So autumn has passed, as though it had never been. A digest of the most interesting posts of November for cosy reading:

📌 For the youngest alchemists of the channel: three magical alphabets

📌 In the Parnassian Mockingbird rubric: a review of Guillermo del Toro's new “Frankenstein”

📌 I tell the story of the recovered jewels of the Habsburg dynasty

📌 In half a century California has built 22 prisons and 1 university; we draw our conclusions

📌 POV: you are in Sochi, but you neither gamble in casinos nor ski

📌 The state of affairs with book thefts in Europe

📌 Who the kolbyags were, and why the word deserves to be brought back into use

📌 An analysis of American political technology, using the new mayor of New York as an example

📌 Brezhnev's touching recollections of his mother

📌 And the sun dims and dims. A retrospective of the “Great Soviet Solar Eclipse”

📌 The story of one d@g

📌 How the Russian Cossacks liberated Amsterdam.