Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Beyond

Her new book, The Years of Blood, offers, as its subtitle suggests, “stories from a reporting life in Latin America.” A widely decorated journalist, Guillermoprieto has written, in fact, several lives’ worth of reportage on the region. While she began chronicling Latin America in 1978, this volume collects essays published in the 21st century—most after 2010.

Gilmar Masiero’s Brazilian Socioeconomic Dynamics arrives at a critical juncture in the intellectual conversation about Brazil. In an era in which international headlines often oscillate between portrayals of Brazil as an eternal “country of the future” or a nation mired in perpetual crisis, Masiero, a professor of business management at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), offers a welcome and rigorously argued third path: a blueprint for activating Brazil’s latent “socioeconomic dynamics.” He does that by offering a nuanced perspective that goes beyond economic metrics—he incorporates Brazilian social and political dynamics as forces that have shaped the nation.

La mirada imperial puesta en Galápagos (The Imperial Gaze on the Galapagos), a collection of essays edited by Alberto Acosta, Elizabeth Bravo, Esperanza Martínez and Ramiro Ávila, brings together critical perspectives on the multiple meanings of the islands: ecological, symbolic, territorial and geopolitical. The collection is based on a fundamental premise: to understand the Galapagos beyond an instrumental and human perspective, refocusing on the plurality of the beings who have woven their memories there for thousands of years.

Dom Phillips, 57, was writing an environmentally significant book when he was brutally killed with Bruno Pereira in the Amazon on June 5, 2022. The crime that shocked the world interrupted their lives, their dreams, and his deep commitment to the Amazon. The book, just published, has four chapters and an introduction written by Dom.  The manuscript was saved because he had left his computer back home after his last trip. Six dedicated journalists studied his notes, trying to capture his intention, his views and the places he had traveled. The title How to Save the Amazon has the terribly sad subtitle, A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers.

As something of an old hand in the history of coffee enterprise, I don’t very often discover a new work that so effectively answers questions I’ve had for decades. Michelle Craig McDonald accomplishes this and much more in her multifaceted study of the coffee trade and consumption from the early 18th to late 19th centuries in what became the United States. Beyond this, however, she managed to produce an accessible, engaging text based on deep archival research, a gem for both general readers and scholars in her own field.

When I was in undergrad at Emerson College, I met a student from Croatia who spoke to me in perfect Spanish. When I asked her how she was so fluent, she predictably told me she’d studied it in school. To my surprise, however, she punctuated her explanation with, “I [also] grew up watching Mexican telenovelas!” It was the turning point at which I began thinking of telenovelas as existing beyond televisions in Mexican households.

It was 1972, and three young men—one accompanied by his wife— arrived separately in Chile from different points in the U.S. Upper Midwest. None had ever been to the slender, mountainous Andean nation. Like some 20,000 other foreigners who’d also recently traveled there, they were chasing a dream: to be part of the social and economic revolution Chileans had embarked on two years earlier by electing Salvador Allende as their first-ever socialist president, the first socialist leader democratically elected in Latin America.

Death does not always mean an end. In early 2013, Venezuela’s president known as Comandante Hugo Chávez died after struggling with cancer. Having won the 2012 presidential elections—and perhaps anticipating the imminent end of his life before taking office—he proclaimed Vice President Nicolás Maduro as his political successor and publicly urged supporters to vote for him should the electoral process need to be repeated.

In the early winter of 1990, one year into the presidency of Carlos Menem, the Buenos Aires police held a public auction of a small fleet of cars that had long been in their service. Immersed as I was in primary research for the book I was writing on the legacies of repression and torture in Argentina, I was horrified.

Christopher Loperena’s book, aptly titled the Ends of Paradise, brings forth sharp analysis of the threats to Garifuna life in Honduras through what he calls a “racialized extractivisim” (13) that involves land theft supported by the state, state-developed tourism and appropriation of culture by the mestizo nation.

As the director of a doctoral program in spirituality, colleagues and students often ask me if I have any recommendations for articles or books they should read. Because the field of spirituality is a new one in academia, fresh research is always emerging. This year, my number one recommendation is Chris Tirres’ new book, Liberating Spiritualities.