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Category: Current Preoccupations
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The bar across the street
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Last week, I went every morning for breakfast to the perfect bar. You stood at the counter for your shot of coffee; the other customers all greeted the owner by…
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Shepherds of Europe!
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They’d put me on a float. It was midnight. A tractor hauled me and some twenty-five villagers into the woods. We were going to cut down a tree. I’d had…
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Gone woke
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Sitting at the border of Oostende’s North Sea coast is a Napoleon-era hippodrome – normally home to horses and 90’s nostalgia bands from the surrounding Flemish countryside – except for one…
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Interview with Sofia Wadensjö Karén
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Across Europe radical voices are growing and cultivated in bubbles. Left, right, surprising new populist combinations: public broadcasters try to guard neutrality amidst this playfield. In Sweden, no less exposed…
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Beyond Bedlam
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In August 1843, the English painter Richard Dadd stabbed his father to death. The Egyptian sun god Osirus told him to. Dadd, an ambitious and accomplished young artist, had returned…
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Project a black planet: the art and culture of pan-Africa
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, born in London in 1977, is one of the best British artists alive today. Enigmatic, mischievous, troubling, her work comprises rich, densely scrabbled Old Master-like oil portraits of…
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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…