This morning Joseph Horowitz sent me an article in The New York Times about who actually does a dictatorship's dirty work — not fanatics, but the mediocre and the passed-over. I have already seen this movie. I filmed its first act, on Super 8, in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1974.

A find from the research desk of The Lost Republic: a Havana inventory listing a Thorvaldsen, a Wappers, a Columbus given by Columbus's own heir — and what these works tell us about the artistic world into which the Cuban Republic was born.

Durante años me preguntaron dónde se podía ver. Hoy vuelve, completa, mi primer documental sobre un escritor: Soriano, el retrato del Gordo que la academia desdeñó y los lectores amaron. Una película que el tiempo convirtió en el archivo de toda una generación.

Haroldo Costa, who died in December at ninety-five, spent his life arguing that the samba school is the book of a country that reads little — and that the singer who carries its song is a griot, the keeper of a people's history. A tribute, built from his own voice on film.

Years ago Ilan Stavans sent me the most sacred sentence in Spanish, rewritten in Spanglish. Moving to Spain now, I still can't decide whether it's desecration or birth. After Bad Bunny's Super Bowl, was Stavans a precursor?