Español Cibaeño

¡Vamuaceile!

Literatura Hispanoamerica

Robert Guzmán Almánzar

Campesino cibaeño: uno de los símbolos de identificación del Cibao

Muchas personas tienden a no saber el origen de mi acento, muchos me preguntan de donde soy, infieren si soy venezolano, cubano, puertorriqueño, e incluso si he vivido en Italia. Cuando respondo que soy dominico-americano pero que me he criado en la Republica Dominicana muchos exclaman que 1. No pareces dominicano o 2. No suenas como tal. Esto me ha pasado bastante en países como Chile, Argentina y aquí en España. A mi entender esto es simplemente porque la gran mayoría de personas que han conocido dominicanos de una manera u otra en estos países tienden a conocer a personas del sur o la capital dominicana que tienen a tener el acento y el físico peculiar por el cual somos conocidos. Muchas de estas personas también tienden a ser de un estrato mas bajo de la sociedad…

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Language Mastery As A Secret Code: How Sadid Al-Mulk Was Saved From Danger

Quintus Curtius

Mastery of language is indeed a powerful tool.  This is especially true when the speakers hail from the same cultural background, and can make use of all those subtleties that would be lost on the non-native. This point is brilliantly illustrated by an anecdote told about Ali Ibn Munqidh, who became emir of the district of Shaizar in northern Syria in 1081.  His surname was Sadid al-Mulk, and this is how I will refer to him in this article.  We will see that words effectively deployed can literally save lives.  This story is adapted from Ibn Khallikan’s short biographical sketch of Sadid al-Mulk.

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Discourse in the Culture Wars and the Hunger for Catharsis

Very grounded and intellectually refreshing article on how we could have more effective, objective, and fruitful discussions/debates, even when coming from two seemingly outrageously distant positions.

Alastair's Adversaria

This is just the fucking worst.

Imagine a self-help book written by the Darth Maul of tenured campus bad boys, an act of trahison des clercs so severe that it calls into question the entire five-thousand-year academic project—a book that seeks to make accessible to a general audience a mélange of mysticism, philosophy, psychology and dietary recommendations, assembled into a package so intellectually low-cal that it would be hilarious were it not basically a to-do list for a generation of tiki torch-wielding neo-Klansmen.

So begins Richard Poplak’s review of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life in The Johannesburg Review of Books. Poplak is far from alone in his excoriating take on Peterson. Houman Barekat declares Peterson to be a ‘a prancing messiah-cum-surrogate-dad for gormless dimwits everywhere’ in the LA Review of Books, concluding his review with the paragraph:

Admittedly it’s not always easy to distinguish between a harmless retro eccentric…

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