. But do we want total submission and dependence on fellow humans, even from our closest loving ones? What if many people are falling for the trap of idealizing simple, unconditional bonds with animals on social media as a way of coping in a world where alienation and acts of cruelty among people are visible in the broken, sensationalized news cycle?

We shouldn’t try to make dogs human, mistaking them for entitled children. Dogs aren’t children, nor do they need the care most humans in the world wish they had access to. They just need an environment where they can be most true to their symbiotic relationship with our species since the dawn of time.

Jack London, on both sides of the line

Perhaps one of the things many people connected to when reading many of Jack London’s stories was his ability to portray the harshness of Frontier life; a young lad who left everything in late-nineteenth century San Francisco East Bay in search of gold in the Big North during the Klondike Gold Rush, he came back with empty pockets, but (the saying goes) his spirit was packed with stories issued from experience.

How Jack London managed to survive in his log cabin 80 miles south of Dawson City, Yukon, is a matter of speculation, though we have a good guess in fragments of many of his short stories and novels, in which, among other things, he explores the blurring boundaries between civilization and the wilderness in the changing character of frontier people and their domestic animals. Buck from The Call of the Wild is a well-groomed, protected, and loved pet in wealthy suburban San Francisco, though he will attain his Nietzschean potential, his “will to power,” when he has to prevail in the wild amid the threat of alpha dogs and wolves, as well as cruel owners.

When Buck embraces the primitive, shedding his “thin veneer of civilization,” he taps into a primal ancestry that dogs only partially shed in order to coexist with us. To Jack London—a reader of Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche— Buck’s newly found joy in fighting and killing to prevail among other dogs and even wolves is not a sign of evil, but a healthy expression of this particular dog’s nature when he meets his potential.

Jack London aside, I, too, was intrigued by the origins of our relationship with dogs, and by when humans’ best friend first got close enough to us to the point of abandoning its previous incarnation in the wild. Back in 2019, I self-published a novel portraying the clash between European Neanderthals and modern humans as they expanded throughout the continent; I wanted to speculate about hybridization among humans, as we retain traces of it to this day, but also I wanted to link this early human struggle with the hypothetical moment in which some wolves got closer to us, giving way to early dogs.

Before farming, before cities: where the bond began

Humans seem to have rewarded the predictable character and habits, which can be shaped into loyalty after a few generations, since prehistory. Early remains show genetic evidence that the descendants of wolves (in other words, early dogs) lived with hunter-gatherer groups millennia before the dawn of Neolithic societies, and that small human groups acquired dogs from one another.

So far, the earliest physical evidence of the bond between humans and early dogs comes from remains in Bonn-Oberkassel, in the Rhineland, where, roughly 14,000 years ago, a man, a woman, and a dog were buried together. The remains show that the dog suffered a long illness and humans had nursed him through weeks of fevers and seizures, before the couple and the animal were buried together, showing a symbolic bond beyond life, as well as a commitment to care and protection.

Dogs’ evolutionary willingness to adapt to us, as shown by their different shapes and niche specialization, almost by breed, shows one single strategy from this canid species as a whole, which holds for Chihuahuas as well as Great Danes: their willingness to live with us and assist us. Only, this assistance leaned toward alertness and help with exploring, hunting, and protecting us and ours, whereas nowadays most dogs are evolving to show affection towards their owners. This may suggest that, amid rampant alienation, contemporary society’s greatest need is unconditional love and respect for one another. And when people can’t find affection or aren’t willing to put the effort required to foster and maintain healthy human bonds, they resort to pets.

First dogs, then civilization

Dogs’ willingness to live with us and meet our needs could have been present from the beginning. In late March of this year, a team led by Anders Bergström pushed back the earliest confirmed genetic evidence of domestic dogs by about 5,000 years. Bones found in Turkey and in a cave in Southern England, dated to around 15,800 years ago, turned out not to be wolf bones: in both cases, the remains were already those of dogs.

What’s most fascinating is that both groups of hunter-gatherers had not yet settled or planted a seed; they were not farmers. But they already had dogs. And, as reported by the New York Times, genetic patterns suggest those dogs were already moving between hunter-gatherer groups, passed along like an advantageous strategy, an early “piece of technology.” Or, in human terms, like a loved relative.

Back to Jack London, he bracketed our relationship from both ends: Buck from The Call of the Wild finds his instinct and will to prevail as an alpha animal, transitioning from a manicured life in suburban Palo Alto to self-sufficiency in the wilderness. But if Buck slowly recovers the wolf inside him, White Fang, the wolf-cub that names London’s other novel on the topic, gradually consents to become a dog. After his Klondike days, Jack London suspected what geneticists are now confirming: the line between the two animals, despite their radically different looks and habits, is thinner and more porous than our taxonomy shows.

When the bond runs the other way

The bond looks like it runs the other way, from domesticated to wild, and this phenomenon is coming into focus with dogs and wolves: a study published this past January in the journal Biological Conservation analyzed DNA from 748 wolves found dead in Italy from 2020 to 2024. The study found that 47% of them were wolf-dog hybrids.

The phenomenon is concentrated in packs from the central and southern Italian Peninsula, where wolf populations recovered first after a near-extinction event in the early twentieth century, and where the countryside is full of free-ranging domestic dogs.

As we learned from stories like those by Jack London, a wolf in a healthy pack will treat a loose dog as a competitor or as prey, whereas a lone female wolf in a thinned-out, weak pack will sometimes treat a healthy dog roaming in the wilderness as a mate. Then, nature follows its course.

We the Neanderthals

But at what point can hybridization transform a species beyond recognition? Geneticists call this threshold genetic swamping: a point at which the wolf as a distinct genetic entity simply disappears, absorbed back into the descendants of the very species it had once given rise to.

Perhaps (this is my speculation as a non-expert, mind you), Neanderthals and Denisovans didn’t vanish from the Earth through extermination or illness, but rather through genetic swamping: unable to maintain their own healthy populations, some female Neanderthals decided to attract adventurous modern human males, and the rest is prehistory.

Regarding wolves who want to be dogs, and dogs who want to be wolves, there’s something quietly fitting in the symmetry. As I speculated a few years back in a self-published book, the covenant began somewhere on the cold Eurasian steppe, when a wolf made an apparently awkward, private call: to come closer to a person.

And it may yet end in the hills of Lazio and Calabria with a dog walking back the other way.

When you’re about to start the day and talk to your relatives living a reality nine hours ahead, a dissonance between each other’s circadian rhythms develops: you are starting your day, full of energy, and on the other side of the conversation, they are winding down. And vice versa.

So, when I recently celebrated my birthday with a weekend day of what I see as normality, though with the twist of waking up a little later than normal, I experienced this phenomenon once again. At the other end of the line, they are trying to sound cheerful and celebratory, though you can sense that it’s been a long day for them already. Knowing this, I try to be aware of the other person’s reality, and a 9-hour time difference with Spain is worth noting.

A working-day distance

It’s not much different from my sister’s, who is married to an Englishman and living in Oxford; eight hours still makes a long workday. So when I talked to my sister and brother-in-law, I could tell we found a common ground and tried to keep things simple in the conversation.

They made an effort to show interest in keeping the chat going, even though I heard the characteristic sound signal used by Apple’s Time to Bed feature that marks the start of what the phone calls “sleep focus.” In today’s etiquette, the soft, melodic notes that seem inspired by Brahms Lullaby are a polite way to tell people it’s time to go to bed.

That said, in twenty minutes we had time to catch up a bit and talk about our latest visit to England last winter, as well as opportunities to see each other in the future. And so, my brother-in-law, a teacher, shared that he was back at painting: he’s been producing work as a visual artist on and off for years, and he thought that perhaps there wasn’t time anymore for it, but on our last visit, he confessed that he needed to express himself through painting.

Though I don’t remember his exact words, he explained the need to reconnect with something that’s much more than a hobby. To some, the flow state they attain when working on something that they feel is part of their purpose is as necessary as the air we breathe. And, unlike trying to rememorate things and moments with a quick gesture to grab our phone from our pocket and snap a picture or video of something we consider memorable, artists choose more profound ways to interact with what they are trying to depict.

How to capture the enchantment of the world

Now, that’s the challenge (and supreme impossibility) of the old-school artist: how to grasp a memorable part of the elusive reality and make it resonate in a format (a canvas) that’s bidimensional and reductionistic (or, in the age of AI generative visual engines like Stable Difussion, synthetic).

Yet, when we look at a painting, we can be moved by the action or “expanded time” of what we see, which may feel much more than just an instant or photo snap. I guess it feels less of a challenge to capture the progression of time in other ways of expression, like a song made out of repetitive patterns; think Philip Glass or Steve Reich.

Born and raised in Oxford, he explained that there’s a pleasant place along the River Thames to walk. Over the years, he had been drawn to it, so a couple of months ago, he decided to make it happen at a time of year when soft light and mist make it very special. It’s a particular corner of Port Meadow, an old protected pasture, managed and favored by the public for long walks, and a connection to the Thames Path (linking one of the river’s sources at Kemble in Gloucestershire to the outskirts of London).

He chose to set the regard from close to Walton Well Road car park, looking west. And so, by looking at a painting-in-progress by a relative, I think about the prospect of taking that walk from Gloucestershire to the sea. Perhaps one day.

I asked how the painting was going, and he reminded me of the painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti and his struggle to finish anything while working on a given piece. He told me that he’s going there after work many days a week, and he’s been going for quite a while, yet it’s hard to reach the moment when the artist says, “This is it, it’s finished.”

About the impossibility of “finishing” art

Some people never reach such a conclusion and need external catalysts forcing them to declare the process concluded, if only for the sake of moving on and starting over. He shared a picture of the work in progress, and I very much liked it, even though I decided not to mention things I didn’t know or hint that it looked “finished enough” to me.

I didn’t ask either how he gets all the nuances I already see in the unfinished canvas, like the wonderful, fleeting sense of light that I always admire during early morning outings in winter in the places we’ve visited and lived over the years in Europe and North America. And yes, meadows are quite a special sight for me, especially when in the place where they seem to belong, Britain.

I would describe my brother-in-law’s style as modern yet still figurative: you can “interpret” it right away; he’s not abstract or close to it. I guess you would call it impressionistic, prioritizing the “sensation” of the landscape in him rather than the need expressed by many (often talented) hyper-realistic artists trying to depict the visual rigors of reality (like, say, Spanish painter Antonio López).

In a painting that tries to “see” reality but not depict it in photorealistic detail, the goal is to capture how does it feel to really “see” a place, to go beyond the veil of blandness that wraps everyday life to the point of making us forget on our way to our daily routines that there’s beauty in everything around us, not only in the natural and architectural landmarks, but in our experience interacting with what David Deutsch called “the fabric of reality.”

Color palette when you see color differently

Now, in the case of my brother-in-law, an amateur painter that you don’t know and it’s not celebrated (yet) by many people but us relatives and many friends, the impressionistic effort manifests in a brushwork that is energetic and gestural, particularly in the foregroud water and the skeletal “winter” trees framing the view closer to our point of view, but not as abstract as many celebrated authors.

The color palette is coherent and rich, with the sophisticated tonal relationships of a true painter: lush and saturated greens, so typical of rainy England (a type of green that pops in my Mediterranean perception, even though, growing up, I visited Galicia in Northwestern “lush-green” Spain every year).

Yet the green of the Thames floodplain is its own kind of green. Instead of a saturated blue of particular days and places that tend to be more to the south in winter, the sky is, up to now, a pale, lemon-yellow wash that suggests one of the two moments of the day that, like French writer Romain Gary reminded us, express an innocence, a possibility, a “promise.”

“With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother’s grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again.”

Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn (La promesse de l’aube, 1960)

As for the shawos and the water, there’s an effective use of deep blues and teals, rather than a muddy, darker, more “realistic” water in winter.

Though in this case, the author is not in it for celebration, but because he needs it. Compromise with one’s own life purposes doesn’t end with the obligations of adulthood or the milestones of mature life, as we picture ourselves approaching middle life. It’s worth remembering that we celebrate many late bloomers in all disciplines, and painting isn’t an exception: Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker and a “family man” before he walked away from his life in his mid-30s, once he realized he had enough to live and, more importantly, that he not only wanted to paint full-time, but also that he could sell his paintings.

“Seeing” with your eyes vs. trusting your instincts

Mary Delany was also a late bloomer; she began her painfully detailed “paper-mosaics” of flowers and other natural motifs at 72, producing 1,000 pieces now in the British Museum; talk about an amateur hobby. And Anna Mary Robertson Moses, simply known as Grandma Moses, began painting in earnest at… 78, and just because her arthritis made another passion, embroidery, too difficult; and, like my brother-in-law, she had a style more focused on rhythmic patterns of the human-managed “rural” landscape than the ephemeral veracity of a still picture.

Interestingly, I didn’t ask my brother-in-law about one important biographical detail that literally conditions the way he looks into the world at any given time: like roughly 8% of males and 0.5% of females, he was born with color blindness, a defficiency also known as daltonism (after John Dalton, developer of the modern atomic theory, who had red-green dichromacy, which caused significant difficulty distinguishing reds and greens.

Now, if my brother-in-law suffers the same type of dichromacy, how is he able to give his work-in-progress so much texture and nuance, including subtle brushes of reddish color across several layers of different greens?

I mention this because, in looking at this painting, I recalled something I read about Claude Monet’s style in his later works, which feel even more contemporary than the rest of his work, given the visually-altered depiction of color they show, as the artist developed severe cataracts and, to him, the world turned blurred and tilted towards heavy reds and yellow. Perhaps this limitation forced Monet to “see more” by being forced to go beyond simple, lazy, “normie” perception:

“I see less and less… I trust my eyes less and less.”

Claude Monet

Perhaps my brother-in-law is in the same process of trusting an enhanced perception that doesn’t rely only on what his eyes ought to be interpreting, but on experience. Instead of missing color, he’s reinterpreting it his way. One can feel that, instead of relying on “hue” (a matter-of-fact reliance on the pure color family, which consists of red, yellow, blue, etc.), he prioritizes “value,” or the nuances of luminosity when light hits objects of different colors at different wavelengths and intensities.

The landscapes with which we feel connected

I think this is a very effective way of seeing the “pastoral,” dreamy English landscape that a meadow represents. If you’ve ever walked through one of them in early morning or later in the afternoon on a misty yet clear day, you can’t help but admire how much such a place resonates in us. A meadow lacks the saturated distractions and condensed beauty of a well-tended garden: it’s monochromatic and invites us to focus on the purity of the pulse, light, and form, almost like the repetitive distillation of Philip Glass’s or Steve Reich’s musical styles. The very idea of the English garden, with its unkempt, irregular scenes over the geometric formality of Italian or French gardens, is an in-between inspired by the country’s misty and grassy meadows, surrounded by trees.

As a creature of the Mare Nostrum myself, I feel like I’m at home sometimes in California, especially when I look at a series of rolling hills still green in spring, spotted with majestic oaks here and there, and the occasional home or little vineyard here and there.

It’s a type of landscape already present in places like the Mediterranean basin during the Roman period and even earlier; now, we observe its idealized remnants scattered here and there, with corners of Tuscany or Provence shared once again. We even own a house in Penedès, an hour southwest of Barcelona, a valley with many things in common with other wine-producing regions around the world, including Napa and Sonoma, not far from where we live.

When we visit such places, we see rolling hills and well-tended agrarian lots amid tree-covered hedges and the occasional human habitation. In places like Southern France, one also sees the olive groves and the lavender fields, and I came to cherish many places in Catalonia not far from where I grew up. Walking or biking through such places offers a sense of promise and an understanding of the human role in nature, as we perceive these highly managed landscapes as a gentle interaction between rurality and urbanism.

In some parts of the world, pastoral management can make sense economically, like the never-ending fields of holly oaks in the interior of the Iberian peninsula, a sustainably managed landscape of spare woodlands used for grazing, where bulls and Iberian pigs can be seen near the road walking from natural ponds to the forests where they feed amid tall grass and the occasional rocky landmark.

View of Port Meadow from Oxford, looking west

I remember seeing these big stretches of idealized land—with healthy animals grazing freely by the side of the road amid the morning mist—as a kid from the back seat of my parents’ car when we drove across the Iberian central highlands, “Meseta,” each early summer. The landscapes we’ve seen, lived in in, and cherish are also part of who we are and what we want to achieve as stewards of the places we choose to live as adults.

And, sometimes, this sense of establishing deeper connections with well-tended landscapes that show a coexistence between human habitation and natural regeneration feels like an extension of our longing for creating something, for making an impact, either by building or managing in the strict sense (a dehesa, a homestead), or by creating. Or said by Romain Gary:

“My longing for perfection, my dream of dealing with life as if it were ink and paper, and with destiny as if it were literature, made me attack with impatient hands a shapeless lump of clay which no human determination can ever mold, but which has itself the frightening power insidiously to shape a human being according to its will. The harder you try to leave your mark upon it, the better it succeeds in imposing on you a form of its own, tragic, grotesque, insignificant or comic, until at last you find yourself lying on the ocean edge, in a solitude broken by the barking of a seal and the cries of gulls, surrounded by thousands of motionless sea birds reflected in the mirror of wet sand. Instead of juggling to the best of my ability with three, four, or five balls, as all artists have done, I was trying to live something which can only be sung. I have wandered in pursuit of something for which art had given me a thirst but which life could not quench. I have long since ceased to be the dupe of my poetical inspiration and, if I still dream of transforming the world into a happy garden, I know now that it is not so much because I love my fellow men as because I love gardens.”

Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn, 1961 (chapter 23, p.269)

A painting in the works can open a whole stream of thought regarding what anonymous human stewardships over countless generations can do for our collective and individual well-being.

Thinking about the big expanse of common land dating back to early medieval times, also a floodplain of the River Thames, I realized that much of what we call rural or “natural” landscapes is properly managed, long-term cultural artifacts.

What landscapes tell us

In the Mediterranean, a drier landscape than the one that favors the green meadow surrounded by towering deciduous trees, as in England, old olive trees are almost a perfect symbol of this. Research shows that the spread and success of this tree across the Mediterranean basin for almost four millennia wouldn’t have been possible without active human planning. In other words, studies show that trade, cultivation, and pruning “made” the Mediterranean landscape, and not climate and the mere random interaction of different species within ecosystems.

When we see old olive trees, which we sometimes come to idealize as sage trees in the Mediterranean landscape, we think about their resilience. Instead, studies show that we should be aware that groves of very old olive trees are a testimony of human stewardship.

How many people know that olive trees live only for a hundred years on their own before decaying? If left uncared for, they grow into bushy shrubs. If you’ve ever seen a very old olive tree, it’s because it has been continuously pruned and cared for, sometimes by 20 generations of humans or more. If that isn’t “deep time,” I don’t know what the expression means.

Perhaps, depicting a meadow is an act of recognition and celebration of human stewardship of what we call “the commons,” a reminder in our times of hyper-individuality that voluntary collaboration among peers over generations brings stability, prosperity, and beauty. Beauty is important in this world, especially as synthetic intelligence begins to deliver its promise: when we see beauty in a “rural” landscape, we don’t think of humans caring for it, but what attracts us to it is our deep understanding of long-term work and collaboration. I’m not sure machines will ever be capable of painting a meadow to celebrate it. Of truly “seeing” its beauty. It’s not processing it. It’s feeling it.

The commons and art

Perhaps, human stewardship is ultimately the biggest and most subversive act of Art. Stewardship is an art we can enjoy sensorially, but also something that makes sense for ecosystems and feels nice for plants, animals, and us.

When I’ve seen a meadow in the misty morning, I’ve felt something similar to what I feel when looking at a big-format picture by Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, which is the sense of any “promise at dawn,” of a worried but optimistic new beginning of the day, like the one described by Romain Gary in his autobiographical book.

We love meadows because they feel like the breath of the earth, the savannah from where our species set forth in its adventure across the world. They are the result of centuries of collaboration among different people and interspecies collaboration; they are the outcome of centuries of grazing, mowing, and mindful management. It’s a testimony at dawn that whispers to us in the ear, “We cared, and you should, too, because if you care, then your children, and the children of your children, will care, too.”

Without us, the meadow would eventually surrender to the forest, because it thrives when it’s appreciated and celebrated. It is a landscape held in a permanent state of “becoming” by the collective will of generations.

What are the landscapes you cherish and care about?

However, I don’t see how blurring the distinction between investment and gambling is going to help new generations improve their prospects, especially when they realize there’s little difference for them between investing in a company with real value and buying crypto or betting on prediction markets.

Platforms like Robinhood and Kalshi are not much different from sports betting; they are designed to create engagement, rewarding frequency, and bombarding users with badges and celebratory messages to make them overestimate upside over risk.

And then there’s AI

Turning financial decisions into something closer to a habit with a narrative can make inexperienced people feel that investing is like playing a video game rather than a cold-blooded, rational commitment. Something different is happening with AI: its demonization or outright banning by some adults is turning an assisting tool into what it shouldn’t be: a substitute for our most personal work, which comes from agency.

I’ve been thinking about this as I see our 13-year-old son, a bright kid with the mind of an engineer, inherited from both grandparents, imagining ways to build apps and scripts using AI; for example, a tool to automate small investments. In other words, many kids refuse to remain passive and just consume content and want to take on the driver’s seat, even when the tools they use are black boxes that conceptually resemble more of a genius sprouting from a bottle than a conceptual old-school toolbox.

Teaching teens to understand markets is a good idea. Telling them, by default, that investing in a solid company and betting on a prediction market are the same thing is not. This distinction matters, especially when regulatory guardrails are being dismantled. It shouldn’t surprise us that the platforms our kids encounter first are the ones engineered for engagement rather than judgment. What we can do is help them understand what these platforms are intending, so they’re wary of many of the perks. Nothing is for free, and many predatory behaviors begin by luring victims with candy.

A generation can be raised as informed investors or as dopamine-chasing gamblers, and right now the infrastructure is set up for the second outcome.

The scarce skill isn’t coding anymore

Anyone who has seen how fast AI tools like Claude or its competitors can analyze complex files or build websites and custom applications and scripts, got the memo: software companies and entry level jobs are going to change or vanish, and people with the ability to create richly layered prompts and a social edge might, for the first time in a long time, be in a better position professionally than more asocial, technically driven youngsters who excelled building complex, rigorous technical systems (through coding, scientific papers and experiment-driven science, etc.) in solitude.

Those who think AI is just a fad that will falter or even completely vanish haven’t seen kids prompting entire websites and apps on Claude Code and competitors, and many technical apps used by the so-called “vibe coders” are becoming the new sensations among high-school and college students. Instead of complaining on social media about the apps or games they use but don’t quite like, many of them are already thinking about their own custom applications so they can do what they envision from their computers, and perhaps soon beyond.

If young GenXers and millennials built today’s user generated content (UGC), which relied on sharing content and experiences through posts in different blends of text, pictures, and video, depending on each platform, a new type of UGC is taking over the remnants of the web 2.0 experience: new platforms will let people build their own apps, automations, and rich content through mere descriptions (and audio rants).

The lineage: Glitch, Roblox, and the UGC instinct

The concept isn’t new, though some platforms may not capitalize on the new reality for being perhaps a bit too early. Consider, for example, Glitch, a website launched in 2017 by blogging pioneer Anil Dash, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, makers of the old school tools for software management Trello/Fog Creek (makers of FogBugz, a known product for old-school coders), and Stack Overflow (an issue-solving platform where users helped with responses). In a way, GenXer coders tried to lower the entry bar to the still reclusive, insider-driven world of coding, which still required people to invest time in learning the basics.

Glitch was a 2017 evolution from that old world, a browser webapp that, instead of appealing to technical users working with terminals and complex local environments, used the browser to serve a 2-screen simple, “what you see is what you get” environment that helped anyone create little apps. You typed code on the left, and the live app ran on the right; then the little thing you built was hosted for free whenever you wanted.

For the first, Glitch reduced the friction and learning curve to residual technical knowledge (which was still hard to acquire and demanded rigor), making every project not only public, but capable of “remixing”: if you liked or found useful a public app on the platform, you could click and get an editable copy of it running under a new URL; it felt a bit like a friendly community of tinkerers, a window to the “open web” the world had lost before everything got churned and packaged into 2 app stores controlled by Apple and Alphabet (which got a cut from any transaction made in their respective walled gardens).

The experiment never got the traction it could have, perhaps because it appealed first and foremost to people with a high level of technical literacy. Where Glitch faltered, another platform created to encourage people to create their own worlds, Roblox (which started much earlier, in 2004, though it took off years after), succeeded.

It’s vibe coding’s turn

Roblox shared with Glitch the UGC instinct—empowering ordinary people to build things for others—, though its ethos was not open for the web to benefit as a whole, but yet another closed garden, a walled amusement park in which the engine is proprietary, the code is hidden from the community, and the whole environment is fine-tuned to encourage monetization. And, unlike Glitch, Roblox focused on user-generated games for kids.

Still, before AI, it took a long time and quite a bit of knowledge to build things even on low-friction, community-based platforms to build apps and games like Glitch and Roblox. Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT launched. And chatbots transformed the way we are going to create digital artifacts from the time being, to the point that even the most purist developers rely to some extent on the automation that one new activity has brought to the table, which pop culture has dubbed “vibe coding.”

In less than four years, the world of programming has fundamentally changed, and every time Claude (so far, the most performing LLM for technical work and companies, even if the people at Anthropic don’t quite know what Claude “is” or how it “works,” as one New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus) launches an improved tool to improve and speed software design, previous generation software companies offering pre-AI services get more concerned (and punished in the stock market).

Figma, for example, went from having a central role in the world of web apps and services that run the digital reality surrounding our experience online to being perceived as a product in deep trouble due to new AI offers such as Claude Design.

So much for literally “learning to code”

For three decades, many utility-centered people insisted that kids shouldn’t invest in the humanities and social sciences anymore and go not only full-on STEM, but focus on computer science or (even better for the VC-driven model) just “learn to code.” This turned out to be the most flawed advice that many people now leaving college have ever received.

Still making a big economic effort to send your kids to coding and robotics camps instead of just “camps” where they learn about the world and, among everything else, socialize with others not relying on screens? Time to choose the more affordable, just “nature and social” option. Being “grounded” has never been more strategic. (That is, unless it’s the kid who insists on going to robotics camp and is already laser-focused on it: why condition a natural interest emerging from inner agency and drive?).

And, surprise surprise: among them, those who decided to learn as much as possible about the humanities, from philosophy to rhetoric and composition, to linguistics, to anthropology and ethnography, comparative literature, history, and (uh oh) journalism. So much for the Pro Advice Industrial Complex, and a lesson to learn: interacting with interesting people, reading books, and being curious about the world (not to talk about learning how to collaborate, or build and plant things with your own hands, understanding how real-world complex systems benefit from care and strategic, low-maintenance), are skills poised to pay off in the future.

Learning to code? Not as much as it used to. Though combining the two worlds—bridging soft and hard skills, social abilities with formal rigor, humanities-driven curiosity, and engineer-driven problem solving—could become even more strategic than it already is.

The García Márquez paradox

We could explain this evolution as a paradox that has already existed in the so-called hard sciences: highly conceptual thinkers bringing breakthroughs to mathematics or physics are often very bad at physics and math (Albert Einstein was famously weak at arithmetic). Which reminds me of the struggle with basic grammar rules of many of the most celebrated writers, like Gabriel García Márquez (who said he learned to write by listening to his grandmother tell ghost stories, understanding from a young age that register does more work than plot if you get it “right”).

No wonder that people who’ve analyzed the potential impact of AI properly, like American scifi writer Ted Chiang, winner of four Nebula awards, are arguing that the new era is already revaluing the humanities. Guess what, it’s becoming clear what many of us already knew; the humanities are not a decoration or a suppletory, affected way of doing some sort of class or social signaling, but an actual CORE competency for working with the new environments, especially as AI training tools such as Mercor are paying experts of virtually any discipline to master niche expertise as well.

There’s nowhere to hide if the new tools aren’t prohibited as a whole, and perhaps the best way to prepare our children for the new social and professional environment is by reminding them that the more interesting, well-read, linguistically capable, and creative they are, the more prepared they will be to master the art of prompting. Many of them will become some sort of prompting Jedi, only we don’t know the type of prompting nor the name of the job yet, because they don’t exist, but they will.

According to Chiang—a natural lover of both storytelling and tech, perhaps the best intersectional place to be in the world that is rapidly taking shape—, the people best prepared to talk to a machine that runs on language are the people who spent their lives paying attention to how language actually works. In fact, disciplines like philosophy have been insisting on the closeness of math and language since Aristotle, if not earlier. What is old-school propositional logic, if not the foundation of LLMs.

A Franciscan sage on a Mediterranean hill

A 13th-century Catalan-speaking, Majorcan Franciscan sage called Ramon Llull was already tinkering with this very intuition, and many consider him the actual father of modern AI, from Large Language Models to generative AI. His Ars Combinatoria or Ars Magna (which reached us thanks to Gottfried Leibniz) is nothing but proto-AI.

Remember: a Franciscan tertiary of the Franciscan rule from Majorca (the same place from where another Franciscan, Father Junípero Serra, grew up, a note for the California history nerds) did more for automated ideation than any fancy contemporary coder. Of course, he was very competent in the humanities and spoke and wrote in several languages, including Latin and Arabic (as well as Catalan/Occitan, Castilian, and French). Knowing a lot about how language works is almost like intuitively knowing how complex models (math, life) work.

There are many writers who were naturally competent at building worlds from their very own registry. Jorge Luis Borges, a librarian before anything else (a Quixotic sage), liked to catalog imaginary books and understood that a description, if accomplished, can summon a world.

Joan Didion opens her story Last Words (from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, originally published in the New Yorker in 1998) with the first paragraph of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, whose musicality had intrigued her since childhood:

So pervasive was the effect of this Hemingway diction that it became the voice not only of his admirers but even of those whose approach to the world was in no way grounded in romantic individualism. I recall being surprised when I was teaching George Orwell in a class at Berkeley in 1975 by how much of Hemingway could be heard in his sentences. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants,” Orwell had written in Homage to Catalonia in 1938. “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white,” Hemingway had written in Hills Like White Elephants in 1927.

This is the beginning Didion refers to:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Montaigne, the good prompter

Many writers get to such a level that they create styles, registers, and entire worlds. Ted Chiang himself, who started as a technical writer, writes as if he were creating thought experiments about what happens when you specify a premise with precision and originality. Good writing is precision behaving like magic. So, back to García Márquez, in his case, “magic realism” makes total sense in more than one way.

Oddly, society spent a decade telling kids that studying English, comparative literature, or journalism (would you even?) were worthless ways to waste one’s time. We’re certainly going to attend an interesting societal experiment in which competent people issued from the humanities will be naturally competent using advanced LLMs. Perhaps more competent than many engineers working at Anthropic, OpenAI, or Alphabet’s pioneering AI division.

The narrative arc of this section of reality works strangely like a good short story, or perhaps like a speculative essay if it were to be written by the forefather of the genre, Michel de Montaigne. By the way, Montaigne came with the denomination of “essais” because that’s what they mean, and what they are: interesting attempts to tap into the things that assemble interesting phenomena. Montaigne had exactly the “good prompting” mindset.

Remember the dismissive commentary regarding dusty, marginal college departments trying to conceive devalued humanities degrees, struggling to barely exist? Turns out their quiet devaluing can end up being very detrimental to many people naturally inclined to experiment with writing and perhaps trying philosophy, rhetoric, comparative literature, and the like. Since November 2022, when the initial, buggy ChatGPT launched, it was already clear that the scarce skill isn’t writing code; it’s specifying intent in language precise enough for a machine to act on.

One question we adults (parents, mentors, professors, tutors, competent representatives of our respective disciplines, people, citizens at last) should ask ourselves is what gets lost when an entire society spends over a decade sounding the alarm and telling its best and most disciplined students that writing or reading good books isn’t as important as Python and JavaScript. As dealing with programming gets more and more relegated to LLM tasks, the generalists are in a different perceived position now.

Three kids, three different answers

Which brings me back to my kids. My older daughter, already in college, is an avid reader and is naturally inclined to writing and other creative endeavors (perhaps she’s seen adults around her reading books, writing, editing videos all her life? What’s nature and what’s nurture?).

My younger kids and many of their friends are naturally interested in the potential of AI, and not always for the wrong reasons. Our middle daughter wanted to create an online publication so she could publish little articles and pictures on noticeable local events that she and her friends find relevant, and having assisted AI help made her confident that the task was doable, allowing her to focus more on writing articles and thinking of angles, what pictures to plan during outings, etc.

She bought the domain and hosting, changed the DNS records, and tweaked the HTML to get what she wanted. It wouldn’t have happened (not like that) with a bit more friction. To her, it felt a bit like learning an instrument by playing a song she likes, which would increase the stakes of actually making it happen (which is the fun of “learning by doing” musical programs for kids and adults: why start with solfège theory?).

As for my son, he isn’t only interested in finding potential flaws to exploit as a competitive advantage in things such as crypto trading, but sometimes likes to dream big about which conceptual tools could unleash real superpowers, according to him. Like, for example, building an entire platform (using AI, of course, though he’s already very competent in computing and programming basics, due to self-interest) for people to easily build useful applications effortlessly, by building ready-made blocks that would graphically speed up the process.

In other words, he’s imagining some sort of Glitch or Roblox, but universal and capable of allowing people to build any conceivable app or script to improve their lives. For example, sometimes he wants to create little apps for Kirsten so she doesn’t need to spend so much time on tedious work that has to do with our incredible amount of big video files, audio, etc.

Llull waving at us from the top of the hill

Such a platform to allow others to easily build useful apps, if open to all, could be democratizing, but at the same time wouldn’t empower its users (“builders,” “creators”?) as much as Glitch, which has a “learn by reading” ethos instead of a simple “describe and create” approach. There are early attempts, however, of creating this evolution of social media: YouWare, AI Studio remix, Remix.gg are some of the still-niche examples that come to mind.

We can imagine, seven hundred years before Claude, Ramon Llull, an expert in Aristotle, walking up a Mediterranean hill, ruminating on whether language and logic were the same thing. Could the right combinations of words generate some sort of “truth”? He was early, and he certainly didn’t want to fall into heresy in an era when he could be killed for it, but he wasn’t wrong on his “celestial” gut feeling.

Ramon Llull’s intellectual descendants aren’t purist coders complaining about the career intrusion of “vibe coders,” the arrivistes of our time and zeitgeist. His descendants are rather the kids reading widely in several registers and languages, paying attention to how sentences work, learning to name things precisely.

It turns out I have some of those kids at home. Some are yours. Perhaps, the best thing we can do for them isn’t paying top money for yet another coding camp. Perhaps a library card, a second language at home, a habit of argument, a long walk to foster healthy daydreaming, a stubborn belief in their own potential (the one every writer and every Franciscan and every good teacher has always held), can do more for them.

Llull would have understood.

In the morning, the 34-acre multi-purpose venue, also used as the local fair and rodeo grounds, looked equally quiet, with only a few big rigs in good shape occupying the strategic spots. We had parked just in front of the only bathroom working on the premises. No shower.

For the first time after days of travel alternating vacation and video production in the Southwest, there was no hard wake-up time for us (our kids had had a much more relaxed schedule than Kirsten and I). Despite the comfortable beds in the converted Ford Transit rental, we woke up early out of habit and decided to let the kids sleep while we each went for a run separately.

I decided to head to the Mission premises once I realized it wasn’t far, and followed the streets built along Mission Creek—upstream, just like salmon did by the time the Padres established the mission and presidio. I found the esplanade facing the church, where the old lavandería sits, packed with people of all ages, nicely dressed.

On the west side, near Los Olivos Street, a street music ensemble was getting ready. I realized it was Easter. It all felt familiar; I must have seen similar things in Spain growing up.

Heading west amid ocotillos and pink mountains

We had arrived at the place late on Saturday after making the previous night—from April 3 to April 4—in Yuma, the last town in Arizona before hitting California as one drive southwest on Interstate 8, sometimes so close to the border that you can see patches of the much-trumpeted, 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard border wall. Stones, dust, a water canal taking water from the depleted Colorado River, crumbling mountains, small reservations with cheaper gas and gambling as attractions: everything went fast.

We crossed the green hay and alfalfa fields of Imperial Valley in a whiff, or so it seemed, probably because we played music and talked about everything and nothing, knowing that, after climbing the mountains of Eastern San Diego County, the Pacific Ocean wasn’t far on the other side.

Somewhere in the transition between Imperial and San Diego Counties, the overlapping silhouettes of the In-Ko-Pah mountains showed different gradations of dusty terracotta (with a pinkish aura) in the distance, like the paintings of faraway desert ranges by Georgia O’Keeffe that my older daughter has come to cherish (perhaps because she’s seen quite a few of those ranges from the back seat of our cars and vans growing up).

Driving through San Diego on Saturday, April 4, went smoothly, with no traffic to speak of (at least, that was the case heading north; we saw more southbound traffic in both San Diego and LA). The van cruised along, we felt rested and had everything we needed to keep going for days if we needed to, and our two kids traveling with us (their older sister is in college) felt at ease with so much space that our goal was keeping them seated and with the belt on, because they knew they could go get cold snacks from any of the two solar-powered small fridges the van was equipped with. There was also the tired feeling that comes with any trip reaching its end, and the words “arriving home” and “homework” were already on the horizon.

That’s perhaps why we decided to stop to cook lunch at the beach in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, past San Diego. We had garlic, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, pasta, a bit of protein, etc., so we made a sofrito sauce with pasta and a few other leftovers on the side.

Camper-made breakfast in Santa Barbara, Easter Day

The light seemed different and inviting in coastal California, crisp and photogenic, and flowers were everywhere. It felt nice to feel the breeze from the Pacific Ocean after days in the dusty, dry Sonoran Desert, and I relaxed a bit from all the driving, improvising a warm meal. The van was (legally) parked in a nice spot, so we took a walk on the beach before getting back on the road.

When we got to the last mountain before hitting the Los Angeles megalopolis from the South, we stopped for a second to see the whole urban valley at our feet. I counted several downtowns of high-rises amid a sea of low buildings, diminutive in the distance. There’s no way I can cross this in a couple of hours, I thought to myself. From there, the city below looked coherent, contained between a giant valley surrounded by mountains, like a massive amphitheater, and the ocean. Once inside, though, the cohesion and any idea of entity vanished amid elevated roads and patches of random activity: just like Tolstoy explains wars, which look meaningful and photogenic when they are explained after the fact, but are a mess when one is inside the battle.

I was wrong, and crossing Los Angeles can feel pleasant with little traffic: when we found the first hints of the legendary bad LA congestion, the hill of the Getty Center showed up on our left in Brentwood, at the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains north of the city, not far from the epicenter of the January 2025 fires. We talked about the other times that had taken so much time to accomplish only a small part of what we had in a little over an hour.

Malibu, Ventura, Carpinteria… The evening was clear, and we could see the Channel Islands in the distance, as well as the oil rigs. I was tempted to stop by the road near the water, just like a few of the surfers waiting for an outing early in the morning, but the RV park in Santa Barbara promised an electric hookup and it was probably smart to recharge the main battery so we didn’t spoil the remaining refrigerated food after relying for a few days only on solar and driving for recharging.

It took us a while to finish and put away the breakfast paraphernalia, and it was already 10 AM or so when we began heading to Big Sur; I was driving while Kirsten tried to wrap up the weekly video, which we intended to post at home a few hours later.

Hearst Castle and the California mind

Driving north along the coast reminded me of a Joan Didion article on her personal account of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, included in one of the two books I traveled with, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (published in 2021, with texts going from 1968 to 2000).

That same day, not far from where we were driving, another version of California was coming to an end. Only, we didn’t know yet.

“It has been for almost half a century a peculiar and affecting image in the California mind: San Simeon, “La Cuesta Encantada,” the phantasmagoric barony that William Randolph Hearst made for himself on the sunburned hills above the San Luis Obispo County coast. California children used to hear about San Simeon when they were very small (I know because I was one of them), used to be told to watch for it from Highway 1, quite far in the distance, crested on the hill, the great Moorish towers and battlements shimmering in the sun or floating fantastically just above the coastal fog; San Simeon was a place which, once seen from the highway, was ever in the mind, a material fact which existed in proof of certain abstract principles. San Simeon seemed to confirm the boundless promise of the place we lived.”

Joan Didion, “A Trip to Xanadu” (written in 1968), from “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021)

One expression from that beginning had stayed with me: “the California mind.” As we drove back home in the Bay Area in our rented campervan on a sunny day with not yet much traffic in places still far from the two big urban centers of the State, South and North of its coast, I tried to reflect on the “California mind” that Didion tried to describe. Perhaps, I thought, that “mind” has a memory.

Didion goes on to describe Hearst’s folly in San Simeon as a place designed for eternity, where time wouldn’t make its unfathomable imprint and entropy wouldn’t follow its course, associated with the arrow of time, which (physics tells us) goes only in one direction for all objects and events in the universe. We’re in it, and the clock is ticking.

Richard Neutra’s seedlings

So, despite Hearst’s intentions, building La Cuesta Encantada didn’t spare him from the ailments of old age, and so he had to abandon La Cuesta Encantada (”San Simeon was to be the kingdom where nobody dies,” Didion writes) to seek medical care in Los Angeles, dying in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951 at the age of 88.

But I was sure there was much more to say about the California experiment, and about what Didion refers to as “the California mind.”

Little did we know that another California legend, architect and self-builder Charles Bello, the same Charles Bello from Kirsten’s legendary video-reportage 50 years off-grid: architect-maker paradise amid NorCal redwoods, died on April 5th, 2026, perhaps in that very moment, at the age of 93 (he was born on July 12, 1932).

We didn’t know that very Sunday yet, but my thoughts on the experiments regarding the California mind that Didion refers to, had in Charles Bello an ideal opposite of the grandiosity and reality detachment represented by La Cuesta Encantada. An apprentice of Southern California legend Richard Neutra, the Austrian-American architect who gave a soul to Southern California’s modern architecture, Bello had developed his own interpretation of building, blending the organicity of nature with a careful study of the place where a building sits.

During our first visit to Charles Bello on August 3, 2019, Charles Bello kept us in awe for hours, as we tried to follow him through his property, a tree farm with second-growth redwoods he was trying to regenerate and protect. We learned that the stones on a wall can be placed in such a way that they play a melodic part of the music of nature (their shapes, colors, and placement being the synesthetic equivalent of musical notes), fallen trees and branches can be celebrated in art pieces made of redwood, and parametric architecture can be born out of intuition with no need of complex computing.

A visit to another type of enchanted place

One of his memorable teachings, as we tried to capture his words and actions throughout his rich property amid nature in Northern California, while he was explaining the structure of a door he had built out of scraps decades before:

“I don’t design, I follow nature.”

Charles was referring to the fact that the door, made of wood and glass, used a structural pattern shown in the fractal veins of a tree leaf. He indeed was following nature, and he saw the world with the clarity and connection to the living that our civilization is losing.

Watch the video of our first visit with Charles Bello: 50 years off-grid: architect-maker paradise amid NorCal redwoods.

As it happens, Charles told us already on our first visit that the reason he had insisted in us coming to the property (we had canceled two previous visits the two previous years due to wildfires) was not only his age, but his legacy: he was concerned about the fate of his redwood corner of California, as well as the buildings in the property, most of which should be declared architectural landmarks and protected as such.

We published the video, and COVID came in early 2020. For one reason or another, Charles’ video soon became one of Kirsten’s most unanimously celebrated (and celebratory) ones, with people commenting that Charles deserved another life to keep going (a reference to gaming, but also a telling shared state of mind), so we all made sure that his corner of the universe kept the same energy.

I was personally fascinated by the fact that, over the months, rewatching the video, it became so apparent to me that Charles physically resembled Frank Lloyd Wright and represented a version of him. Only Charles had decided to focus on his rooted reality, never venturing beyond it and never seeking the fame and cultural immortality others pursue, consciously or not.

Charles’ story

Kirsten’s first video on Charles Bello was so influential that one local University offered to take on his property, declaring it a foundation and dedicating it to educational purposes. Though the relationship between Charles, his sons, and the University soon soured, we decided to stay out of the difficult conversation, even though Charles always kept us on the line. For some reason, he trusted us.

It troubled us that Charles was having so much trouble securing continuity to his property and his memory there.

That’s why our second visit to Charles at home, on June 28, 2023, was above all an excuse to check on him. That fresh day of the summer of 2023 felt a bit different than the first for many reasons. During the first visit, we didn’t know what we would find, even though Charles’ phone interactions let us guess that he was, if clearly of old age, playful, and very energetic. So energetic that we soon found he outpaced us for hours.

During that second visit, Charles was already 90, but he stayed as energetic as we had found him the first time. He nonetheless confessed to us that he sometimes struggled with short-term memory, and we could tell he was carefully monitoring himself. I got the feeling, and I wasn’t wrong, that Charles wanted to keep going for as long as he could provide himself full autonomy, and that means not only psychomotricity, but also his mind. We found him as sharp, or sharper, than many people we know who are much younger.

Our dinner that night with Charles, at the end of our visit, felt special. You can see it in the video of our second visit with him.

Watch the video of our second visit with Charles Bello, Guide to the Good Life from architect-farmer amid redwoods: 55 years off-grid.

We weren’t wrong, and the first visit left us in such awe that, on the trip back to Kirsten’s parents’ home in Cloverdale, north of Sonoma County, we barely talked. I compare the feeling to the one we get right after leaving the theatre after watching a very good, especially moving movie, which is very rare and becoming rarer for some reason. Or, especially, I compare the feeling we shared without words to the one I felt as my eyes flew through the last pages of books such as Les Misérables or War and Peace: one wants to finish, but at the same time wants it to never end.

Artist, steward

One wants to keep it lingering, savoring it, because that piece of art reveals a deeper rhythm in things, one that goes back to nature, universality, and the best part of us. It’s the end of something memorable, and as we’re reminded of its end, we may subconsciously reflect on the end of all things, on mortality, on how, because things decay, some things don’t.

Like meeting somebody remarkable who gives you a retrospective walk through his architecture, his work as steward of his land, and opens his life to you. We’re all so lucky that we happened to have cameras on both visits, and that Kirsten found the tranquility in our then-home (an apartment in Paris) to edit the piece as it deserved. There’s a reason Charles’ first video is the one that has more time watched per user and more accumulated time watched (total time watched) of all videos in her channel, even when other videos have more visits.

We are also grateful that, thanks to our visits to Charles’ place in the Mendocino unincorporated redwoods, an old logging area depleted by decades of mismanagement and short-term gain, many good-hearted people stepped up humbly, never complaining, never raising their voices, never claiming anything. Just trying to help Charles and his legacy.

We are talking about patient people like architect Greg Godsey from Heritage Architecture. Once Greg contacted Charles and realized that Charles was having a difficult time trying to navigate the tricky legalities of his succession, he offered him more than counsel: he openly told Charles (as Charles told us on several occasions) that he was invited to come live with him and his family at his home in Texas.

Initially, Charles was reluctant to leave behind decades of his life, but eventually, he moved to Texas for some time and was taken care of by Greg and his family, no strings attached. Some time passed, and Charles decided to move back home to his NorCal property. That’s where we found him during our second video, and it’s on his property where he faded out on April 5th.

We know that Charles left a will indicating where he wanted his ashes spread, and we truly hope his wishes are not only respected but also made a reality.

Deus sive Natura

How did we find out Charles died, since we’ve been traveling and working so hard that we barely keep up with emails? Greg Godsey, whom we visited in Texas, messaged me on Substack, where he keeps a newsletter. He sent me a private message:

“I am sorry to report Charles Bello died on April 5th 2026. I wrote a tribute to him on my Substack. I thought you would want to know.”

I have to confess, I didn’t like the feeling.

I quickly told Kirsten, and also read Greg’s article about his family’s relationship with Charles.

I also asked Greg for advice on writing this piece. We conversed back and forth, and we talked a bit about Spinoza’s pantheistic theology, Deus sive Natura (”God, or Nature”), God and nature as the same substance, a single, self-caused reality. Charles struck me as a force of nature, a pantheistic creator, though I’m not sure he would have liked to be labeled. Perhaps all he wanted was to blend as one with the surroundings he cherished. You can call it whatever you like.

I began this article explaining where I, Kirsten, and our children were when Charles left us on April 5th. I decided to mention it because, as we drove past Hearst’s Castle, I sure felt something. A feeling of wanting to go up the road and walk around, see the folly with my own eyes. I imagine a visit by us, a video.

A giant hollow tree

Then I thought, I don’t know. Hearst’s excess and fear of lacking immortality contrasted almost antithetically with the souls of many of the California characters we’ve come to cherish as legends on the channel, like Lloyd Kahn or, in this case, Charles Bello. And, so, I thought about Bello that day, too, as the music blasted and we headed back to the Bay Area in our rented campervan.

By building an over-the-top castle in San Simeon near San Luis Obispo, Hearst tried to be one man trying to defeat time. By contrast, Charles Bello was a person flowing with time. If Hearst tried to build something that would outlast time, Charles chose to belong to it.

There was a giant hollow tree up the hill near his home that had burned down a long time ago. Charles cherished the place, which he called Big Tree, and liked to get inside, looking up, encircled by its charred inner core.

To Charles Bello, in memoriam.

“From God’s supreme power, or infinite nature, an infinite number of things – that is, all things have necessarily flowed forth in an infinite number of ways, or always flow from the same necessity; in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows from eternity and for eternity, that its three interior angles are equal to two right angles.”

Spinoza, Baruch; Ethics, Part 1, XVII

On December 7, 1957, attending the Nobel Banquet on his honor at the City Hall in Stockholm, Albert Camus expressed this more elegantly:

“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world.”

Since we’re talking about the bias of every generation of thinking their very own zeitgeist to be the one that really matters, it was another writer of Albert Camus’ very own time, although ten years older, George Orwell, who commented on the same idea, but with an ironic, witty twist, when in his Notes on Nationalism (1945) stated:

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

I doubt many people think we’re living a golden age of virtuosity in politics, education, the arts, or society itself, and it feels like we are about to offset a big chunk of our thinking and philosophizing to the agentic tools that quantify our tasks in tokens, or the monetization (gamification?) of computing effort. Offset a harder task, and you’ll pay—and proportionally pollute—more.

The acceleration that we are feeling

Everybody’s writing, talking, speculating about Claude’s unreleased frontier AI model, dubbed Mythos, which can apparently find vulnerabilities in the software and systems we’ve built over the decades, posing a risk that we used to see in the distant future, most likely (we thought) by the time quantum computing would become a reality.

But that possibility is already here, and if it feels a bit like an acceleration, well, perhaps it’s because it is one. Claude Mythos is now being tinkered with by 10 strategic companies and one foundation, Linux. All are headquartered in the US and cover networks, GPU architecture, operating systems, one bank, and the US government, with the goal of patching any potential weaknesses before others exploit them.

And so, this risk, which can be very real if we consider the already impressive capabilities of the latest released models, turns out to be not only a warning of AI models’ advance but also an elegant way to state that, given the evolution path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), things could get messy fast if the tools were to fall in the wrong hands.

But many things have quickly come to depend on how AI performs in the future, from stock valuation to the future of jobs, wages, personal autonomy—or lack thereof. The evolution won’t be stopped or as closely controlled as many experts would like.

Everything functions, and that’s a big part of the problem

Our current technological landscape feels a little bit like the metaphor used by the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his posthumous interview published in Der Spiegel in 1966 (published after Heidegger’s death in 1976), Only a God Can Save Us, because the humanities have become a commodity of our way of framing reality in which everything is a resource awaiting deployment.

The interview took place in 1966, and started where it ought to be: Heidegger’s convoluted relation with nazism (as virtually any public figure of his country and generation, by the way). Heidegger was born in 1889, which made him 14 years older than Orwell and 24 years older than Camus.

The three of them saw Europe enter two fratricidal wars that ended up involving the world and killed millions of people, and two of them, Orwell and Camus, dedicated their lives to the task of thinking and writing about the contradictions of their time, whereas Heidegger had to live with the contradictions and decisions that led him to acquiesce with nazism, renegating from his very own mentor in Freiburg, Edmund Husserl, as the Third Reich targeted Jews early on, and having to live with it the rest of his life. That said, Heidegger’s philosophy and his critique of the modern world (bureaucratic, headless, driven by utility and inertia, uprooted from tradition and substance) continued to influence subsequent generations.

By the time the sixties arrived, Orwell and Camus were dead (the author of 1984 died of tuberculosis in London in 1950; Camus died in a car crash in 1960, as his friend and editor Michel Gallimard drove the car that was bringing them to Paris from the French countryside), and Heidegger was in his period of “enforced withdrawal” from academic life, given the context of the post-WWII denazification proceedings; like Albert Speer, also known as “the architect of the Third Reich” and author of an influential autobiography of the era, Heidegger served as an example of how even many (most?) highly educated people in Germany fell for the reality distortion field of the nazi era.

From philosophy to cybernetics: the new center of gravity

But the sixties were looking ahead, not back, and the world wasn’t anymore centered in and around Europe; instead, it was managed by two superpowers spreading across North America and northern Eurasia. It was also an era of change and acceleration; the Cold War was at its peak after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the space race would culminate a mere three years later with NASA’s successful—and televised for the world to remember—moon landing.

It was an era in which mainframe computers were still rudimentary and cumbersome, and Doug Engelbart’s The Mother of All Demos at Stanford, which highlighted the path towards modern personal computing, happened more than two years later, on December 9, 1968. Yet, to Heidegger, it was clear we had entered an epoch of acceleration that he rightfully called cybernetics.

Europe wasn’t at the front seat anymore, once many of the brightest scientists left Mitteleuropa for the Soviet Union and, especially, the United States, and the things that were about to happen—or so Heidegger thought—were to take place in new centers. Silicon Valley, transitioning from an agricultural valley to a military and research complex, was beginning to take shape.

When I read the interview many years ago, I noticed the difference in tone between the optimism and naïveté of the interviewer, Georg Wolf, and the philosopher’s premonitory restraint. Wolff pushed back and countered Heidegger’s pessimism with a love declaration to the technical era:

“Everything functions. More and more power plants are being built. Production is flourishing. We live in prosperity. What is really missing?”

To the old and ostracized (yet still influential) philosopher, what was missing was implied in the interviewer’s description of modernity’s acceleration:

“Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more.”

He wasn’t answering this at random: his seminal work, Being and Time (1927), was all about tool analysis. He argued that we don’t relate to things as abstract stuff we observe, but as tools we use, stuff “at hand,” so when a craftsman is using a tool, it disappears into use and fuses with its user: there’s no isolated tool anymore, but a tool in use, revealing a transparent value. Only when the tool breaks (Heidegger argued) does it become an “object” to be analyzed and questioned.

Things with name, purpose, soul

Decades later, in 1954, Heidegger elaborated on where he thought modern society was going. In The Question Concerning Technology, he contrasted the mentality of the craftsman (which brought forth and revealed technical activity through personal agency) with that of modern technology, which forced, extracted, and controlled “users.” In other words, craftspeople had finally been substituted by mere users of technology they didn’t control.

If Heidegger was sure about cybernetics taking the place of philosophy already in the 1966 Der Spiegel interview, he was also positioning himself as somebody outside the new thiking, because the new reality was eroding concepts such as home and rootedness, and soon everything would be a bit nameless, placeless, or what the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han (an expert of Heidegger himself) has called “the inferno of the same.”

When places are replaced by non-places, and everything dilutes into a very generic sameness, to try to practice some type of craft and keep all sorts of old-school agency becomes the biggest act of rebellion, especially now, once AI has shown that it can write and think and do many other things for us. Instead of. Excluding us. Soon, even the internet will stop mining people’s attention and focus on alluring AI agents (who will do things for us) with snippets of code that we won’t perceive, nor are we supposed to. The transition to the agentic web has already started.

There’s a small act of resistance that predates the current reduction of the world to functioning systems, and most likely will survive any trend that tries to erase who we are or we want to become: we can build things, use things our way, customize things, and name things so their nickname reminds us that they are important to us and they contribute to our version of the human experience. They are still our tools, and we feel agency when we use them because they amplify our potential rather than trying to erase or replace it. They have a name and particular traits that feel like embedded time for us, as we share experiences and memories using them.

Günther and Otto’s symbiosis

Naming things is a very different act from categorizing them. A personal name reminds us that a particular thing is not interchangeable; we have, or like THAT one, we’ve established a deep relationship when we use it, and it has a specific existence, not a categorical one interchangeable with any other similar object.

The smallest act of resistance could also be the oldest one. You name the thing. You say, this one, specifically. You are not referring to the Platonic category, or the generic model, or the ideal of the thing. It’s “this one.” And so, the first thing Don Quixote does, as a protagonist of the first modern novel, is to name his horse. It’s an important endeavor, and it comes before saddling up. Cervantes understood that, by naming the tired farm animal Rocinante, he was entering a world in which adventure was possible again.

Like Cervantes’ character, many of us have tried the same act of resistance, personalizing the things we cherish so they become our loyal life companions in a context of planned obsolescence that forces us to constantly shed our possessions to give way to new ones.

I recently came across the story of Günther and Christine Holtorf aboard their car, named Otto. First, I saw a picture circulating online of an old, blue Mercedes G-Wagen 300 GD with an almost identical appearance to our 1989 G-Wagen, model 230 GE, which we keep in Spain. Perhaps that’s why it caught my attention first, but this one looked like a particular type of car. One with a name.

The picture shows a mature couple hanging out in camping chairs next to a dusty, packed G-Wagen in the middle of the desert. It turns out that Günther and Christine traveled for decades in their car, many times across the world, and it feels natural that they had developed a connection with the car that had facilitated the adventure.

Ode to old school odometers: the machine that outlasted its own counting

The story of Günther and Otto had begun many years before that picture. After a corporate career with Lufthansa and then the logistics company Hapag-Lloyd, Günther Holtorf had had enough institutional travel with schedules he didn’t control, so he quit in 1988 at 51. That’s when he bought the car and decided to take a trip to Africa with his then-wife. But, upon their return to Germany, Günther and Beate divorced.

Günther was 53 and decided to place an ad in his paper of choice, Die Zeit, looking for a companion for a new trip. Christine, a single mother from Dresden, replied, and he just asked: Why don’t we do a little bit of travel. In November 1990, they set off together, again for Africa. It was the beginning of a 26-year journey, covering approximately 900,000 kilometers across 179 countries.

Otto, their car, treated them well. Günther, in return, did his part in the relationship with his machine, delivering an oil change every 5,000 kilometers, replacing spare parts before they wore out, and rarely cruising faster than 80 km/h (50 mph). The car never broke down. Unlike the lavish Mercedes Sprinter rigs of today’s vanlife, they carried only the essentials: non-perishable food, a spare wheel, a few clothes, cameras, cooking and sleeping gear, and a few camping utensils.

When I read an article about the Holtorfs and their companion Otto once they decided to finish their 1989-2014 journey, I recognized the character and quirkiness of a car I’ve come to cherish myself (despite the fact that mine isn’t Otto). After covering almost 1 million kilometers, Günther’s car was still running on the original engine, whereas I had to change mine once.

As it happens, in my car, Otto’s odometer topped out at 99,999 kilometers, so every time another 100,000 kilometers went by, Günther took the car to Europe, where a mechanic pasted a new sixth digit in front of the existing five. Since I have mine, I’ve encountered this issue only once. I bought it when it showed a little over 16,000 kilometers (who knows how many times it had topped 99,999). I broke the engine at 32,000, and now I’m past 33,000, so I’ve already put 100,000 kilometers on the new engine.

Geländewagen diaries

One could think that Günther and Christine had a fortune to live their lifestyle, but the funding was modest: they lived off savings, his pension from the two corporate jobs he’d held, and the royalties from the sale of a street map of Jakarta that Holtorf published in 1977, a 400-page city atlas that eventually sold 150,000 copies.

As for Otto, well, he took care of them, as they took care of him. First, they spent five years in Africa, traveling through the Sahara, Central and West Africa, and the continent’s deep interior. Then, they shipped the car to South America and followed suit, then to Central America and North America. Then Otto was shipped to Australia and New Zealand. Then Asia. The Caribbean. In total, 26 years of adventures, including a cruise through Cuba and North Korea (Holtorf became the first Westerner to drive in North Korea).

In his interviews over the years, Günther Holtorf has talked about many things, but especially about their experience, which didn’t require social media at all, nor any digital device, for that matter. Theirs was an analog adventure aboard Otto, and I have to confess that I like to drive our old G-Wagen because I find the same feeling returning when cruising slowly from a more Spartan, analog car I understand and can maintain and fix.

I can imagine Günther, as he has explained, crossing the Sahara under a full moon with Beethoven playing on Otto’s cassette deck (I can tell you: you have to play it loud, because the engine noise is very present in such a car from the 80s). In a car without a computer, a GPS, without a digital screen or cellular signal at all, crossing the Sahara. A durable, repairable, analog machine with a name, advancing like Rocinante, with a moving horizon ahead.

“There is no way you could do that kind of driving in a new one. This car was built in the late ‘80s and is as simple as it gets. With all the electronics and computers in today’s vehicles, it would be impossible to maintain it yourself while in the middle of nowhere.”

Günther was talking about cars, but he could have been talking about our lives.

I (sometimes) drive Otto’s sibling

Now, as it happens, things weren’t perfect during their trips, especially after, in 2003, Christine was diagnosed with cancer. During the first two years after the diagnosis, they could still travel, but then she had to undergo a more aggressive treatment and had to stay home many times. Her son Martin accompanied Günther during some of the trips in those years. Until her final trip to the United Kingdom, in the summer of 2009 (she died in June 2010).

But the trips didn’t stop, and Günther and Otto cruised along, with Christine’s photo hanging from Otto’s rearview mirror, swinging back and forth depending on the terrain they were crossing. Günther finished visiting the many places he had planned to go with Christine in October 2014, when he retired to his home by a small lake in Bavaria. He died in October 2021, at 84.

I wonder what my 50s bring on, not far from now. Günther, Christine, and Otto are an inspiration to me, and to many: Otto is now on permanent display at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, which I consider to be almost a waste, for I’m sure Otto still has a say driving dirt roads while Beethoven blasts in the cassette recorder.

Now, as it sits in a museum, Otto has become yet another artifact: an object awaiting observation instead of someone’s cherished, customized, worn-out tool. Which is, of course, exactly what Heidegger feared would happen to everything.

When asked about philosophical enframing, Martin Heidegger didn’t offer a program, but the recommendation to cultivate a readiness (through thinking and poetry) for something that couldn’t be forced or manufactured, because it’s embedded in our very own experience.

Negotiating, not optimizing

Günther Holtorf’s adventures belong in a pre-social media, pre-vanlife world, when adventures were organized around Quixotic idealism and one could drive Otto as Don Quixote rode Rocinante, cruising at 80 km/h with no GPS, no sponsors, no digital presence, and Christine’s photo hanging from Otto’s rearview mirror, swinging back and forth.

The modern world was still there, with borders, bureaucracies, shipping containers, diesel prices, conflicts, but Günther and Otto moved through it, negotiating with it rather than optimizing for it.

Only a god can save us, Heidegger said. He was probably right that no human institution will reverse the trajectory. But he also said something quieter, less quoted: that nearness doesn’t consist in shortness of distance. That the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness at all.

After covering over 900,000 kilometers, Günther returned home in Bavaria, knowing that he’d maintained his companion Otto as someone who cared for his Rocinante.

It’s perhaps not a model most of us can follow. But it is, perhaps, a direction we can face.

The other day, I stumbled upon The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks by Fred Haefele, which contextualizes much of what I’d been wondering about, especially after the announcement of Slate’s modular, regular-cab, crank-window electric pickup — and the question of whether a use case for it can even exist. In Haefele’s words:

“Of the sixty million pickups on U.S. highways today, just one in eight was bought for work purposes. The remaining fifty-four million are what truck dealers call “lifestyle purchases.” Does the pickup impulse spring from some deep, organic longing? For agrarian roots, for simpler times, for a driving experience larger than life?”

I am also interested in the unique place that this vehicle segment holds in the American psyche. Coming from abroad, my regard was perhaps different a few years ago, though I’ve always sensed this isn’t a tale of pure utility, that there’s more to the story.

First personal encounters of the flat-bed kind

When I began visiting the United States regularly more than twenty years ago, Kirsten was living in Greenwich Village, a part of Manhattan that reminded me in many ways of the Old World.

For one, neither Kirsten nor any of her roommates owned a car or drove around the city; they biked or hopped on public transportation, and they sporadically rented a car or carpooled with friends for outings on Long Island or upstate New York. I had also gotten rid of my first car, a 1984 VW Golf (Rabbit in the US), and it didn’t feel odd to see people with no car in the city.

I realized soon after that, in other American cities, only the disenfranchised regularly use services such as urban buses and the rest move around by personal car, no matter how short the errand, a stark difference with urban and suburban Europe, where public transportation doesn’t carry any stigma or class signaling, and one can well share the seat with the richest person in town without even knowing it.

Already the first time I visited Kirsten in New York, we hopped on a cheap flight to San Jose Airport to see some of her relatives in the Bay Area, and the first thing we did was rent a car with which to drive, basically, anywhere we needed to go, or distances where “towns” (difficult to spot with my untrained eye) didn’t cluster around dense centers but stretched along tree-covered expressways.

Out West, I spotted many more pickup trucks, even in urban environments.

A free-parking democracy

This was—I thought then—what Joan Didion meant when she described entire new developments going up as fragile embodiments of some sort of American Dream that depended on optimism and growth continuing forever. I had read little from her but appreciated some of the excerpts I read in college when I was learning about New Journalism (I didn’t yet know that Kirsten had read all about her, and that our daughter would do so at 19, a mere two decades later).

Back to those first impressions, which are the ones that last: when I saw firsthand a gentle, manicured, and wealthy version of the car-centric suburban continuum where the majority of Americans lived after World War II, I could draw on pop culture references to ease the culture shock.

I sensed early on that there was, indeed, a different sense of space, and to this day I probably get too close to people when I’m talking to them (people seem to have no patience for those who “tailgate,” which I didn’t know was a thing — until I learned there can be worse things, like road rage).

I soon found out, too, that cars were all boringly automatic (now, after driving automatic cars for a few years, it takes me a while to drive stick shift cars smoothly), and—outside city centers— there always seemed to be easy, free parking available right next to the place one had decided to go to: car dependency often came with convenience — as long as one didn’t have to commute and sit in traffic every day.

There weren’t smartphones with map apps and broadband internet access yet, but the urban reality I was discovering seemed ripe for becoming even more frictionless and convenient for those who could afford to live there.

Highway 101

Besides the tree-lined streets and front-yard gardens taken over by squirrels in the Mediterranean climate of the South Peninsula, one of the first things I noticed was the shape and relative popularity of pickup trucks, which, until then, had remained theoretical.

Of course, I’d watched movies and realized that open-bed cargo vehicles remained popular, but I didn’t think it reached the point of outselling any other popular vehicle segment. When we drove across the Golden Gate and took Highway 101 to Cloverdale in wine country north of Santa Rosa, I noticed that trucks were even more favored by drivers, though I saw few of them with their beds loaded or on their way to work.

Of course, I spotted other trends in urban and suburban California and compared them with what I saw in Barcelona and other big European metro areas. For one, there were fewer scooters to watch for, and the few motorcycles I saw weren’t overtaking cars in the city like swarms of wasps.

In the early to mid 2000s, the Bay Area already had a large number of hybrid cars by comparison with virtually any other place in the world then, particularly the then-ever-present white Toyota Prius with the yellow sticker “Access OK; clean air vehicle,” which allowed drivers to use carpool lanes even when driving alone. I also noticed the rising popularity of SUVs, which are bigger and more powerful than their European counterparts.

That said, the surge of pickup trucks was the main difference, and despite being less popular the closer one got to the Bay Area, they were everywhere in the suburban to rural continuum: on commercial strips, in residential neighborhoods, in rural areas that were turning into commuter towns as the Bay Area got more expensive.

For someone arriving from Europe, the presence of the pickup truck felt both obvious and mysterious. Were the needs of Americans that different and idiosyncratic from those of Europeans to justify an entire car segment? Was it true that cars could have evolved differently in the States due to environments that had been designed around cars rather than predating them, as well as cheap gas versus the efficiency-driven evolution of oil-dependent European and Japanese car companies?

From the Model TT to the F-Series

Well, it made sense, but only in part. Of course, cheap fuel, more land devoted to straight, paved roads, pervasive parking requirements, and low-density development codes had boosted an expansive, laissez-faire car culture. But this evolution didn’t explain the success of what’s arguably the first pickup truck, the Ford Model TT, which started production in 1917, was based on the first best-selling, industrially-produced car and already defined a sought-after utility in North America: a heavier, more robust frame, a durable and easy-to-maintain engine, and a basic wood frame on top of a flat chassis as the first truck bed. Henry Ford himself came up with the name “pickup.”

I also noticed that, in many suburban environments of manicured lawns, double-car driveways, and garages, one could see two cars parked on weekends. Quite often, the combo was sedan-SUV, but over the years, I noticed it tilted toward SUV-truck.

This perception may feel subjective, and it is, but then there are the sustained car sales data over the years. Consistently, over the same period since I began visiting the US (and since moving here in 2022), several truck models have topped the sales lists, with no exception, beginning with the Ford F-Series.

Across the US in 2025, Ford sold 828,832 F-Series, once again the best-selling vehicle overall, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado, another pickup truck, with 558,709 units. Both companies have ditched their old sedans and now offer only one car each that is not a truck or an SUV of any size: the Mustang and the Corvette. So, almost 110 years after the flat-chassis Ford Model TT entered production, there are five trucks among the top 10 best-selling cars of 2025: Ford F-Series (1), Chevy Silverado (2), Ram series (5), GMC Sierra (6), and Toyota Tacoma (10).

Another trend: if 20 years ago trucks felt big and tall compared to other cars, they’ve grown substantially bigger and taller since then. And unlike European enclosed commercial vehicles, they have an open bed. Such a design told me they were vehicles designed for hard labor, for carrying and towing heavy loads, but I saw little of that. Many are powerful, capable 4WD vehicles.

Open-bed trucks vs. European self-enclosed little vans

Then, I had a question: why didn’t European small-sized commercial vehicles, the ones more likely used by self-employed professionals and in rural settings, have an open-bed design like pickup trucks in the USA? Or the other way around: why did most personal commercial vehicles in the USA have an open bed? Was it a more benign climate, prone to less rain, or a matter of cultural idiosyncrasies?

Rain or bad weather in general aren’t the main reasons, even though the climate in northern Europe doesn’t help. The main reasons that explain the design difference and preference of American and European consumers come down to perceived convenience: whereas Americans favor the readiness of an open bed — the safety risk of leaving cargo visible isn’t a concern in suburban and rural environments — European small vans were designed with an enclosed cargo volume to keep tools and cargo not only dry but hidden.

The use of light commercial vehicles is also very different: in Europe, such cargo cars and vans are especially popular in urban and suburban environments, where they are often used in last-mile logistics and start-stop service work. Cargo cars and vans also face a very different urban landscape: much of European commercial driving takes place in older, denser areas with narrower streets, scarcer parking, and conditions that are, in general, more challenging for drivers navigating heavy traffic.

This is the reason vans come in different heights, chassis lengths, and shapes. As is the case with the versatile use of pickup trucks in the USA, the smallest cargo vans are often morphing into conventional vehicles, and there are compact van-based cars that double as tiny commercial vehicles when needed, and many people like their versatility for that reason. There’s a whole segment built around them: Peugeot Partner/Rifter, Citroën Berlingo, Opel Combo, Renault Kangoo, Volkswagen Caddy, Ford Transit Connect/Tourneo Connect, Fiat Doblò, Toyota ProAce…

Unlike pickup trucks in America, these cars are far from status symbols and are perceived for what they are: versatile, no-frills utilitarians. By contrast, the best-selling trucks in the US include high-end versions, with prices ranging from $70,000 to over $100,000 on the Ford F-150 Raptor R, Ram 1500 RHO, GMC Sierra 1500 Denali Ultimate, Chevy Silverado 1500 ZR2, or Toyota Tundra TRD Pro.

The complex role of pickup trucks

Unlike small commercial vehicles seen elsewhere in Europe or Asia, American “small” and “normal-sized” commercial vehicles are, as I suspected when I first came to the US, a cultural matter, too.

Pickup trucks were born as work tools but have evolved as a mainstream personal-vehicle category that often includes all the luxuries of big SUVs, including an ever-bigger cabin and an ever-smaller bed relative to the growing size. Open-bed vehicles aren’t just commercially viable: since at least the late 1980s, they’ve become the best-selling personal vehicles in middle America.

Besides potential practicality (using the bed once in a while, though not often enough to justify it), culture, and a generally more pleasant and less rainy climate, pickup trucks are also a statement that prioritizes size, power, and potential convenience over other factors important in tighter environments that prioritize efficiency and actual use over perception: small enclosed cargo vans in Europe, and cargo and pickup kei cars in Japan offer the same convenience as American trucks —at a fraction of the size and price.

Pickup trucks have offered American consumers something beyond utility for longer than assumed: open-bed trucks only surpassed other cars in popularity in rural states like Alaska in the late 1980s, but they didn’t dominate sales until the 2010s, when they overtook best-selling sedans in many states and the aggregate US market.

However, many coastal, mainly urban states, led by the biggest US market, California, introduced regulations and taxes that make it more expensive to buy and maintain less efficient gas and diesel pickup trucks, to the point that the segment’s popularity comes with caveats: an EV — the Tesla Model Y — topped the best-selling list in California in 2025, despite Elon Musk’s fallout, followed by two relatively efficient cars, the Toyota RAV4 (small SUV) and Toyota Camry (a sedan); then came another EV (Tesla Model 3), followed by two efficient cars (Honda Civic and Honda CR-V). The top 10 list was rounded out by two pickup trucks: the Toyota Tacoma (9) and the Ford F-Series (10).

As it happens, and as Joan Didion would probably explain in one of her witty descriptions depicting American culture (and particularly that of her home state, California), cars are also artifacts of aspirational perceptions and wishful thinking, and many Americans do believe that raw power and potential convenience are worth having, even if they come in less efficient vehicles used to drive around in suburban and urban environments, so, when a shock in gas prices comes, as it has done with the attacks of the United States and Israel on Iran, many people struggle to add a bigger gas expense to their already high car lease or purchase monthly installments.

From a growing market to “the” market

It takes mental gymnastics not to see the tragic irony: in late 2025, the federal government signed legislation to formally block California’s stricter vehicle emissions standards and goals, and at the same time, disincentivized the deployment of renewable energy contracts already under execution (to the point of paying the French company TotalEnergies $1 billion to cancel wind farm leases), while energy and gas become more expensive due to AI data centers and the gas disruptions in the Middle East. You can’t make this up.

If gas is more expensive at the pump, drivers of less efficient cars are paying a disproportionate toll for the war disrupting the energy sector, even when, due to the shale oil explosion in the new century, the US is the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter. It wouldn’t surprise me if those within the American public supporting the war (polls) are overwhelmingly pickup truck drivers.

Interestingly, there are EV pickup trucks, but sales remain marginal when compared to their gas counterparts. There’s a polarizing design from Tesla (Cybertruck), an EV-native alternative from Rivian (R1T), and an option from Ford (F-150 Lightning) and General Motors (with the new EV versions of the Chevy Silverado and the GMC Sierra).

Can rising gas prices prompt customers to reconsider their reticence toward electric trucks? So far, the search for more efficient commercial vehicles has tilted toward midsize pickup trucks (Toyota Tacoma, Ford Ranger, Chevy Colorado, GMC Canyon, Nissan Frontier, Honda Ridgeline, Jeep Gladiator) with smaller, more efficient engines, as well as hybrid-engine models: Ford and Toyota offer both midsize and full-size hybrid engine models, whereas Ram offers a full-size version and Jeep sells the Gladiator 4xe.

Subaru Baja: if the Outback and the Tacoma had a baby

I don’t own a pickup truck. Yet. But I might someday, though I’ve promised myself I will only do it if I truly need one (which could happen, especially if we end up building something in the wilderness by ourselves). Though this question, “who needs a pickup truck,” seems to be more difficult to answer than I thought. In any case, I’d definitely be interested in second-hand models with good fuel efficiency, so perhaps the versatility of a hybrid engine would be worth considering, given a competitive price. In my case, only an ambitious self-building project in North America, outside an urban area, would justify the purchase.

I recently saw a Subaru Baja in the Bay Area, produced between 2003 and 2006, and essentially an Outback with an open bed instead of the conventional trunk. I confess I was intrigued by its lack of success (I own a 2017 Outback, which we bought second-hand, and it’s easy to get used to its 4WD). Given the evolution of the Outback, which in its 2026 incarnation (the car’s 7th generation) loses any trace of conventional station wagon and morphs into yet another SUV, a revival of its open-bed model would make sense to those looking for the utility and lifestyle while retaining the performance and efficiency of a more conventional car.

I knew little about kei cars other than what I had seen in manga series such as Dr. Slump; upon arrival in Japan in the summer of 2015, I realized kei cars were as popular and pervasive in Japan as pickup trucks are in the United States, and, whereas microcars have their own rich history in Europe, from the Isetta to the still-in-production Smart, their cultural imprint and number are negligible, if compared with the importance of kei cars to Japanese daily living.

During the two weeks we traveled (by road and the Shinkansen, Japan’s fast train) across Honshu, Japan’s largest and most populous island, I photographed kei cars in all sorts of quotidian situations. They appeared to be parked in impossibly narrow spots, and some passenger models carried families, others were used for last-mile deliveries, and I also saw plenty of capable kei pickup trucks.

Flat-bed kei cars: all utility, no show

When we stopped at a gas station with our friend Yuichi Takeuchi, an old friend of his stopped by on his way to a construction site: he was carrying a big log beam on his kei truck, which seemed the most normal thing to do. I figured then that there were two types of people using flat-bed vehicles: those focusing on their actual need for a flat bed, and those who buy such vehicles for the looks and the signaling. Not surprisingly, many of the people using flat beds heavily in the US drive efficient and sometimes smaller, older pickup trucks, such as old iterations of the Toyota Tacoma.

Following the premise of utility, efficiency, minimalism, and lack of fanfare, the American startup Slate has built a small electric pickup that’s sturdy and highly configurable. The company says production will start later this year for around $28,000, far from the price of the bigger EV trucks now on the market.

The Slate is different in many ways. It’s less capable but has been designed to prioritize the actual versatility offered by trucks, favoring cargo load and the bed transformation if required. It looks a bit like a concept car never meant to be produced or like a car designed by Braun, prioritizing a basic look instead of sophistication or the aggressive front end favored by other trucks. Like kei pickup trucks, the Slate doesn’t scream testosterone but might be capable of doing the job.

One similarity with other trucks: the Slate’s clean lines are not too concerned about aerodynamics. Other than that, it seems designed against the regular assumptions that built the modern truck market: the base model consists of an old-school regular cab (two-passenger) cockpit, which has almost disappeared from the market, while the segment has shifted toward more comfortable and high-end crew cabs.

As for the interior’s amenities, the base model is as Spartan as the interior of an East German Trabant Tramp: it lacks a built-in entertainment system, though it could connect to Bluetooth screens and speakers; and (like the 1989 Mercedes G-Wagon I keep in Spain) it comes with old-school crank windows to reduce costs and complexity. Optional amenities and power window upgrades would cost extra.

Electric pickup trucks: a smaller niche (so far) than many forecast

An electric pickup truck offers advantages: it can run on electricity generated by a domestic solar installation, a refreshing statement in a moment when geopolitics can make driving much more expensive overnight. As with other EV trucks, the trunk is engine-free, and the small Slate offers 7 cubic feet of space there; the bed, though small at 5 feet, isn’t much smaller than the shrinking beds of the current small- and full-size pickup trucks on the market.

The car’s two range options (150 miles projected for the Standard and 240 miles projected for the Extended model) aren’t that impressive, but probably fit a large percentage of drivers actually using their trucks for last-mile errands and jobs, from casual hauling to carrying and using tools. Will potential customers rationally predict their use, or do these specifications (regular cab, no amenities, limited range, testosterone-free design) condemn the Slate to a niche?

As for the price, Slate will be competing against a growing segment of the smaller, more affordable pickup trucks, many of which offer gas models with all amenities at a similar price range. The Ford Maverick sold over 155,000 units in 2025 and has proven that the “bigger is better” trend doesn’t reflect overall market needs, whereas the Tacoma, Toyota’s small-size truck, is among the 10 best-selling cars in California, favored by its reliability, real off-road capability, and steady resale value.

According to a recent study by the research firm Strategic Vision, 9 out of 10 pickup buyers barely use their trucks for business towing or work (as a mobile office, on a job site). Interestingly, 63% of electric pickup drivers haul something in the cargo bed once a month or more, at a higher rate than among conventional full-size pickup drivers.

The study also states that, overall, the bigger the truck, the more likely it is to be used for work (which rarely involves towing and hauling things anyway).

Vehicular memoir

It’s interesting to read some comments regarding this study; many highlight some of the market-oriented and sociological insights of full-size trucks’ popularity outside their intended use.

The demise of sedans in favor of SUVs of all sizes seems universal, and many trucks also respond to a perception change on the road and in masculine identity.

That said, if I were to camp more in the wild and try to self-build a home at a rural property, I wouldn’t mind getting a pickup truck with a decent mileage, reliability, and resale value, though I doubt I’d lease it or buy it new — or perhaps wait for the Goldilocks equivalent to a modern Subaru Baja with the reliability of an old Tacoma and the price of an actual entry-level work car.

Conditioned by the market incentives that have transformed trucks from commercial vehicles to easy-to-lease everyday cars, many people end up getting a muscular hauler with a 6-passenger cabin for the same reason urban and suburban parents get a three-row SUV: to do errands that don’t require a flat bed or to drive their children to activities.

After a few years living here, perhaps my perception lacks the freshness of the outsider, though the misalignment between aspiration and utility seems most clear on the road when high-end, big-cabin trucks cruise past me on their way to mundane, suburban errands that don’t need a flat bed or V8 hauling.