Along the Motlawa River I spent a few days in northern Poland between Christmas and New Year. I don’t have time to write it up properly thanks to a flurry of podcast recording and work on a new book, but I want to give you a few brief impressions. Perhaps it will inspire a trip of your own. I blew a big chunk of my savings on a series of long flights in November, so travel options were limited...
Pamela Petro Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient. The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable term...
Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer’s history of East Germany changed the way I look at the late twentieth century word I grew up in, and put a human face on the other side of the Cold War. Eighties movies and television portrayed it as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency — and it was widely militarized, watched over by the Stasi and by a nervous...