Coded Dreams
The Algorithm Speaks Portuguese: Digital Colonialism in the Age of TikTok
How Lusophone Africa's Cultural Export Fuels Global Platforms While Creators Remain Economically Marginalized.
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Ancestral Echoes
Mascot of the Apocalypse: Backward Feet, Forward Lies
Curupira was never meant to be cute. Why climate summits love Indigenous symbols but ignore Indigenous sovereignty.
Sonic Cartographies
Audible Economies: Soundtrack da Quebrada
A cultural history of Brazil’s mobile street vendors and the sounds that shape neighborhood identity.
Street Syntax
Blessed by Bullets and Bibles: Narco-Pentecostalism on the rise
In Rio's favelas, AK-47s and prayer books go hand in hand as a new breed of narco-evangelicals rewrites the rules of crime and faith
Ancestral Echoes
The Art of Patience: Slow Food, Wild Walks, and a Life in Ferment
Whether in a jar or along a trail, Fermen.table is cultivating more than taste—it’s restoring a rhythm that modern life has forgotten: slow, local, and quietly alive.
Diaspora Aesthetics
The Hair Map: Weaving Identity in Salons from Luanda to Lisbon
In Afro-diasporic communities across the Lusophone world, the act of hair care carries the weight of memory, resistance, and identity.
System Hacks
Entartete Farben — The Degenerate Color Panic Reaches the Seleção
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, then as sportswear regulation.
Street Syntax
Not Your Novinha: The Rights of Girls Silenced by Catorze
Some numbers hide entire societies behind them. In Brazil’s urban peripheries, 14 is one such number. Whispered in memes, muttered in funk lyrics, etched into the margins of conversation, it is neither neutral nor innocent.
Shifting Grounds
A Man with a Shovel: The Trees That Hélio Built
One man’s quiet campaign to reforest São Paulo, tree by tree.
Random Urgencies
From Sugar Plantations to Server Farms: Big Tech's Colonial Playbook
Cloud colonialism is extracting data and labor from the Global South to power AI systems that enrich Silicon Valley—and the Portuguese-speaking world is ground zero.
System Hacks
Carnival or Coup? How Spectacle Masks Political Rot in Brazil and Beyond
From Lava Jato to Bolsonaro, the line between theatre and tyranny grows dangerously thin.
Street Syntax
The Glyph Code: When Cities Use AI to See Their Scars
Can a machine decode urban rebellion—or only erase it faster?