Archive · Art · People · Humour

Frida Kahlo in the 1933 press as Diego Rivera's wife and amateur artist

The muralist's wife amuses herself with works of art. Can you imagine that this might have been written about Frida Kahlo? An unexpected mention of Frida in the press of 1933, in the column "Visiting Interesting People", and visiting not her at all, but her husband,

NB! · Archive · Books · Observations · Humour

An insert in the collected works of Stalin asking that the book bearing this personal label be returned should any defect be found in it

An insert in the collected works of Stalin asking that the book bearing this personal label be returned should any defect be found in it. One does not, of course, envy the inspector after whose check a flaw or error turns up in a book by Stalin. Oh, one does

Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Science

nplus1 reports that Italian archaeologists have discovered in the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence six previously unrecorded cardboard boxes and wooden crates containing more than 150 bone fragments, including the remains of two infant

nplus1 reports that Italian archaeologists have discovered in the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence six previously unrecorded cardboard boxes and wooden crates containing more than 150 bone fragments, including the remains of two infants. It turned out that they had been excavated as long ago as the

A painting from 1937–1939 in a frame on a dark museum wall: workers assemble a large metal tank in a factory hall.

NB! · Coming Up · Moscow · Museums · Observations

Exhibition marking the centenary of the GOELRO plan at the Museum of Moscow

It is a hundred years since our country was blessed with electricity, GOELRO-style. The exhibition is about just that. Everyone to the Museum of Moscow

NB! · Archive · In the Press · Science · Nature

One might consider it a prophecy of catastrophic climate change from 1912 come true, although humanity has pushed nature to the brink of existence and extinction not over centuries, as the futurologists of a century ago supposed, but in merely…

A fallen oak lies on the ground, its split trunk with a broken root end and moss-covered bark set against green foliage.

NB! · Observations · Nature · Saint Petersburg

The oldest oak, aged 160 years, falls in the botanical garden of Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg Live reports that the oldest oak in the botanical garden has fallen. The 160-year-old tree, with a crown 24 metres across and a height of 18 metres, which had witnessed the abolition of serfdom, could not survive climate change, or, quite as likely, a fungal disease.

Archive · Society

Copying archival files oneself was formally permitted as long ago as 2016, when the Supreme Court declared this restriction on archive visitors unlawful

Copying archival files oneself was formally permitted as long ago as 2016, when the Supreme Court declared this restriction on archive visitors unlawful. A copy of a page could cost five hundred roubles, and this was a weighty concession, finally adopted by Rosarkhiv last year, albeit with the proviso that

NB! · Observations · Humour

Oh, if only Karl Marx really were nothing more than the name of a luxury brand

Living room in a wooden house: a corner sofa and armchair in floral covers with red cushions, a dining table with chairs, a round crocheted rug and a chandelier with red shades.

NB!

Living room interior of a log house with a floral-upholstered sofa

Architecture · Faith · Observations · Mores

A Moscow family bought a 1908 log house in Tarusa and opened a café in the yard

A touching piece about how a young family left Moscow, buying in Tarusa an izba of 1908 that was once a dependency of the Holy Trinity Convent community. The house was sold by the elderly granddaughters of its first owner, who chose these buyers precisely because they were the only

Archive · Mores · New York · People

Big Edie and Little Edie, Queens of Self-Isolation, 1975

Retired society divas Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale at their estate, Grey Gardens, where they lived in complete seclusion for many years

Observations · Society · Humour

If we are to speak seriously of the meme "in the USSR bread was bread, the crusts were tasty and the crumb heavenly, that's what Canadian wheat does for you", then the Soviet Union began buying wheat from Western countries as early as 1963, a year that wa

Nature sent a drought, and the government, as luck would have it, chose that very moment for another piece of folly. Instead of wheat they sowed maize and fodder crops, to feed the livestock that had been taken from private households since 1959; the cultivation of the virgin lands faltered;

Alexandr Radayev