Original in Spanish: 2026-09-26 - En qué ando
They cut off both her forearms with an axe and threw her down a ravine. She packed the stumps in mud to stop the bleeding, climbed out and walked six kilometres to the road.
Seriously.
It could have carried her name
California, 1978. Mary Vincent was 15 and hitchhiking; what happened is in Seis kilómetros sin brazos. Afterwards she testified twice against the same man, twenty years apart, and backed the law that toughened sentences for torture. The press named it after him.
Two people in bathrobes
George Miller finishes Mad Max: Fury Road, two hours of chase across the desert, and the next thing he shoots is Three Thousand Years of Longing: two people talking in bathrobes in a hotel room. It’s officially my favourite kissing film. It even beats Heated Rivalry.
Inflation is the tax of the poor
Madrid, 1609. A 73-year-old Jesuit ends up prosecuted for lèse-majesté and locked in a convent for writing a treatise on coins. Juan de Mariana argued that shaving the silver out of the vellón coins was a hidden tax paid by the usual people: Inflation is a tax on the poor. Four centuries later, Trump promises $5,000 to every adult American if the Republicans win the November midterms, without explaining where it will come from: Trump Dividends.
Authorized bread
In Radicalized, Cory Doctorow has a refugee jailbreak her toaster, which only accepts authorized bread, and risk deportation for copyright infringement. It sounds like satire until you remember your printer already rejects ink that isn’t the brand’s.
Eighty hours
Japanese has a word for working yourself to death, karōshi, and Japan even has an official line: more than 80 hours of overtime a month and your health is at risk by decree. It’s the dark end of ganbaru: hang in there, don’t complain, keep going. To see it as a documentary, Salaryman; to laugh through gritted teeth, Estupor y temblores, from interpreter to cleaning toilets in one year.
And also
The cargo cult of Vanuatu and a certain John Frum, Queer Eye, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Ayn Rand’s two doorstop novels, and the A. S. Byatt story that Three Thousand Years came from.
I’m fine and all that…