I kept wondering why there were so many references to Romanian immigrants in recent Spanish literature. And then I discovered the following information:

The top three immigrant groups in the EU are Turkish
(2.4 million), Moroccan (1.7 million), and Romanian (1.6 million).

Does anybody know why Romanians emigrate in such large numbers and not, say, Ukrainians, Poles, Slovenians, etc.?

I’ve been trying to understand the concept of corporatism, but I’m kind of stuck. I’m good on the differences between fascist and liberal corporatism but what I don’t get is why corporatism is “a system of permanent, structured inequality.” This always is mentioned as a given but I’m not getting what is especially unequal about corporatism that is not present in the alternatives. I also am not sure what the alternatives are.

Does anybody know anything about this? Please don’t give me links, though. All I want is a simple short explanation for dummies. What do you associate with the word “corporatism”?

My father told me over Skype that political freedom is starting to be felt in Cuba. I asked him what he was referring to.

“Animators are dancing in very frivolous ways,” he said. “Patriotism is dead, and all people care about is money.”

I’m not as opposed as many of my colleagues to using translation in language teaching, so I asked students to translate a few paragraphs from Benjamin Prado’s 2013 novel Ajuste de cuentas. One of the sentences is:

Money works like an axe that splits society in two. On the one side, there are those who have it and on the other, those who dream of having it.

One student came up with the following translation:

Money is an axe that splits society in two: the right-wingers who have money and the left-wingers who want to have it but can only keep fantasizing about it.

A 16-year-old boy walked into his school in Moscow with a rifle and started shooting. He only had a small-caliber weapon so the number of people he killed is limited to 2. The description of the killer and his history of behavior reads like a translation from an article about the Columbine.

People who keep repeating that kids shooting up schools is a uniquely American phenomenon are idiots. This is something likely to happen anywhere where there are kids with an easy access to guns. The stronger is the tradition of socially approved child abuse in a country, the more likely it is to happen.

What is really funny in this tragic story is that now crowds of people in Russia are vociferating that they need to get armed ASAP to protect themselves from killers.

Sometimes there are cultural differences, but then sometimes there aren’t.