Latitude 59

Every year, on the first Friday between June 19 and 25, Sweden stops. People leave the cities, head to the countryside, decorate a flower-covered pole, crouch down in public parks singing songs about tailless frogs, and stay outside until the sun finally gives up and sets — sometime around eleven at night. This is Midsommar. I've lived through eleven of them. This year we celebrated at Skansen, th...

Some books find you when you're ready. This one found me during one of the hardest stretches of my life. The Fakir is a novel based on the life of yoga master Ramiro Calle — a man I had the chance to meet in Madrid. It's not a self-help book. It's a story about a tightrope walker, an ancient tradition, and a four-word instruction a father left his son: "Attain yourself." In this episode, I talk ab...

Sweden is famous for human rights, equality, and social progress. What's less known: for nearly 200 years, the Swedish crown financed slave expeditions, built a fort on the West African coast, administered a Caribbean colony with its own slavery code, and when it finally abolished the institution, compensated the slaveholders — not the enslaved. This isn't about guilt. It's about knowing the full...

I didn't choose most of these changes. They just arrived — quietly, over a decade of living somewhere that isn't your own country. I eat dinner at six. I plan everything. I get anxious in loud places. I have Swedish words my brain refuses to translate. In this episode, ten things Sweden did to me without asking permission — and what that says about what it actually means to adopt a country, not ju...

Every year on April 30th, Sweden lights massive bonfires. It's called Valborg. It started as a pagan ritual to mark the end of winter, later blended with the feast of Saint Walburga, and somehow survived centuries intact. In this episode, I reflect on what it feels like to watch that fire after eight months of cold and darkness — and why humans still need rituals that mark endings. Because without...

Something broke in the world of work after 2020. Companies got leaner, colder, and more ruthless. Employees got tired, detached, and quietly stopped believing. In this episode, I explore that silent tension: mass layoffs from profitable companies, the collapse of loyalty between employer and employee, and the deeper trap of building your identity around a job that can drop you overnight. Heraclitu...

In the final chapter of *Cosmos*, Carl Sagan describes a world where nuclear weapons hold billions hostage, where military secrecy shields decision-makers from accountability, and where no one has been elected to speak on behalf of the human species. He wrote it in the Cold War. It reads like today's headlines. In this episode, we sit with that question — and ask ourselves why, forty years later,...

Artificial intelligence is already part of how most of us work, learn, and create. In this episode I reflect on how I use AI to optimize tasks and move faster — and where I've started to worry about what gets lost in the process. What happens to your own voice when a tool can generate it for you? Where is the line between using AI as support and outsourcing your thinking entirely? I also look at t...

After returning to full-time work, I started noticing how little time we actually have for ourselves — not because time disappears, but because it gets taken, fragmented, and consumed before we can do anything with it. In this episode I reflect on the speed of modern life, the noise of technology, and the growing difficulty of keeping your own mind in order. Recorded alone in a dark forest near St...

Before the world existed, Norse mythology places only three things: fire in the south, ice in the north, and between them an infinite abyss called Ginnungagap. From the meeting of those two forces, the first life emerged — a primordial giant, a cosmic cow, and eventually Odin himself. In this episode I tell the Norse creation story from the beginning, drawing on the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda....

Swedish idioms follow a pattern you'll start noticing everywhere: two words, connected by "och" — and — creating a rhythm that's very specific to the language. But if nobody explains them, you'll hear them daily and still have no idea what people mean. In this episode I go through nineteen of the most common Swedish idioms, with their literal meaning, their real meaning, and an example sentence fo...

Two countries that couldn't look more different on paper: one in the frozen north, one stretching toward Patagonia. But dig a little into the history and something surprising emerges — a Swedish architect who shaped Argentina's capital, a poet who found his voice in the Argentine pampa, a 1903 Antarctic rescue that bound both nations together. In this episode I explore the unexpected threads conne...

If you're thinking about moving to Sweden, this episode is the one I wish someone had played for me before I packed my bags. After more than ten years living here, I can tell you that the biggest challenges are not the cold, the language, or the taxes — they're the ones nobody mentions upfront. In this episode I go through nine things you genuinely need to make life in Sweden work long term. Pract...

2025 was the hardest year I've had in a long time. I lost people I loved. I lost my job. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I found myself going back to a set of ideas — not mantras, not motivation, but real premises that helped me stay grounded without pretending everything was fine. In this episode I share eleven of them: from Stoic philosophy to Krishnamurti, from the ego to memento mori....

In 240 BC, a man in Alexandria read about a well in southern Egypt where the sun hit the bottom at noon on the solstice — meaning the sun was directly overhead. He wondered if the same would happen where he lived. It didn't. And from that single observation, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with an error of less than 0.2%. In this episode I tell the story of how he did it — a...

The Swedish job market looks fair and transparent from the outside. It's more complicated than that. In this episode I share ten practical things I've learned after more than a decade working in Sweden — from joining a union on day one to why tailoring your CV matters more than sending a hundred generic ones. No motivational fluff. Just honest, specific advice for anyone thinking about moving to S...

I left Argentina in 2002 during the crisis, thinking I'd return soon. I didn't. And the last time I went back, I felt like a tourist in my own city. In this episode I reflect on what it really means to return home — and why, after years of living abroad, the home you remember is not a place anymore. It's a version of yourself that no longer exists either. A personal episode about displacement, imp...

Everyone thinks they know what Swedish culture is. The minimalist design, the blonde hair, the welfare state. But after more than eleven years living here, I think it's something else entirely — it's in the silence in elevators, in the manager who makes his own coffee, in the unwritten rule that nobody shows off. In this episode I share what I actually see when I look at Swedish culture from the i...

Two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius with a warning that feels more relevant than ever: don't confuse self-improvement with self-promotion. The philosopher who walks around with dirty hair and a messy beard to signal his rejection of materialism is just performing — the opposite of what philosophy is for. In this episode I read and reflect on Seneca's fifth letter, which is...

Moving to Sweden from Spain wasn't just a change of address. It was a full recalibration of daily life. In this episode I go through 13 things that genuinely surprised me — from the silence in elevators to saunas followed by frozen lake dips, from darkness that lasts for months to summer nights where the sun never sets. Not a travel guide. An honest account of what it actually feels like to land i...

The cosmos is everything that was, is, and will be. And somewhere in that immensity — in a galaxy among hundreds of billions, orbiting a star among hundreds of billions more — there's a small blue planet where matter became alive and started asking questions. In this episode I reflect on the universe, our place in it, and what it means that we exist at all. Inspired by Carl Sagan's  Cosmos ,...

It started with anime on Argentine TV, then a classmate's Game Boy smuggled in from Japan before it even launched in America, then a little black book about a country that felt like another planet. In this episode I trace my lifelong obsession with Japan — from a Buenos Aires playground in 1989 to what I now know about the gap between Japan's image and its reality. A personal story about childhood...

Everyone has an opinion about Sweden. The suicides, the cold people, the perfect equality, the endless winter. Most of it is wrong — or at least far more complicated than the cliché. In this episode I go through the most repeated myths about Sweden, one by one, from the inside. Not as a tourist, not as a journalist, but as someone who's been living here long enough to know the difference between t...

Jiddu Krishnamurti said something that's hard to hear: war is not something that happens to us. It is us — the outward expression of our inner greed, our hunger for power, our need to belong to something bigger than ourselves. In this episode I explore his ideas on the psychological roots of war and why no leader, government, or army will ever end it. The revolution, if it ever comes, has to start...

Richard Vaughan built an empire out of a simple idea: Spanish people can learn English if someone actually commits to teaching them properly. What started as a one-man operation became one of the most recognizable language brands in Spain. In this episode I sit down with him to talk about language, obsession, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to learn — or teach — anything worth knowing....