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Category: Digital Library
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To what extent are we part of Mark Zuckerberg?
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I started reading « The future is for everyone; the path to a positive AI future », an essay by Mark Zuckerberg, the intellectual equal of Elon Musk, « We are fortunate…
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Cultural observation
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A friend of mine from Brussels visited me in Rīga last week. She had never been to this part of Europe before, so there was a lot of exploration to…
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Museum for one
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I have learned what artistic freedom is. It happened in a secret museum somewhere in Sweden. I had to wade through tall grass toward a windowless barn, painted in faluröd, the…
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Would you rather eat your friend or your enemy?
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This summer, when it’s been too hot to contemplate cooking any kind of meat, let alone human, Le Monde has been publishing a wonderful seven-part series on cannibalism by the science journalist…
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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,…