NB! · Cinema · Saint Petersburg · Society Pages · Humour
Emir Kusturica Spotted at SPIEF
Emir Kusturica has been spotted at SPIEF. As the saying goes, if nobody catches cold, then everything will most certainly come to pass.
Alexandr Radayev
Faith · Art · Society
The United States Has Its Own Heavenly Patroness, and She Is Our Lady Immaculate, or the Virgin Mary Immaculata
The American bishops proclaimed her patroness of the country in May 1846, eight years before the Vatican made the Immaculate Conception a dogma. The Immaculate Conception is one of the most widely reproduced images in Western art: a maiden in white and blue, a crescent moon beneath her feet, twelve
Archaeology · Geography · Heritage · Science
Chinese porcelain raised by robot from a sunken northern ship of the late Baroque era
In the Skagerrak off the coast of Norway, at a depth of some 600 metres, an eighteenth-century merchant ship has been found almost intact. Usually a shipwreck leaves behind little but potsherds, yet here whole stacks of well-preserved tableware lie on the seabed, and alongside the plates and
Books · Observations · Society
The open letter from Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky to today's public appeals
Ivan the Terrible and Kurbsky exchanged "letters" that were not a correspondence but a literary duel, staged for the public and meant for the judgement of posterity. Both understood that they would be read far beyond the Lithuanian border. The open letter is a genre with a catch.
Archaeology · Science · Humour
While some look for traces of extraterrestrials in ancient monuments, others are establishing what ordinary mortals were capable of
While some look for traces of extraterrestrials in ancient monuments, others are establishing what ordinary mortals were capable of. A new study deals with the Altar Stone of Stonehenge, a six-tonne sandstone slab at the centre of the circle. The stone hails from the north-east of Scotland, from
Coming Up · Art · London · Museums · New York · Paris
Kahlo, Renoir, Raphael and Duchamp among nine summer exhibitions in London, Paris and New York
If your holiday happens to land you in one of the three art capitals, here are three exhibitions for each, worth carving out half a day for. London 🎨 Frida: The Making of an Icon. Tate Modern, from 22 June. More than 130 works by Frida Kahlo and a separate strand
Faith · People · Pop Culture · Rome
Pope Robert Prevost plays tennis weekly, and Jannik Sinner visited him at the Vatican
Pope Leo XIV makes time for tennis every week and explains it by the Augustinian tradition of caring for body and spirit: the Rule of Saint Augustine values good habits. Robert Prevost, while still a cardinal, admitted that he considered himself "quite the amateur" on the court, and
Archive · Faith · New York · People · Humour
The 1996 baseball photo shows papal lookalike Gene Greytak, not John Paul II
Like this photo of John Paul II playing baseball during his visit to the US? John Paul II really was a sportsman, and a keen one, but he did not play baseball, and that is not him in the photo. The picture is genuine, but it shows Gene Greytak, an
Archive · Faith · Humour
Alpine skiing in the lives of John Paul II and Patriarch Kirill
Patriarch Kirill on skis in Switzerland in 1971 and Pope John Paul II on skis in northern Italy in 1984. The heads of the largest churches are bound together by snow. John Paul II skied all his life: first in Poland, in the Tatras, and then, having become pope, he
NB! · Archive · People · Ethnography
Gathering flax seed at Kimry in the 1930s, photograph by Leonid Shokin
NB!
Black-and-white photograph in a black frame on a dark gallery wall
Coming Up · Art · Moscow · Museums · People
"Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" has eclipsed the legacy of Vera Mukhina, and that injustice is at last being put right
"Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" has eclipsed the legacy of Vera Mukhina, and that injustice is at last being put right. From 3 June to 27 September the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Art on Delegatskaya Street is showing a large retrospective of the work of the world-famous