Google Translate got better and better overtime and had a short window of being brilliant, before getting, one assumes, AI slopified, and coming up with stuff like this - (the word I'd googled was "muchacho")

Turkoslavia is a brilliant US-based translation project, and I'm delighted to see my good friend Vilis Kasims in the new issue with a typically fractured take on '90s Latvia - along with a note from me explaining why he's such an interesting writer exchanges.uiowa.edu/turkoslavia-...

JOMAJO!!!! Mums ir 25 % Latvijas filmu apmeklējuma īpatsvars kopējā kino apmeklējumā! Tā nav bijis pat 2018. gadā, kad tas bija 22%. 1/4 cineuropa.org/en/newsdetai...

Tell you who we don’t hear from so much any more. People who told us Brexit will be fine because “we’ll just forge a closer relationship with the United States”.

It used to be said that the left was far too 'online', but it seems that this is increasingly (more) so for the right nowadays.

#NowPlaying Thanks to @iammilliam.bsky.social for insisting I track down a Mono copy of this. £25 inc postage and sounding glorious.

The things that have underpinned the UK's foreign policy are in tatters. What are the alternative routes being discussed and how viable are any of them?

👇 Agree with this. There’s a somewhat pernicious “we haven’t presented the British public with this trade-off in plain language but we are going to act as if we have and they have Decided To Be Irresolute”.

This opens up wider questions about how far the UK and Canada in the 5 eyes intel sharing framework as well as other former allies of the United States can still provide the Americans with any sensitive intelligence information at all

These so-called "patriotic" 🇬🇧newspapers who brought you Brexit were never really patriotic at all. They are driven by a disdain for Britain's European neighbours, and a fawning obsession with America. They do not really want 🇬🇧 to be sovereign. They're content being a 🇺🇸vassal.

Where is the accountability for utter wrongness?

Watching GB News or reading the Telegraph you realise there is a slice of right-wing opinion that would happily betray this country.

I think the White House badly underestimates the strength of the pan-European folk memory of 1930s appeasement, and how deep it still cuts. I suppose this is what happens when you learn in school that WW2 started in 1941 in Hawaii.

Maybe we can, oh I dunno, start to have a conversation with voters about this? The problem is not going to go away.

Mortena ieteiktais raksts no EE ir diezgan interesants. "Many experts initially believed LV had the best prospects for success thanks to its infrastructure, ports and Riga.But the country quickly sank into corruption, overly cautious reforms and dependence on RU transit." news.err.ee/1609779081/t...

To paraphrase Orwell, this was bad and was not any less bad because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about it when it is 10 years too late www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01...

Sanctions are hurting: Russia just had its worst monthly oil and gas revenue since the start of the full-scale war (relative to GDP). In nominal rubles, only January 2023 was worse.

Interesting piece from a couple of months ago, about something that's become increasingly apparent in recent years - that Lithuania, historically the poorest Baltic state, is on the path to economically overtaking much-vaunted Estonia news.err.ee/1609779081/t...

Bluesky draugi, esat laipni aicināti ņemt dalību šajā priecīgajā notikumā!

Finding the reactions to this bleakly funny. Lads, the point isn’t that you are sending enough people to “win”, because we in fact, can’t win. It is just to have a tripwire! If you are going “why not 13, like Germany?” you have not understood how bad things are.

Three of Latvia's Finnic languages – Courland Livonian, Salaca Livonian, Lutsi South Estonian – have developed popular written forms. Read about these orthographies, their development, and how they changed as these communities changed in my recently published article. tinyurl.com/latviaonthea...

A protest rally in Chicago in 1988 against the Soviet occupation of Lithuania (Image: Romualdas Požerskis, MO Museum Collection) deepbaltic.com/2025/12/19/a...

Always inevitable that UK commitment to Ukraine would reopen the defence spending debate (as I wrote in today’s Morning Call). #PMQs www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

"Even Hel has frozen over" 11/10 no notes, Notes from Poland.

Guest on Latvijas Radio 1 this morning compares Trump's threats to Greenland to if Latvia declared it was forcibly taking the tiny island of Ruhnu in the Gulf of Riga (which opted to join Estonia in 1919)

The Rochdale Canal at Hebden Bridge in January 2010. It is a 32-mile broad waterway and crosses the Pennines between Manchester and Sowerby Bridge. It was the first of three trans-Pennine canals to be completed, opening in 1804 to facilitate trade during the Industrial Revolution. It originally

Just remembered this particularly baffling front page

Latvia PM says Baltic Sea optical cable has been damaged reut.rs/4aDINaF

Par kabeļa bojājumu jūrā pie Liepājas sākts kriminālprocess un identificēts kuģis https://www.leta.lv/home/important/DFD94610-24EF-4FA5-9F56-AB7BB6E485AB/

Whenever Trump does something crazy, people try to rationalize it. Now, they're saying it was Venezuela's "heavy, sour crude" that made him kidnap Maduro. I think the truth is much scarier and less strategic: He simply enjoys the feeling of power and humiliating his opponents.

century of IR humiliation

As we might see now with Venezuela, more often than not America's strategic fiascos start after the US armed forces deliver an initial conventional military victory

Rise of Reform is both a symptom & a cause a rising minority fearing divisions in Britain are insurmountable. Two-thirds of those voting for other parties tend to think more unites than divides, but a slim majority of Reform voters disagree. Could drive an increase on the other pole, eg Green

You wouldn’t stand up in a cinema a shout: “I know where that was filmed!” It would be filthy manners. Please don’t do this is Hookland. We respect the fourth wall in the county. My DMs are open if anyone wants ask where a picture was taken. Replies publicly breaking the fourth wall will be hidden.

"What unfolded overnight in Venezuela will cause immediate anxiety to governments like Iran and Denmark" www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

‘It has become difficult to live’: Hungarian writers bemoan country’s hostile environment

Early 2000s in Tallinn, two drunken Swedish guys invited hubby and me along to the Depeche Mode Bar. None of their songs were being played that night, so one Swede enquired why. The bartender: I’m sick of playing Depeche Mode! The Swede: Why did we even come here, we’re such stupid Swedes!

"If you come from a city where politeness is announced loudly – “Please move down the carriage!”, “Let the passengers off first!” – Riga’s tram etiquette can seem almost too quiet." deepbaltic.com/2025/12/17/t...

Come on, ‘The Mancunian Candidate’ was right there.

“But who were they seeking protection from, exactly? As the months that followed would show, more or less everyone.”

As almost the end of the year, will re-share my favourite piece I worked on in 2025 (and one of my favourites ever) - the stubborn Lithuanian village that maintained its independence amid general chaos, and tangled with multiple armies while doing so meduza.io/en/feature/2...

Rima Praspaliauskienė grew up with stereotypes about the Lithuanian community in the US, but found herself beguiled after a move stateside There she found out that some American Lithuanians had stereotypes about her too (a Tarybukė - or "little Soviet") deepbaltic.com/2025/12/19/a...

"For newcomers from cultures where hospitality is expressed with overt enthusiasm, this can feel distant at first." Istanbul-based writer Ersun Augustinus Kayra considers the quiet forms of everyday courtesy that keep Latvia's capital running. deepbaltic.com/2025/12/17/t...

The default response of Europeans to any crisis of tumbling into a neurotic miasma of self-doubt is not going to help much when the America Crisis that Trump has unleashed plunges the United States into chaos

Jaunākā aptauja apstiprina iepriekšējo. NA ar Stambulas konvenciju pamatīgi iešāva sev kājā. No 9.7% vasarā uz 5.6% novembrī. Cieti. www.lsm.lv/raksts/zinas...

One Russian paper today: ““We will not agree to a truce because we need the capitulation of Ukraine.” Meanwhile: “Nearly 60% of Russian regions have a hole in their budgets of over 600 billion roubles, almost 11 times more than in 2022.” #ReadingRussia

fuck Courland

Courland's relentless empire-building is infamous.