“Time will tell,” wrote Rizal, “if I am dreaming or I see too far.” I copied that into my notebook years ago. Without the citation, I can’t go back to the original source and find out its…
Filipinos love to play with words. We effortlessly form puns or terms with double or conflicting meanings for a laugh, often unmindful of the power of words to communicate, conceal, or confuse. Take propaganda. Textbook history taught…
Dead men tell no tales is a phrase older than the title of a 2017 film in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. The phrase has been tracked down to the 13th-century Persian poet Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn…
Whenever I reflect on the sorry state of the country, I always remember the time my father cut me off from whining by declaring: “You don’t know what you are talking about. You think your life is…
The late Aquilino Pimentel Jr. once related how he accompanied a group of Mindanao warlords to Malacañang for a symbolic surrender to the government through then President Corazon Aquino. When media was called in for the photo-op,…
Zoilo Galang’s “Encyclopedia of the Philippines” first appeared in 1936. A second edition of 20 volumes, using the material that survived World War II, appeared in 1958. Galang’s, like all print encyclopedias, was obsolete as soon as…
April 12, 1895 is a date found in the dustbin of history. It is not familiar to many Filipinos as: June 12 (1898), Independence Day; Nov. 30 (1863), Andres Bonifacio’s birthday; or Dec. 30 (1896), Jose Rizal’s…
Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the first voyage around the world with Ferdinand Magellan has provided me with hours and hours of fun. Now that Yale University has made their French illuminated manuscript available online, I direct my…
Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times, says that the plunging viewership for the annual Academy Awards is not about the decline of the Oscars but the end of the movies as we know it. The…
Reading my students’ papers on what the Philippines was like on the day they were born can be quite depressing. Using the Inquirer archive, they traveled back in time 17, 18 years to discover a world that…
Today, depending on the results of the coming elections, may be the last commemoration of Edsa 1986. Those who took part in that significant moment in our history look back with nostalgia first before accepting the reality…
Pandemic physical distancing discouraged me from going to Rizal Park yesterday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the execution of Jose Burgos, Mariano Gomes (with an “S” not a “Z”), and Jacinto Zamora. Bur-Go-Za would be their…
