Lawyers are a clever lot, they can stick to the letter of the law when it suits them and jump into interpretation when it doesn’t. How long should the meaning of “forthwith” be debated when the author of that particular clause, Adolfo Azcuna, has already clarified...

Last week, I “met” Letizia Roxas Constantino in her Quezon City home. While I missed meeting her in person (she passed away in 2016), I “met” her through a lovingly curated exhibit of her writings set up for her 105th birthday last April. To describe the exhibit as...

WHEN people marvel at my modest Filipiniana collection, I advise them that it is never too late to start. One need not rob a bank to collect things. As a boy, I started with things around me, from leaves in our garden to shells on a beach. Trash to someone was a...

Time waits for no one. If time does not stop, can we really save time, or waste it? The pandemic lockdown made me value time, flowing like a stream of water through my fingers, reminding me of Apolinario Mabini, who was exiled to Guam from January 1901 to February...

A year ago, when the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom was being discussed and debated, I argued for its use. I was naive to liken AI to the calculator on our smartphones, believing AI was not the enemy, it was a tool that saves us the heavy lifting...

My students find me weird because in the age of Google and Waze, I continue to be intrigued by physical maps of the Philippines. I am often asked to explain my fascination with early maps—from the late 16th to the early 17th centuries—when the geographic information...

What more can one say or show about Fernando Amorsolo, the first National Artist of the Philippines, that deserves a second look? I thought the answer to my question was—nothing. Then I saw photos of people at the current Ayala Museum exhibition, “Amorsolo: Chroma.”...

The first documented sighting of a Filipino by a pope was at the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome on April 7, 1869. During the feast of the Annunciation, Fr. Faustino Villafranca, a visiting priest from Manila, was presented to Pope Pius IX, who...

I had my first taste of elections in the grade school classroom. We wrote out the ballots, the teacher read the names aloud, and classmates made a tally on the blackboard. No election protests. Fast-forward to last Sunday in Barangay Urdaneta, Makati: I shaded circles...

When the former “UniTeam” went their separate ways, I could not help but think of similar splits in Philippine history. In 1897, Katipunan leaders met to iron out issues between the Magdalo and Magdiwang, but ended up holding a snap election for a revolutionary...