An unexpectedly interesting, really good, long article about bortshch. It’s also about Ukraine and Russia and the Soviet Union, but mostly about borshch. I should try it some time.

Via Unfogged.

In honor of the wedding…

Kind of unfair she’s usually “former model Carla Bruni”.

Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits - this one in particular - persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968) which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said - apparently of this book - ‘I did this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical world’.

The System of Objects is aphorism dense. It is also somewhat puritanical. An example of the first:

The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. in order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in it function, thus making it more fragile … so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign …

And an example of the moralising:

… sexual perversion is founded on the inability to apprehend the other qua object of desire in his or her unique totality as a person … the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticised parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification.

The first issue of a new pan European magazine - Indigo - is available online in English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Polish, and Italian. According to the German VISDP magazine, Indigo’s publishers want to put the magazine’s content on paper eventually. Collaborating with CafeBabel, the magazine is apparently primarily targeting the twenty/thirty-somethings of “Generation RyanAir”. [...]

Slate has a slide-show essay about John Constable, an English landscape painter who they say very important.

France is, finally, honouring its North-African war heroes in the wake of the release of the film Indigènes. The film is by French director Rachid Bouchareb and its main cast of five were collectively awarded the Best Actor prize at the film festival of Cannes. The title of the film means “natives” but the official [...]