Mark Blondin
WRITER · PHOTOGRAPHER
Vila do Conde, PORTUGAL
"I left the US looking for a different vantage point. I found it."
I'm an American writer. Seven years without a fixed address — three continents, a long run of rented rooms — before I settled in Vila do Conde, on the coast north of Porto.
I write political essays and travel memoir. The essays go after how American systems actually run once you stop taking the official account on faith: the two-trillion-dollar business of managing American illness instead of ending it, the press that enshrined a pandemic model and went quiet when the facts arrived, the retirement system that froze in place and left the people inside it there. The travel writing is the other side of the same window — what the country looks like once you're outside it. I check the numbers. I name the names. Nothing gets a pass it hasn't earned.
Recent work has appeared in The Humanist; earlier work in HuffPost. I'm writing a book about the American medical-industrial complex and a memoir about the leaving.
New essays go up first at Material Witness, my newsletter. It's the best place to read me, and the only place to read me first.
Writing
Essays on political economy, public health, and the structures we're told not to look at too closely. Recent and forthcoming work below.
The Game of Holy Whispers — The Humanist, June 2026
THREE BODIES OF WORK
TRAVEL MEMOIR
Road to Mindelo
On arriving somewhere that refuses to be what you expected.
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POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Dissent
The official story is always missing something. Here's what gets left out.
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PHOTOGRAPHY
Witness
Three continents. One camera. The world as it looked.
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