Black-and-white photograph of an elderly bearded man in a light jacket seated at a table with a microscope and test tubes.

Books · Observations · Science

On the idea that Europeans have a long old age rather than a long life

Academician Mechnikov wrote in "Essays on Optimism":. Europeans do not have a long life, only a long old age. When you are no longer fit for anything, and yet still alive

Architecture · Moscow · Museums · Observations · Science · Paris

The Paris Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology compared with the Fersman Museum

Yes, my favourite museum in Moscow is still the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in Neskuchny Garden. Let us compare it with the Galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, which occupies a building of somewhat grander proportions, yet looks almost like the Fersman Museum. The

Art · Education · Society · People · Humour

The Best So Far on the Subject

The young Napoleon Bonaparte at his studies in Brienne (Jean Onfroy de Bréville, 1910). And the not-so-young Trump, who long ago stopped learning anything new.

NB! · Observations · Society · Humour

And that is before he has seen the new fares

Architecture · Faith · Art · Museums · Society · Paris

Digest of channel posts from the first two weeks of February on Paris, culture and history

A guide to the posts published on the channel in the first two weeks of February. Besides a great many posts about Paris, there was cultural news, surveys of social problems and astonishing stories from the past. 📌 The story of Saint Plautilla, who handed her veil to the Apostle Paul

NB! · Books · Mores · People

Thomas Mann and His Poodle Niko

NB! · Archive · Mores · Pop Culture

Harper’s Bazar, 19 February 1870

Black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman standing at a window of a richly carved, ornamented façade.

Architecture · Cinema · Observations

The film “A Room with a View” and a photograph of a couple at the window of an ornate façade

Two at a Window of the Doge's Palace in Venice. It put me in mind of the film A Room with a View. If you have not seen it, it is essential viewing, a jewel in the golden fund of world cinema.

NB! · Nature · Humour

How Many Times Must It Be Said: Snails Do Not Carry the Plague!

NB! · Cinema · Monarchies · People

Stills from the film version of the Vakhtangov Theatre's production “Paul I”, about the complex and enigmatic life of the Emperor, which holds a great many secrets, with Alexander Oleshko in the title role

Moscow · Science · Education · Palaeontology

Terms from the chorus of a palaeontological song by Moscow students of the 1950s

Student, step out faster, for oysters wait for us in the field, and the Jurassic ammonite waits for us in the field, the Vraconian belemnite, the Lutetian nummulite. The opening of a palaeontological song composed by students of the Moscow Institute of Geological Prospecting named after Ordzhonikidze in the 1950s.

NB! · Cinema · Pop Culture · Humour

Let us speak of how Peter Jackson introduced into the plot a middle-management orc who kept arguing with Saruman about the realism of the output targets at the orc factory

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