Faith · Art · London
Christ in the Carpenter's Shop. John Everett Millais, 1850. The young Jesus Christ has hurt his palm on a nail sticking out of a door and shows the wound, at the place of the future stigmata, to the Virgin Mary. I am the door: by me if any
Observations · Education · Society
Social studies has no disciplinary core. Physics quite literally explains how the world is put together, why the lightbulb burns and why the water stands heaped above the rim of the glass. Mathematics teaches one to think rigorously and to bestir one's wits. History supplies context. And social
Architecture · Observations · Humour
Design by Carolina Moscoso
Archive · Books · Society
Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. As Zinaida Gippius wrote: Our grandfathers' impossible dream, The sacrifice of our heroes in their prison cells, Our prayer on timid lips, Our hope and our sigh: The Constituent Assembly, What have we done with it...? Literal translation
Faith · Art · Humour
The Virgin Mary crushes the devil while an angel holds the infant Jesus. A reminder to one and all that the Mother of God will come and restore order
Archaeology · Faith · The East · Monarchies · Rome
In AD 217 the Praetorians murdered the Emperor Caracalla at Edessa. The Praetorian Guard were the emperors' personal bodyguard, elite troops stationed in Rome itself. Over two centuries they had dispatched more than one ruler and had grown used to deciding who would come next. Power passed to the
Faith · Books · Observations
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends
Cinema · Books · Observations · Education · Society
From 2026 all universities in South Korea will be obliged to take records of school bullying into account at admission. Previously this was voluntary; now it is compulsory: an applicant with a record of violence in his school file has his score reduced or is simply turned away. In 2025
Archive · Museums · Mores · People
It was taken by Pyotr Ivanovich Vedenisov in Yalta in the 1910s, using the technology of the Lumière brothers. Pyotr Vedenisov graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire in 1888, moved to Yalta and spent the rest of his life there as a pianist, local historian, meteorologist and amateur photographer with a
Books · Observations · Humour
You lot might want to check that. Garage did not publish one and a half million books, however tempting it is to dazzle with handsome figures. What it did was print one and a half million copies of some fixed number of titles, I don't know, perhaps 100
Archive · Geography · Maps · Moscow
In 1618 an engraving with a view of Moscow appeared in the six-volume atlas of the cities of the world, Civitates Orbis Terrarum. The atlas was compiled by the Cologne priest Georg Braun, beginning in 1572, and this was already the second map of Moscow in the edition. A
Architecture · Moscow · Education · People
Among the Moscow state gymnasia, the Fourth stood in a class of its own. It was a classical school of the highest rank, with Latin and Greek, and with the right of direct entry to Moscow University. Its teachers were men of uncommon gifts: the physicist Kraevich, whose textbook outlived