Knife sharpener, Buenos Aires, 1870. Source: Archivo General de la Nación Argentina Listen to the story: Bonus: Two afiladores announcing their services, Buenos Aires, 2023: I have my own pantheon of local gods. At the center stands the sage taxi driver. Then comes the vegetable stand proprietor, the fellow at the newspaper kiosk, the street…

Listen here: My strongest and favorite memories from my adolescence were of my solo adventures exploring San Francisco. Not much else stands out from that time. I did all the ordinary dreary things: I went to school, I played sports (badly), I had a few frustrating dates. But what jumps out in memory was the…

Listen: Sometimes as I am walking home late at night, I scent her fragrance. No matter the exhaustion of all that has come before, no matter the exhaustion of all that is to come, these things mean exactly nothing when I feel her near. She waits, no doubt, for moments such as these: summer nights.…

Listen to “Hotel York” here: What I like best about the Hotel York is its sign. Faded, over-sized and garish, it is a sign that tells a nuanced story. It is most definitely a sign worth crossing the street for. Which, of course, I did. I had set out for a walk, alone but for…

Listen here: This is a re-vamped, expanded version of an article I originally wrote for the Buenos Aires Herald in 2001. It makes me a bit wistful. I’m generally forgiving about technological change and modernization and try my best to embrace it but I truly miss those old buses, the colectivos, of Buenos Aires. Sadly,…

Listen: When you and most of the world go to sleep, I come out of my sheath and comb through the words that have been discarded, sorting and separating them into small piles on the floor around me. I contemplate the tattered shreds of Webster’s Unabridged, its once-proud onionskin papers turned to translucent confetti. No…

Listen Here: Our trip began in the percolating crowds of Plaza Once. We caught the #32 bus, which would leave us at Puente de la Noria. It used to be one of the entry ways to the great city from the Pampas but today it is the bridge over the moat holding back the poverty…

Listen here: Some time ago, I went looking for Little Red Riding Hood. Turns out, she wasn’t so easy to find. The tale begins some years back when a taxi driver, a decorated veteran of potholes, traffic jams and crooked cops, bragged to me, “Ah, I know this city like the back of my hand.…

Listen: After all the subway harangues, the sales pitches for chocolate bars, the children begging, the young men with booming voices waving prescriptions they can’t fill – all wanting money – it is a relief when at last the poets come. They are soft-spoken if they speak at all. They are well but simply dressed…