Don't know about you, but I'm still (very) occasionally typing 2025 instead of 2026. Guess last year is still trying to haunt me ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’ — A former insider looks back at their time as a member of the upstart Spanish political party and analyzes how it went from showing so much promise in its early days to coming apart and morphing into a shadow (if not a parody) of its original self.

From the article:

We also hadn’t clocked how our base was changing. The initial strength of Podemos was that it brought hundreds of thousands of people out of apathy, and even attracted supporters in other countries. But by the 2020s, the major experience of working in Podemos was of dwindling political debate and growing internal paranoia.

In Defence of Cliché — One wordsmith describes how they went from crafting advertising copy to penning what some people would consider more serious prose, then to straddling the gap between those stylistic worlds. It just goes to show that some types of writing can be complementary, no matter how different they may seem.

From the article:

While it’s helpful to see the two writing styles as different and separate (just as academic writing is), I do believe that, at their core, creative writing and copywriting share many fundamentals. Arguably, the goal in both is to sell: as a novelist or poet, you’re selling a world, a character, a concept for a reader to buy into, not unlike how a commercial sells a product. The writing must be coherent in order to achieve its goals. Creative flair or emotional insight can take a piece from successful to exceptional.

The triumph of logical English — A long and detailed analysis of how English prose evolved and became easier to read. What's interesting is the writer's contention that longer sentences can be as easy to read as shorter ones, and if constructed properly those longer sentences can be joys to read.

From the article:

The miracle of modern English is not shortness or simplicity, per se, but that it allows us to do almost anything: syntax can swell to great length or be concise and taut; it has room for ornate vocabulary and simple language; it is a structure that allows us to build many forms of expression. It gives us Shakespeare and Locke, Milton and Darwin. It is the language of poets but also of economists and YouTube commentators.

The Myth of the ‘Dark Ages’ Ignores How Classical Traditions Flourished Around the World — Turning a persistent narrative on its head, Naoíse Mac Sweeney argues that during the historical period in which we've been taught that European civilization was constantly on the brink of collapse there was a lot of intellectual and cultural cross pollination between West and East.

From the article:

The bloodline that we think of as Western did not flow in a single channel from Greece to Rome and from there to Western Europe. Instead, it sprayed rather chaotically in all directions, carrying the cultural inheritance of Greek and Roman antiquity to all four points of the compass.