On February 27, 2026, the Trump administration designated Anthropic — the American AI company behind Claude — a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” The designation, previously reserved for foreign adversaries such as Kaspersky Labs and Chinese semiconductor suppliers, was triggered by Anthropic’s refusal to remove two restrictions from its $200 million Pentagon contract: a prohibition on the use of its AI for mass domestic surveillance of Americans, and a prohibition on fully autonomous weapons systems operating without human oversight.

Within hours, OpenAI secured its own Pentagon deal for classified networks, reportedly under terms that included the same two safety provisions Anthropic had been punished for defending. The apparent contradiction was striking, but the public discourse that followed missed the deeper structural issue entirely.

Media coverage, government rhetoric, and public debate converged on a single framing: should a private company or the federal government decide how military AI is used? This framing is not merely reductive. It is dangerous, because it erases the institution that should be making these decisions: the United States Congress.

The Binary That Obscures the Real Question—

The dominant narrative presented the dispute as a confrontation between corporate power and executive authority — tech billionaires versus the Pentagon. A CBS interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on the evening of February 28 exemplified this pattern. The interviewer pressed repeatedly on a single axis: “Why should a private company have more say than the Department of Defense?” “Why should Americans trust a CEO over the federal government?”

The question sounds reasonable until one examines what Amodei actually said. Across a thirty-minute interview, Amodei made the same point at least four times — he does not believe a private company should hold this authority permanently. He explicitly stated that Congress needs to legislate guardrails for military AI — particularly in areas where the technology has outpaced existing law. He described the current situation as untenable and called for democratic action. The interviewer, did not pursue this line. The framing remained locked on a binary — corporate versus government — that excluded the democratic process altogether.

When the public conversation about AI regulation is reduced to a power struggle between two actors — both operating without legislative mandate in this specific domain — the possibility of democratic oversight disappears from the discourse. And when it disappears from the discourse, it disappears from the political agenda.

Two Red Lines, Two Legislative Gaps—

Anthropic’s two restrictions — no mass domestic surveillance, no fully autonomous weapons — are not arbitrary corporate preferences. They correspond to two areas where AI capabilities have overtaken the legal framework.
As Amodei detailed in his February 26 statement, current law allows the government to purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from commercial sources without a warrant — a practice the Intelligence Community itself has flagged as a privacy risk and one that has prompted bipartisan pushback in Congress. The practice is not illegal; it was simply not operationally useful before the era of large language models and advanced analytics. AI, however, changes the scope: powerful models can assemble scattered, individually innocuous data points into a comprehensive portrait of a person’s life — automatically and at massive scale. And the Fourth Amendment doctrine — along with the statutes Congress has enacted — has not caught up to what is now technically possible.
This same legal obsolescence extends to battlefields. The concern is not about the partially autonomous systems currently deployed in Ukraine or under development for Taiwan contingencies. It is about fully autonomous weapons — systems that identify, select, and engage targets without any human involvement. Amodei argued, with technical specificity, that current AI systems are not reliable enough for this application, citing the fundamental unpredictability that anyone working with these models recognizes. Beyond reliability, accountability itself is at stake: if a fleet of coordinated autonomous systems ope rates under a single command node, the traditional chain of military accountability — built on the assumption that human soldiers exercise judgment at multiple levels — collapses. Anthropic proposed to work directly with the the Department of Defense on R&D to prototype these systems in a controlled environment. The Pentagon declined unless it could deploy without restrictions from the outset.

Neither of these concerns is ideological. Both are structural. And both point to the same conclusion that legislation has not kept pace with capability.

The Precedent Problem—

The administration’s response to Anthropic’s position set a precedent that extends well beyond AI policy. The supply chain risk designation — a tool designed to protect n ational security from foreign adversaries — was deployed against an American company for exercising contractual discretion. The message to every technology firm doing business with the federal government was unmistakable: compliance is not negotiated; it is compelled.

The internal contradiction of the government’s own position deserves emphasis. It simultaneously threatened two actions that are logically incompatible: designating Anthropic a supply chain risk (which labels the company a security threat to be excluded) and invoking the Defense Production Act to compel continued service (which labels the company’s technology as essential to national security). A company cannot be both a threat to be quarantined and an asset to be conscripted. The coexistence of these two threats reveals that neither was grounded in a genuine security assessment — both were instruments of coercion.

The punitive character of the action is further underscored by Anthropic’s broader conduct. This is a company that voluntarily forfeited several hundred million dollars in revenue by cutting off access to firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party — some of which had been designated by the Department of Defense as Chinese Military Companies. It likewise shut down CCP-sponsored cyberattacks targeting its systems and advocated for strong export controls on AI chips to maintain a democratic advantage. Whatever one thinks of Anthropic’s red lines, the suggestion that this company is a threat to American national security is not supported by its record.

If the precedent holds that a principled disagreement over two narrow use cases — representing, by Anthropic’s account, roughly one percent of deployed applications — can trigger a national security designation, then the space for any company to maintain safety restrictions narrows to zero.

What Congressional Action Could Look Like—

The policy vacuum at the center of this dispute is not abstract. It has concrete dimensions that Congress could address through legislation. First, the data broker loophole: a statutory framework governing the government purchase and AI-enabled analysis of commercially collected personal data would close the surveillance gap that both Anthropic and bipartisan voices in Congress have identified. Several legislative proposals have circulated in previous sessions — none have advanced to a vote. Second, autonomous weapons oversight: a statutory requirement for meaningful human control in lethal autonomous systems, with defined thresholds for what constitutes “meaningful,” would establish the accountability framework that both Amodei and military ethics scholars have called for. Third, the weaponization of supply chain designations: Congressional review mechanisms for the application of national security designations to domestic companies — particularly where the designation is retaliatory rather than protective — would prevent the tool from being used as a coercive instrument against lawful commercial actors.

All these many words to say, simply: AI must be regulated. Not eventually, but now. None of these proposals are novel. What is missing is political will — and a public discourse that demands legislative action rather than accepting the false binary of corporate versus executive control.

The Democratic Deficit in AI Governance—

The Anthropic-Pentagon dispute will likely be remembered as the moment AI governance became a national security flashpoint. The most damning indictment of this affair, though, is not what the two parties said to each other. It is what was absent from the conversation: a legislative framework that renders these confrontations unnecessary.

* Video: Interview with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. interviewed by Jo Ling Kent, CBS News, February 28, 2026.

The final stretch of the year has begun, and with it, the holiday season. First in line: Thanksgiving. What is Thanksgiving supposed to mean in a nation of abundance, when millions of its people face empty plates, almost daily — or daily, period? This contradiction is not accidental. It is the result of choices — choices that prioritize profit over dignity.

Today is the last Thursday of November. It’s Thanksgiving. Airports across the country have been full for days. Grocery stores have been stripped of turkeys, cranberries, and the seasonal rolls that appear only in November. Somewhere, someone is arguing about politics at a table heavy with food. Somewhere else, someone is doing math. And the math goes like this:

“If I skip breakfast and lunch, I can make dinner last two days.”
“If I drink enough water, my stomach will stop asking.”
“If I chew gum long enough, the flavor becomes a kind of meal.”
— not nutrition, but compensation. A trick the body almost believes.

One in seven people in the 2025 United States of America knows this math, and they do not forget it. Once you learn to calculate hunger, the numbers stay with you — a constant negotiation between yourself and arithmetic.

“If I get this wrong, it is not an error. It is an empty plate.”

A man receives twenty-three dollars a month in food assistance.
— Twenty-three dollars.
He walks down 8th Avenue, past the bars and restaurants, and people assume he is going inside. He is not going inside. He is walking past, doing the math, wondering how a grown man is expected to sustain himself on less than a dollar a day.

A woman wanted to make chicken soup. She could not afford the chicken.

A mother has three children. She thinks about them constantly, not in the sentimental way people talk about on holidays, but in the way of someone who is failing a test she studied for her whole life. She did everything right — school, work, no drugs, no jail, no mistakes. Still, she cannot feed her family. And when she is with her daughter, she cannot be present. Hunger is louder than love, it takes up all the room.

The body has a setting for this. It is called power-save mode, a phrase borrowed from machines, applied now to… people. When there is not enough fuel, the system dims. Limbs become heavy. Thought becomes slow. There is a pain at the front of the head, something pressing against the brain, and it is not a metaphor.

It is Tuesday.
It is Wednesday.
Thanksgiving is on Thursday.
“What are we eating on Monday?”

Outside, it is cold. The kind of cold that requires decisions.
Heat or food.
Warmth or fullness.
Pick one.
You cannot afford both.
The thermostat becomes another equation, another negotiation with a body that is already conserving, already dimming, already learning to want less.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about warmth.
Gathering.
Abundance.
A table surrounded by people you love, eating more than you need, grateful for the excess.

But gratitude requires a baseline. It requires something to be grateful for. And when the minimun is nothing — when the stomach is empty and the radiator is off and the math does not add up no matter how many times you run the numbers — gratitude becomes obscene. It becomes a word for people who have never had to choose.

A teacher went to food banks while employed. She stood in line with her students’ parents and learned something she already knew:
— you are not the only one.
You are not the only one skipping meals, not the only one lying awake
— calculating,
not the only one telling your children that
— dinner is enough, that…
— breakfast isn’t necessary, that…
— hunger is just a feeling and feelings pass.

Someone put groceries on a credit card.
Someone else knows there will be no Thanksgiving this year.
No turkey,
no stuffing,
no mashed potatoes.
No Christmas either.
Just the math, and the cold, and the slow dimming of the body’s expectations.

They say:
“pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
But that requires boots.
It requires a floor to stand on.
It requires a body that is not running on empty, a mind that is not clouded by the particular fog of malnutrition, a life that has not been reduced to a series of impossible calculations.

There is a phrase for what this does: it kills hope.
You take away the ability
to feed themselves,
to feed their children,
to sit at a table and eat,
and you take away the reason to keep calculating.
The math becomes pointless. The numbers stop mattering.

Today is Thursday. Airports are full.
Somewhere, a table is heavy with food.
Somewhere else, someone is drinking water until their stomach stops asking. Someone is chewing gum.
Someone is choosing between heat and food.
Someone is doing the math,
over and over,
hoping this time the numbers will come out different.

They will not come out different.

One in seven.
In America.
In November.
In the cold.

“What are we eating on Monday?”

In September 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would end the Household Food Security Report — the primary tool for measuring hunger in America. Forty-seven million people are hungry. The government has decided to stop counting them. “You can’t end hunger by simply ignoring it. And now it’ll be harder than ever to find the many people in America who need help the most. (Emily Holzknecht and Adam Westbrook)”

* This essay was inspired by “America, the Hungry,” a New York Times Opinion Video by Emily Holzknecht and Adam Westbrook, published on November 27, 2025.

Dear one,

Have you heard of Letters Live? If not, go check it out. Spoiler: you might fall, at least, very much in like with it. I have, but in love.

It’s 5pm of Sunday, November 11. I was just now thinking about the art of letter exchange — a simple gesture, but so precious. Nowadays, letters might sound reminiscent of the past, and writing letters, in the send button era, can be seen as an act of resistance. But it’s not. It’s not about preservation. It is, though, about continuity. The act itself never stopped, it just changed clothes. Letters, emails, text messages, thoughtful social media posts, handwritten notes left on tables, shelves — they’re all the same impulse: composing one’s inner life and sending it toward someone, even if that someone is a future reader they’ll never meet. We write to each other because, somehow, we want to connect – we’re wired for that.

Jane Austen wrote many of them… Virginia Woolf did the same, and Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, Camus and Maria Casarès, Keats, Franz Kafka, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Maria Weston Chapman, Ignatius Sancho, and Eleanor Roosevelt voicing human rights through her tireless advocacy; as well as James Joyce, Flaubert, George Orwell, Voltaire, Vincent van Gogh and his beloved brother, Theo van Gogh, Joan Didion, Émile Zola, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Einstein, Marie Curie, Ernie Pyle, Shen Congwen, Lu Xun, Su Shi, Yukio Mishima, Natsume Sōseki, Mutsu Munemitsu, and Kawabata registering unattainable love and the transience of beauty.

There were also the women’s rights advocate, Abigail Adams, and her husband, John Adams, a Founding Father and the second U.S. President, who today, by the way, might be in despair from watching his forty-seventh successor’s debacle — that’s factual, not partisan; followed by Paul the Apostle guiding grace and sin, and who, most likely, would tag the latter — a pseudo-politician — for wanting to impersonate God — of course, the said pseudo-politician’s own definition of God, which does not apply in heaven.
Still on important historical moments, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, Maria Leopoldina, José Bonifácio, reporting injustices and asserting nations’ sovereignty.

And because our true homeland is the language one speaks, and mine is Portuguese, and since Portuguese is the language of what we feel but cannot resolve, I must list here the choreographer of contradiction, witness to the impossibility of a unified self, the poet who multiplied himself to tell the truth, who was a consciousness fractured into… clarity perhaps? — Fernando Pessoa. And given that one’s native language is home, and mine is Brazil (although, home to me has a broader definition), I’m ending this list with my favorite Brazilians — Mário de Andrade and Fernando Sabino, who captured through letters urban loneliness with humor and impeccable narrative; and last but not least, the remarkable Dora, who after a lifetime of writing letters for others — letters for people who can’t write — finally writes one for herself, to Josué, in the redemptive Walter Salles’ film Central Station.

Each one of those figures left fragments of themselves in letters.

And so have soldiers, friends, lovers, neighbors, uncles, cousins, mothers, my mother, my father, you, and I.

The first time I held an epistolary novel, I could not put it down. That was birthdays ago… I remember how enchanted I was with the raw intimacy of stories as vivid as my own, which instantly clinched: our lives do happen in letters — not between their lines, but traced by them. That fascination for letters carried me through two decades of a life dedicated to literature, while the world spun toward the algorithmical age of data, where you are now — and where here I am, writing this letter to you.

Unknowingly we write to an unknown future reader. Kerrin-Lee Nell wrote to London, which is really writing to everyone who loves every part of this city — and to those who will come to love it. Your letter, your words, Kerrin, join centuries of voices saying: I have something to tell you. Well, I very much look forward to listening to it on the 28th.

Here’s to Kerrin-Lee Nell, and the four other finalists — Theo Ivanovic, Martin Lloyd-Elliott, Claire Fuller, and Gerard Breislin. And those whose names we don’t know, as well as everyone on Substack who wrote their Dear London letter and is sharing it here on the plataform (names below) — you are part of this too.

London, London…

You’re not just a place I’ve been. You’re a part of me now. And I’ll love you, always, for the stories you told me and the ones you dared me to write. — Kerrin-Lee Nell

The format shifts. The intention, stays.

From a heart’s poste restante,
Carla

PS: More on letters to come (brought to you by moi and — stay tuned!)

To some of our Substack writers who wrote their tribute to the city, others who answered the Letters Live call, and now have their letters live all the way from here to London, a big shout-out for showing up, writing your truth, and keeping the converstion alive.

• - Dear London

• - Dear London

• - The Letter That Didn’t Win

• - Dear London

• - Dear Lion at Trafalgar Square

• - Nature in the City

• - A London Love Letter

• - I Lost a Letter Writing Competition

• - A Love Letter to London: Somewhere Between Rain and Light

• - Dear London

• - Dear London

• - Dear London…

• - London Calling

• - Dear London, This Is Not Goodbye

• - A short ode to my dear London

Music excerpts:

"Vive," Djavan.
"Waterloo Sunset," The Kinks — performance by Colin Hay.
"A carta de Dora," Antonio Pinto & Orquestra Paschoal Perrotta.

*Shared for non-commercial, editorial use only.

This morning, ironically just a couple of days after the day established as our “international day” — for the world to see us, women, as women — I sat with coffee in hand, scanning the headlines, when I was arrested by a NYT review of a book that stayed with me long after I read the final page in its original language, Portuguese, years ago. Giovana Madalosso’s The Tokyo Suite has crossed the language barrier again, bringing its unflinching gaze, this time, to English-speaking readers. Seeing both editions side by side — one familiar, one new — I’m struck by how some truths about motherhood, power, and care need no translation. Beyond exploring maternal ambivalence, can intimacy exist within a fundamentally exploitative arrangement?

What happens when domestic fiction becomes socioeconomic critique? A child’s parents, who are largely absent, rely on a third woman to provide their child with love, routine, and emotional security. Yet, because she’s an employee, her role is inherently unstable — she’s indispensable but also disposable. This tension exposes the uneasy reality of domestic labor: those who raise the children of the wealthy often live with the quiet arithmetic of survival, calculating the cost of a roof overhead, meals on the table, and their own absence from home.

The story’s dual perspective — shifting between Fernanda, an television executive producer and Cora’s mother, and Maju, the family’s live-in nanny — operates as more than a narrative technique. It embodies the philosophical problem at the heart of contemporary caregiving: the irreconcilable conflict between the commodification of care and its essential intimacy. When Maju kidnaps four-year-old Cora, the girl who is hers in every way but law, she commits a radical act of love and resistance against a system that denies her legitimacy. And by reclaiming her agency through an indefensible transgression, Maju also violates parental rights and the implicit contract that allows the professional class to outsource its emotional labor while maintaining the fiction of primary attachment.

The rebellion extends further as Majú calls Cora her “Chickadee” — the intimate nickname of their quasi-maternal bond — and rechristens the child “Ana,” appropriating the privilege of naming and defining identity.

When motherhood becomes a divided, somewhat blurry role, what essential truth persists?

Consider how precisely Madalosso calibrates her characters’ motherhood instincts: both mother and nanny, 44, both untethered from maternal guidance, both navigating identity beyond traditional motherhood roles.

Love here reveals an act of sacrifice. For Maju, that sacrifice means risking everything — including living a life potentially interrupted by legal consequences. For Fernanda, her sacrifice emerges from a profound fragmentation — a woman who sees herself not as a subject, but as an object defined by external desires: her lover’s passion, her husband's pragmatism, her professional ambitions.

Both women are caught in distinct perspectives, blind to the consequences of their emotional derailments. Their roles, however, are not freely assumed but forged in absence marked by a system that transforms maternal bonds in a transactional framework, exposing how circumstance, not individual agency, determines who provides care and who purchases it.

Following this business exchange, the room named Tokyo Suite — which connects to the book’s title — evokes the distance between the Japanese capital and the elitized neighborhood of Higienópolis in São Paulo, Brazil, where Fernanda’s apartment is located. It crystallizes the novel’s central paradox: a space presented as a generous provision while actually serving as the architectural embodiment of the employer’s outsourced maternal obligations, allowing her to prioritize her own pursuits while easing her conscience about the arrangement. What seems like benevolence is, in truth, a polished facade to an arrangement that enables one woman’s success at the cost of another’s autonomy — a control confined to labor and extended into the most intimate aspects of life. Fernanda’s affair with Yara, a director of nature documentaries, charged with animalistic overtones and liberation from domestic constraint, stands in stark contrast to Maju’s “conjugal visits” from her partner, Lauro, carefully scheduled and monitored. Even in desire, the women remain separated by who controls time and space, illuminating in the narrative how ruthless capitalism determines who works and also who gets to want.

To this dilemma, there is no policy solution, no perfect balance between career and caregiving, no way to separate our economic structures from our emotional lives. Instead, we’re left with Fernanda’s belated recognition: To be a mother, you need to adopt the child after birth. This truth, though, arrives too late to repair what’s broken, serving not as revelation but indictment — an acknowledgment of privilege’s inertia.

Perhaps the disquieting force in my reading is how these two women implicates its readers. Those with sufficient resources to delegate care will recognize their own justifications in Fernanda’s interior monologue; those who have provided that care will feel Maju’s invisibility.

The dynamics within Fernanda and Maju’s shared existence prompt one to ask: what is the price — emotionally, ethically, socially — for the arrangements that make modern life and motherhood possible? And who, ultimately, bears the true cost? Work-life balance has become a commodity — highly sought after but rarely questioned.

Art is often mistaken for mere leisure, a quiet indulgence for when the demands of life subside. But this is a mistake. Literature and films, as well as other forms of art, exist not just to entertain, but for one to ask, to inquire, to analyze, to see through. Without art, the world would be stripped of meaning. We would not live, only endure — and in a world both unruly and unjust.

The Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago once remarked: “Writers make national literature, while translators make universal literature.” With Madalosso’s literature alongside Walter Salles’ recent Oscar triumph with I’m Still Here, Brazilian art is taking its rightful place on the world stage, and art, at the same time, is challenging us to look in the mirror, uncomfortable as that might be.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This is why art is also politics. So is language, because language is never neutral. Literature is composed by language — and language is political.

So, here is my take — The Tokyo Suite is not just another major hit in Brazilian publishing. It offers a compelling contribution to contemporary Brazilian literature. It’s literature, yes! — no doubt on that — but it’s also politics.

That said, literary work is considered so because of its artistic, narrative, and linguistic qualities — political engagement alone doesn’t make something literature. A novel can be apolitical and still be literature. Nevertheless, even the choice to avoid politics is itself a political act, because literature does not exist in a vacuum. Literature reflects struggles, ideologies, identities, sovereignty, labor, resistance, sexuality, religion, nationalism, poverty, wealth, ambition, fear, anger, envy, sadness, love, life, death, even silence… and the many other dimensions of human experience, all inherently tied to language, culture, and history — and all of which are shaped by power structures.

Who gets to mother, who gets to love, and who gets to belong are not private concerns, but political ones. To speak, to write, to name — none of it is neutral. Literature may not always be about politics, but, in one way or another, it is always influenced by it. And as Madalosso’s The Tokyo Suite leads me to conclude, failing to recognize this is not just an oversight. It is complicity.

Japanese is a language of striking simplicity and profound depth, often unfolding an unsaid poetry.

In the recent movie “Perfect Days,” directed by Wim Wenders, Hirayma, the exquisitely portrayed protagonist, delivers a poignant response to the query “When is next time?” (今度はいつ | KONDO WA ITSU?) with, “Next time is next time. Now is now.” (今度は今度. 今は今 | KONDO WA KONDO. IMA WA IMA). However, translations — whether in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, or any other languages — although they grasp the essence, may still fail to convey the lyrical nuance of the original. And this is not a shortcoming of any translator; it is simply the nature of language, which calls us to be more mindful of communication as a tool of appreciation.

In the dialogue featuring Koji Yakusho, the repetition of “今度” (kondo, meaning “next time” or “this time”) and “今” (ima, meaning “now”) explores concepts of time and presence in a manner deeply rooted in Japanese perception. This linguistic playfulness and philosophical depth are challenging to convey with the same brevity and impact in other languages, often losing some of their beauty.

Translations and simultaneous interpretations often require a balance between literal accuracy and the need to convey the same emotional or conceptual impact, which can involve adding explanations or modifying phrases to better fit the target language’s cultural context. Achieving this balance, though, is not always possible due to the specific circumstances or timing at which a certain language conversion is being applied. This is one of the joys and challenges of working with language: finding ways to bridge these gaps and bring across not just words, but meanings and feelings. Ewandro Magalhães, chief interpreter at the United Nations, surely knows what I mean.

This view on language made me reflect upon the dismissive attitudes evident in some readers’ comments on a recent article, “How to protect an endangered language,” covered by The Economist:

“What is the problem with a language disappearing?”

“There’s a reason they don’t exist.”

“Why protect them, what’s the problem with the extinction of cultural tools that are no longer meaningful…”

And, in my opinion, among these, the most troubling one is:

“If they’re disappearing, it means they aren’t important at all.”

If we are to think about some of the comments mentioned above, it doesn’t take much to realize how ill-informed and poorly equipped in critical thinking our folks are, which, for their lack of analytical skills, underscore the known challenges and global attitudes that contribute to the issue addressed by the British publisher.

Let’s consider Spanish and English: While English has 375 million native speakers, Spanish boasts about 460 million native speakers, making it the second most spoken native language globally. Including non-native speakers, the total number approaches 560 million, with major populations in Latin America, Spain, and growing communities in the United States.

As of the most recent estimates in 2022, the population of the United States is approximately 334 million people. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s data, there are over 42 million native Spanish speakers in the United States. Additionally, there are about 15 million bilingual Spanish-English speakers, bringing the total number of Spanish speakers to over 57 million — and this number continues to grow. This data reveals the profound connection between language and cultural identity, and illustrates a potential language shift scenario that could occur based on demographic changes and cultural influences.
The decline or disappearance of a language often involves factors related to social, cultural, and political contexts in which its speakers live. Most often, languages disappear when their culture or speakers no longer exist. Such movements aren’t unprecedented globally, and they can lead to substantial reconfiguration of national language policies and cultural identity. Historically, shifts like these have occurred in various regions around the world. For instance, Latin gave way to Romance languages in Europe as the Roman Empire declined, and Coptic, in Egypt, was replaced largely by Arabic after the Muslim conquest in the 7th century.

The United States is experiencing significant demographic evolution, with the Hispanic population being one of the fastest-growing segments. If this trend continues and Spanish gains more domains of use (such as in government, education, commerce, media, and everyday communication), it could indeed challenge English for linguistic dominance and lead the country to a bilingual society where Spanish holds equal or greater status.

That being said, while it’s possible that Spanish could become more prominent, leading to a truly bilingual society, it’s hard to say definitively that English would be replaced entirely. Yet, by the same token, the possibility of Spanish becoming a primary language in the U.S. is not far-fetched — just think of Caesar Augustus’ land. Such a consequential linguistic transformation serves as a reminder of how dynamic and responsive languages are to human circumstances, and it highlights our role in these changes.

Speculating, however, about how languages evolve over time can be quite intriguing. Given the rapid pace of language adaptations in just centuries or even decades, it is challenging to predict exactly how they may develop over such a long timeframe. Nonetheless, it is certainly possible that the linguistic landscape in the United States can look very different in a millennium from now. Imagine, then, the potential metamorphosis in the linguistic landscape of the entire world.

Although this essay is written in English, I would not want the beautiful language of the Lusophone countries, Portuguese — my mother tongue — to disappear. On the contrary: what defines us is the language we speak — whether one speaks one, two, three, or more languages — and that in itself provides a compelling reason to appreciate the grandeur of all languages.

Preserving our linguistic diversity is not merely about maintaining communication; it’s about safeguarding our very essence. With these cultural and language differences acknowledged, we can co-exist in harmony and protect, as well as respect, our plurality, for this is humanity’s true strength. As I often say…

… language is our most powerful technology

— it shapes not only the way we communicate but how we understand the world.

Perhaps, then, we should hold onto it if we want humanity — us and ours — to persevere and remain audible in the Babel-chorus of global voices.

“A palavra nos protege”, disse Márcia Tiburi numa conversa sobre seu livro “Com os Sapatos Aniquilados, Helena Avança na Neve”.
Sim, a palavra nos protege — e nos salva. Os amigos, também. Principalmente aqueles que não nos deixam esquecer os nossos porquês. Tenho poucos amigos, os quais, ainda que com a distância e a comunicação não constante, fazem das travessões, em minha vida, razão, e não, complemento — Luciana N, Luciana P, Luciane G (“Três Marias” nos cosmos e, em terras firmes, “Três Lulus” — contudo, apenas uma Lulu!); Lili de Quintana apenas minha; Kel (irmã adotada pelo coração); primota Andrezza amada; Elinho; Rafael (que ontem era, e hoje foi). E há no peito alguns mais que chegam agora, que chegaram ontem, que vêm e ficam… e outros que partem.
Se a palavra e amigos nos protegem e salvam, a música nos alimenta, e, se a ouvirmos com os olhos da alma, ela também nos salva. Como seriamos sem o som de nossas sinfonias interiores? O que nos deixaria Beethoven se sua alma não pudesse ouvir o que se pode ver?

No percurso dos muitos anos desta vida, uma coleção de códigos postais separados por fronteiras e oceanos já demarcaram minha localização, nunca permanente — São Paulo, Curitiba, Tóquio, Melbourne, Nova York, Chicago, San Francisco, Montpellier, Heidelberg, Paris, Lisboa, Londres. Cidades-casas intermitentes que na memória refletem familiaridade.
Há, em cada uma dessas cidades, histórias que estendem-se à família; aos amigos (ímpares); aos seus residentes e arquitetura e vielas; à cultura e literatura local; aos seus livros de história; as muitas bibliotecas e livrarias — extensões das estantes de casa. Em São Paulo, porém, há algo a mais que reverbera: músicos. Todas as terras os têm, claro (!), mas a capital paulista abriga uma cultura musical única e crescente

Na última quinta-feira, fui conferir uma das programações do Theatro Municipal. Em cartaz, o Quarteto de Cordas da Cidade de São Paulo e a pianista (que admiro, como dizem os portugueses, imenso) Karin Fernandes. Elogios desnecessários ao talento dos cinco músicos, mas, enquanto eu estava naquela que foi a sala onde Mário de Andrade iniciou o seu legado musical, vi, como num curta-metragem, todos os músicos que já pude ver tocar nos mais variados palcos do planeta. E pensei, enquanto os cinco músicos emocionavam os ouvidos atentos da platéia: “nada sai a frente dos nossos”. Pois!
Nada bate ter um músico como, por exemplo, Marcelo Jaffé, eloquentemente durante o espetáculo, dando à plateia aula magna sobre outros músicos a fazer história em épocas longínquas — e que aula (!), fomos de São Paulo a Varsóvia, e voltamos pelas cordas e teclas dos presentes no palco.

Nessa mesma noite, enquanto voltava para casa, escrevi à pessoa que gentilmente me proporcionou o espetáculo:

— “O Quarteto tem linguagem própria! Os quatro parecem até uma célula só. Admirável! Sem falar que o Marcelo Jaffé deu uma aula de história esta noite — 😍 bah! Ahhhhh, mas a Karin Fernandes foi a minha cereja do bolo! Ela é uma das melhores pianistas 🎹 que temos no país — virtuosíssima!, e sem falar que ela é uma querida, toda modesta, mesmo sabendo que é um furacão no piano. Como temos músicos excepcionais, né! Eu realmente A-M-O isso no nosso país! “

Ao observar a cidade, reflito sobre a essência do que nos faz humanos, e vejo tessituras do cotidiano, onde prédios se erguem como notas em uma pauta e os transeuntes entoam melodias mudas em seus passos — a arte musicada e suas muitas possibilidades em nossa sinfonia da vida.
Num tempo em que o analógico avança rumo aos livros de história, sempre digo que nossa mais poderosa tecnologia são as palavras. A música, entretanto, é a mais valiosa.

On a rainy evening in the early 90s, wandering through Japan, my ancestors’ land, longing for a few minutes with loved ones — connected through an imaginary line released in space — I headed to a phone booth, which was about to become a doorway to a lifelong connection.

Upon arriving at the booth, lifting the receiver, sliding in the phone card, and dialing the number, I waited for the line to go through. And there it was, in that pause just before the first ring: his music to greet me. It wasn’t just an on-hold melody; it was a pre-melody, an overture to a deeper harmony. I felt that as an embrace, as if I were back in my living room, sitting in my favorite armchair beneath the soft lamp glow. Although I only came to realize it much afterward, that evening, Japan started to build its way to my life’s journey, leading me to the understanding that home is not necessarily a physical place, but what one carries within.

For months, that sequence of notes I did not know until that green phone booth — now a memorable photograph of Japan — played in the recesses of my mind, intertwining with Tokyo’s daily cadence, almost like the city’s soundtrack.

One morning, walking the streets of the Japanese capital, a poster of Antonio Carlos Jobim beside a charismatic Japanese man — who I would later discover to be Ryuichi Sakamoto — drew me inside a Tower Records store.

Being miles away from what was then my only home, Brazil, and stumbling upon a familiar face — even in a printed form, in such a foreign and public setting — instantly brightened the moment. The poster was not about any collaboration between the two maestros, as I had initially assumed; rather, it showcased Sakamoto’s great admiration for Jobim’s oeuvre.

It was then, while at the store and listening to an album by the gentleman who so humbly looked up to Jobim, that I made a happy discovery: those haunting chords echoing across the city belonged to “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a piece as emblematic of its creator as of his homeland. Serendipity or not, that was the moment I crossed paths with Ryuichi Sakamoto, igniting an admiration for his work ever since.

Years later, Sakamoto was scheduled to perform in Tokyo, with the Brazilian musicians, Paula and Jaques Morelenbaum. Still acclimating to the language, in a time when the internet was far from the ubiquitous resource it is today, I somehow came to believe the Japanese maestro was married to the singer Paula Morelenbaum. My ever-inclined-toward-literary-fiction-fertile-imagination, had even woven this as a romantic dialog tale:

               — How nice this could be! An acclaimed Japanese musician “married in love and in music” to another magnificent musician, and to make it even nicer, a Brazilian one at that! 

And my imagination went on:

              
   — How did they meet? Could that have been at a Bossa Nova concert? Or what if Jobim played match-maker?

Well, that “once upon a time tale” stuck with me for quite a while afterwards.

Fast forward to my time living in Tokyo, fully immersed in the Japanese culture and its day-to-day rhythm, I learned a surprising fact from one of my students back then: Paula Morelenbaum was not married to Sakamoto, but to the cellist Jaques Morelenbaum. Because of their shared last name, I mistakenly believed the two Brazilian musicians were… siblings. I know… I couldn’t help but laugh at the storyline I had spun out over those years.
That aside, I’m not bringing it up to save face for having changed the pairs, but Jaques Morelenbaum’s work — especially the stunning soundtrack for the Brazilian movie “Central Station,” as well as “Choro, Chuva e Cello,” — has been a recurring presence in my personal narrative.

And this is my little cherished story about one of the most celebrated Japanese musicians to date, brought to me by a nostalgic green phone booth and two remarkable Brazilian musicians — three, in fact, for Jobim belongs here as a guiding bird master.

I had the opportunity to see Paula and Jaques Morelenbaum again, this time performing with Marcos Valle at Birdland in New York City in 2018, and the clear picture of the two playing together that night still strikes a smile.

Sakamoto was not part of that performance, but it felt like he was — a presence channeled through the two artists on the stage. Needless to say, the Morelenbaums have, somehow, come to feel like an extension of Sakamoto to me.

Reflecting on it now, I finally understand why I thought the Japanese piano player and the Brazilian singer were married: communion — the sacrosanct communion of musicians on stage. Communion stems from the Latin communio. Communicare, from which communio derives, traces to the Proto-Indo-European root kom-, signifying together or with, while -muni- relates to sharing or exchanging, and -o, a noun ending, indicates a state or condition. Here, expanding past unisons and imprinting belonging, comes music — a communion that reverberates long after the final note fades. Sakamoto, through his music, conjured a layer of crafted communion, composing not only the notes he played, but bridging within the space between them.

In 1983, director Nagisa Ōshima cast Sakamoto alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film based on Laurens van der Post’s novel, The Seed and the Sower — a memoir about his time as a prisoner of war in Java during World War II.

Without prior acting experience, and at just twenty-nine, Sakamoto accepted the role on the condition that he would compose the film’s score, which marked the true breakthrough in his experimental career. The track “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” specially, amplifies the story’s themes through plaintive strains that capture vulnerability and longing, exploring the tension between connection and isolation.

Yes, it’s a war film, but not in the conventional sense of battles and strategy; instead, it examines how rigid codes of honor, duty, and masculinity in military cultures create psychological prisons as confining as the physical camp. It suggests that love and compassion might transcend war, and yet also that repression — sexual, emotional, cultural — can twist into cruelty.

The plot centers on the relationship between Captain Yonoi (played by Sakamoto), the camp commandant, and Major Jack Celliers (David Bowie), a newly arrived British prisoner. Yonoi becomes fascinated — almost obsessed —with Celliers, experiencing what the film presents as a fatal attraction that the captain cannot understand or control. This obsession disrupts the camp’s rigid order and challenges Yonoi’s understanding of himself as a Japanese soldier committed to bushido (the warrior code).

The film’s title comes from a moment when Sergeant Hara (played by Takeshi Kitano), drunk, tenderly wishes Colonel Lawrence (Tom Conti) Merry Christmas despite them both being soldiers bound to opposite sides — laying bare the absurdity and tragedy of war, which forces man to deny their common humanity.

Oshima deliberately made the film ambiguous and uncomfortable, refusing to provide simple answers about cultural identity, or moral righteousness. It’s less about who wins the war than about how war damages everyone it touches, victors and prisoners alike. Tellingly, this is exactly what Sakamoto himself would dedicate much of his life to uphold: the fragile ties that hold us together.

Final years…

Following a major operation and a long hospital convalescence in early 2021 — the latest chapter in a struggle with cancer first diagnosed in 2014 — Sakamoto found just enough strength to sit before his synthesizer not intending to compose, but rather “to be showered in sound,” hoping it might mend a little of his “damaged body and soul.” From those tentative gestures came a series of sketches, recorded like entries in an audio diary across 2021 and 2022. Out of that tenuous span emerged the album 12 and, in its wake, Opus, the starkly poetic 2023 farewell film directed by his son, Neo Sora.

Filmed in September 2022 at Tokyo’s legendary NHK 509 Studio, Opus captures the composer’s last performance in circumstances that transform limitation into a redemptive meditation on mortality.

Too frail to play a full set in one sitting, Sakamoto recorded the program over multiple sessions across a week, with only the film crew as his audience, resulting in a masterful reimagining of a life’s work, where the performer’s impermanence becomes inseparable from the performance itself.

For the nearly two-hour film, his hands shape the sound on the keys — sometimes slowly — one pensive note at a time. More than a concession to physical necessity, the slower tempos were a conscious choice. Knowing it could be the last time he would present his art, he wanted — in his own words — “less notes and more spaces.” Slowing the tempo let each note linger in the air.

Curated and sequenced by Sakamoto, the twenty pieces performed in the film trace the arc of his career — some pieces, he had never played solo before; others, like “Tong Poo,” slowed almost to suspension, as if time itself were stretched into sound. Stripped to its very core, the music let each pause resonate, carrying the weight of a lifetime.

But what makes Opus stunning is the way it lays bare fragility. Where earlier performances were marked by flawless technical precision, here, Sakamoto wavers on some notes as he plays “Bibo no Aozora.” Sakamoto knew his days were numbered, and what we witness is his encounter with beauty and desolation, where Sakamoto captures how a soul perseveres even as the body withers.

In the film’s final moments, the piano carries on, its keys moving one after another, but Sakamoto is no longer there.

Sakamoto died in March of 2023, about six months after filming Opus.

Watching the last thing Sakamoto performed before he died — I feared — would feel like reaching an end with nowhere left to go. It would be too definite. Yet, the feeling Opus leaves you with is not one of grief, but of triumph. In many ways, Neo Sora’s film plays not as farewell but as the crescendo of a remarkable life and talent.

Since the Industrial Revolution, pianos have embodied the imposition of civilization on nature: machinery bending wood and strings into precise forms. Sakamoto once said, “we humans claim it falls out of tune”, and added: “that’s not exactly accurate.” For him, “when the instrument’s tuning goes awry, matter is struggling to return to a natural state.”

When I first went to Japan in those early 90s, I was trying to fit myself within a world of demanding expectations (whatever those expectations were) and was set on an inward search for a self I had yet to discover. It was also in Japan that my first forays into depression intertwined the giddiness of spring with new life challenges and the bittersweet beauty of becoming an adult away from home. So many dreams and longings were born back then — some that have been fulfilled; others, yet to be. In retrospect, thinking of “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” it makes sense that Sakamoto’s testament to the complex and shifting nature of desire would wind so tightly around me.

To you…

A Legendary Playlist…

Despite his reputation for serene composure, Sakamoto was not indifferent to how sound shaped public spaces — and he pushed back when music clashed with harmony. At his favorite New York restaurant, Kajitsu, he found himself disturbed by the jarring dissonance that clashed with its tranquil atmosphere. True to form, he responded not with detachment but with an email, written in equal parts honesty and affection:

“I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music. Who chose this? Whose decision of mixing this terrible roundup? Let me do it. Because your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu” — he meant the thousand-year-old palatial villa in Kyoto, designed on the aesthetic principles of imperfection and natural harmony known as wabi-sabi — “But the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower.”

And that led to “Kajitsu”, the playlist shaping the morning soundtrack as I write from this café somewhere in the West Village, coincidentally, the same neighborhood Sakamoto called home. Everything feels in sync, cycling back and continuously.

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.”
—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949), later, in 1990, put into the motion picture directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Author’s note:

This humble essay is a scribble of personal memories shaped by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s influence on my life, originally written and published in March 2024, one year after his death, and later revisited as the same year approached its close, during a period of personal reflection and self-review of the year gone by.

Born in 1952 to the family of a book publisher in Tokyo, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a Japanese musician who reshaped the way the world understood electronic sound. Most know him in one of three ways: as the Oscar-winning composer of The Last Emperor; as a co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the band that helped invent techno-pop in the late 1970s; or as the haunting voice behind films like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Revenant.

But Sakamoto was far more than any single musical achievement. Beyond his music, he pushed boundaries toward what kindness and conscience could accomplish. A lifelong anti-capitalist navigating a commercialized world, Sakamoto remained committed to the role of art as a social and political vehicle, wielding capitalism’s own tools to amplify messages that defied its principles, turning even mainstream platforms into vessels for questioning and resistance. He gave his voice and resources to social and environmental causes: he founded the More Trees project for reforestation, co-created AP Bank to support renewable energy, and led global initiatives like Zero Landmine to clear the scars of war. After the 2011 earthquake, he organized the No Nukes concerts and helped form the Tohoku Youth Orchestra, believing children could rebuild their lives through music. He also spoke out against reckless urban development and challenged copyright laws that treated culture as commodity rather than community.

I have seen Sakamoto’s live presentations in Tokyo, Osaka, New York City, and São Paulo, and I wish I could have thanked him in person for what his generosity as a human being and artist has made me realize — that art can guide you home even when home feels out of reach, and its truest gift lies not in what it says but in how it teaches us to listen; that art is also the quiet shared, memory carried, and humanity revealed. And, perhaps, trying to make sense of all this prompted me to write this lengthy essay to trace, however imperfectly, the outlines of someone whose music reshaped silence within me.

If Sakamoto’s work has ever touched you — whether in a film score, a piano phrase, or in the quiet between sounds — I’d love to know which moment has stayed with you. What begins as something deeply personal often becomes unexpectedly collective, and, possibly, that is the truest tribute an artist like Ryuichi Sakamoto can receive.

Video credits:

* Video 1 - Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Ryuichi Sakamoto Trio, by VINCERO 빈체로

* Video 2 - Ryuichi Sakamoto & Morelenbaum² Casa Interview, by werdse12

* Video 3 - Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, analysis by Queer Plus Lotus

* Video 4 - Theme from The Sheltering Sky, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Opus Official Teaser (2023), by RyuichiSakamoto

* Video 5 - Ryuchi Sakamoto’s message + Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, by commmons

* Video 6 - Interview with Ryuichi Sakamoto (2012), by playonbarcelona

* Video 7 - Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda | Official Trailer, by mubi

Audio credits:

* Audio 1 - Kajitsu Playlist, by nytimes

* Audio 2 - “As Ryuichi Sakamoto returns with ‘12,’ fellow artists recall his impact” | NPR - All Things Considered - produced by Elizabeth Blair, edited by Rose Friedman and mixed by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.

Ele diz:

você não gosta de mim,

você gosta da minha música.

Ela, em seu silêncio, nada contesta —

não consegue,

está demasiadamente encantada por ele,

ali, à sua frente, para discutir bobagens.

Seguem os dois,

um a compor acordes; o outro, versos espelhados em recortes.

No carrossel do tempo, as estações avançam...

E o fio invisível da vida

— na terra distante do Sol Nascente —

a entrelaçar pontos e costuras,

faz cruzar caminhos,

embora separados

por alvoradas e crepúsculos

de um céu compartilhado,

entre coincidências e sentimentos

ainda não traduzidos.

Ele, o panda-sapo mais bonito; ela, céu afora

a dançar-voo passarinho,

depois, menina-mulher a voltar ao ninho.