Mitri the Scribe was once the highest-paid servant of Pharaoh Unas in the 24th century BC. He was the guy you went to if you wanted a temple built, or a letter written, or if you needed a funny idea for a personalized license plate. Now he sits in the middle of a room at the Cairo Museum, unmoving, unblinking…

…but very much alive.

Really, this is a story about a tour guide. I promise I’m going to get back to Mitri, our Lord and Savior whom I met in Egypt, but first I want one of my favorite scribes of all time to illustrate a point I want to make about the delicate relationship between a tour guide and their tourists. …

According to a study by Microsoft, humans now have an attention span of eight seconds. Eight seconds! Don’t ask me for details on the study, I only skimmed it. And please don’t click away to that study link, I only included it so you’d believe me.

Anyway, if you’ve made it to this second paragraph, congrats! You’re a rare breed. Though you’ll notice that I’ve increased my odds by appealing to writers in my title. Writers tend to be readers by nature and practice. Reading articles from start to finish is like our daily push-up routine. …

A few weeks after the presidential election was called back in my home country, the United States of Giving-Me-An-Ulcer, I went out to Barcelona’s Poblenou Cemetery looking for a famous statue. It’s called El Petó de la Mort in Catalan, El Beso de la Muerte in Spanish, and The Kiss of Death in English.

I’m somewhat of a cemetery connoisseur and a massive history buff, so this sort of excursion would normally fill me with deferential, if not downright giddy, warmth. Napoleon razed this cemetery to the ground in 1775, for France’s sake. And my country’s been run, for the last four years, by a coked-up Napoleon wanna-be. …

The history behind America’s billion-dollar wage theft problem and how to fight it.

Hardly any of the bus drivers at the tour companies I worked for in the early 2010’s lived on the San Francisco side of the Bay. Most of them were Black, Latinx-American, or Chinese-American and they drove in from Oakland or as far away as Vallejo… They’d leave the house before the sun came up to beat the bridge traffic. If they made it to the bus yards in the Dogpatch with any time to spare, they’d catch some Z’s in their car. …

This pandemic is shaking us to our foundations. It’s literally forcing us to reconsider both time and space.

• We’re struggling to block out our time like we used to. We’re unsure if we’re spending it correctly. We can’t decide if it’s moving too fast or too slow. Wasn’t it just March? We’ve been inside forever.
• The space between us is wider and yet we’re in constant contact with each other over Zoom, social media, etc. We’re trying to be there for each other, to stick together, but not physically.

If you’re feeling rattled right now, it makes total sense. These two concepts are key to our fundamental understanding of our world and yet we’ve taken them completely for granted. …

I’m going to start with an analogy. I’m very proud of this analogy.

I’m 5'2. And I’m talking feet here because I’m an American and, even though I live in Europe now, I still can’t convert inches to centimeters. 5'2 is pretty short, if that helps my non-U.S. friends. Salma Hayek is 5'2. Feel free to imagine I look exactly like Salma Hayek.

Now, because I’m very short, I don’t have a great sense of exactly how much taller people are than me. They’re just… taller in general. It’s not until I see myself in a mirror with them or in a photo that the height difference becomes a thing. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m still shocked and offended every time. …

*Note — I started writing this article a few weeks ago, before things got really scary in Italy, before all of Catalonia shut down, and before the U.S. went into a state of National Emergency. I’ll catch up to today at the end of the article.

It’s 2 AM in Barcelona, Catalonia and I’m keeping vigil next to my sleeping grandmother in the hospital. We’re in the semi-critical ward with our own room tonight because she’s had a stroke. My dad found her standing in the pantry the other day, moving objects around for seemingly no reason. When he asked what she was doing, she couldn’t answer him. …

The Frederic Marés Museum is one of Barcelona’s best-kept secrets. It contains within it a juxtaposition as paradoxical as life and death — ecstatic creation and utter destruction. It’s almost too conceptually massive to write about but I’m going to give it a try because …fuck it.

An eccentric artist’s lifelong compulsion to collect, create, and preserve has filled this medieval building in Barcelona’s already-mysterious Gothic district with room after room after room of trinkets and baubles and rare, vintage oddities, the likes of which have visitors positively drooling from an overwhelm of awe and wonder. …