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When the beans won’t cook
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I’m futzing around the kitchen, heat-wave grumpy. I’m cooking white beans with tomatoes for dinner; I soaked the dried beans overnight, but they are a little too old, too long…
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A forest
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The weather has been chaotic enough in the Baltics to produce perfect conditions for forests to offer their annual gifts: berries, mushrooms, all sorts of plants, accompanied by a bunch…
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Mothers who don’t feel so motherly
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Last week, I wrote about Nebraska, a novel in which a mother pushes her handicapped child in front of a train. This week I’m reviewing an only slightly less murderous non-fiction book…
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Odysseus and the global wars veterans
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Somewhere near Chasiv Yar, along the « fortress belt » in the Donetsk region, Serhii Krynitskyi, a Ukrainian soldier, crawls out of the dugout that he has been holding for the last…
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Mrs. Chatterjee’s children
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The novel’s grisly premise hits you on the opening pages: Anna Chatterjee’s husband and two surviving children are journeying to the upstate New York prison where Anna is scheduled for…
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The cartography of everything wrong
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So there I am, in a museum in a town that in 150 years has evolved from a community of farmers to an artists’ colony, then to a posh village,…
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Meadows are the best
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My best friend in Brussels told me he never used the word meadow before he met me. And one of my fellow editors believes the ultimate form of tea is one that…
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The persistence of William Morris
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The idea for a workshop on « the university of Nowhere », where researchers and staff would conceive and describe a utopian university, came about after some accidental re-encounters with William Morris,…
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The many different faces of the shortest night
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This week, Latvians went into the wild. The longest day of the year fell on a weekend (21 June), and Līgo nakts / Jāņi — known as St John’s elsewhere…
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Carlo Ginzburg: They are the Dogs of God
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I needed to know more about werewolves. Carlo Ginzburg, I realized, was my man. Ginzburg is an Italian historian who practises what’s described as « microhistory » — in his case,…
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Orford Ness
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We stepped off the ferry — an open motorboat, with room for twelve passengers — onto the dock. We’d come for a day’s outing to Orford Ness on the Suffolk…
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The Footnotes
| Published in
The ERB is reading the 2026 World Cup and offering daily dispatches, in collaboration with Hazar Deniz Eker and Sander Pleij (one is losing his belief in football, and the…