Twenty Loaves of Bread, and the Capture of Abimael Guzman.
On 12 September 1992, Peru’s most wanted man was not betrayed by ideology, weapons or an intercepted confession. He was betrayed by the ordinary appetites of a household. There is something unusually intimate about searching through another person’s rubbish. Once stripped of its polite discretion, a life appears in fragments: the cigarettes smoked after dinner, the medicine applied before bed, the number of mouths consuming bread. We may lie about our politics, our whereabout
The Cuisine That Refused to Disappear
Begin with a picada. Almonds, garlic, parsley, and bread are crushed together until separate ingredients become a structure capable of holding an entire dish. It is one of the essential gestures of Catalan cooking, repeated in fish stews, meat casseroles, sauces, and family kitchens, and it offers an unusually precise metaphor for a country whose institutions have repeatedly been broken apart, but whose culture has continued to reassemble itself. When Barcelona fell to the Bo
