Archaeology · Faith · The East · Art · Books · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Science · Society · Nature
Marcus Aurelius advised retreating into oneself, for nowhere does a man withdraw more quietly. In the digest, for my part, I try to gather what has been published over the month while the memories are still fresh. So, the main things on the channel for August. The section on archaeology
Cinema · Moscow · Observations · Society · Nature · Humour
Dear Crocodile, we need you very much. We have a little river. Next to it there is a big chemical factory. It is spoiling the river, and soon there will be no river, only one big inkwell. We are writing to you because you are held in great esteem. Come
Archive · Science · People · Nature · Saint Petersburg
The physiologist Ivan Pavlov with his colleagues and students of the Military Medical Academy before a demonstration of experiments on the transmission of conditioned reflexes. Professor Georgy Konradi recalled that Ivan Petrovich had quite literally grown into one with the dog as an object of study, and that when demonstrating
Observations · Science · Society · Nature
I have already told in detail how the last Turan tiger of the Great Steppe was killed by hunters in the last century. In 2025 I wrote that the actual release of tigers into the wild of Kazakhstan was still a long way off, and now it has come to
Archive · People · Pop Culture · Nature
The lion tamer Irina Bugrimova with a lion in the early 1960s. Photograph by Semyon Mishin-Morgenstern. Irina Bugrimova was the first woman lion tamer in the USSR and a People's Artist of the Soviet Union. She was born on 13 March 1910 in Kharkiv, into the family
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage · Science · Paris · Nature · Saint Petersburg
Fet begged to “drive the living boat off with a single push”, to catch the fleeting before it vanishes. The monthly digest has a more modest task, though the same one: to hold on to what matters before the flood of news washes it away. Here is the main news
NB! · Books · Nature
Faith · Art · Nature
The sculpture Il Salvatore salvato, the Saved Saviour, carved from the trunk of a centuries-old olive tree that died of Pierce's disease. The crucifix stands on the Salento peninsula, in a burnt olive grove from which, shortly before the fire, the trunk of the dead ancient tree
NB! · Art · Observations · Nature · Humour
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Nature
In an article on how the inhabitants of southern Norway could make wooden fish traps at least seven thousand years ago, I came upon a suggestion that at about the same time people carried commercially valuable salmonids, namely brown trout, into mountain lakes. The hunter-fisher-gatherers, according to the
Archaeology · Art · Science · Nature
That Magdalenian art is not a random jumble of animal figures but a specially ordered structure is, on the whole, not a new idea. André Leroi-Gourhan wrote about it in the 1960s. He arranged the Stone Age herd around the horse and the bison. The scheme was discussed from
Geography · Science · Nature · Ethnography
In southern Brazil, on a high plateau in the coldest part of the country, an araucaria forest grows. The araucaria is a coniferous tree whose ancestors were alive in the days of the dinosaurs. The forest does not form a solid mass but is interspersed with grassy glades, onto which