Confession with Blue Horses / Unser geteilter Sommer - Neuerscheinung!

 

Confession with Blue Horses gibt es jetzt auch auf Deutsch - als 'Unser geteilter Sommer', in einer wundervollen Übersetzung von Ulrike Sterblich. Es war wirklich schön und bewegend, die Geschichte bei ihrer sprachlichen Heimkehr zu begleiten und durch Ulrike Sterblichs elegante Übersetzung nochmal ganz neu zu erleben.

The messages that survived civilisation's collapse

 

How a young scribe's homework helped unlock an entire lost civilisation - and what he and other writers from the very distant past can teach us about everlasting scripts and languages. With some excellent advice from leading experts in decipherment and ancient languages on how to craft your own immortal message. One of them even made an actual clay tablet for this feature!

BBC Family Tree (new series)

 

For the past year, I've been editing Family Tree, a BBC series of online features about the latest global research on families, parenting and children's health and development. It's been an absolute delight to commission and work with so many talented writers, and shine a light on fascinating scientific insights and discoveries from around the world.

Check out some of our stories on the surprising benefits of traditional South Asian baby massage, the secret of Arctic 'survival parenting', and why rates of short-sightedness among children are soaring (to as much as 80-90% in some countries and age groups).

In Quarantine, Kids Pick Up Parents’ Mother Tongues (NYT feature)

All over the world, families have been forced to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does that mean for homes where several languages are spoken? My New York Times feature on children switching languages during the pandemic.

If you enjoyed this feature, you may also like one I wrote for the NYT last year, about newborns copying the melodies of the mother tongue they heard while still in the womb: "Do Babies Cry in Different Languages? A pioneering German researcher decodes newborns’ cries. Here’s what they reveal".

"Art was our lifeline": the GDR's creative rebels

Painted photo of Cornelia Schleime, taken by Gabriele Stötzer,  1981

Gabriele Stötzer is a really remarkable artist and writer who deserves to be much more widely known. I interviewed her for this piece in the Economist on the GDR's rebel artists, who created incredibly bold, funny, provocative, fearless art that challenged the surveillance state.

Stötzer was imprisoned as a young woman, in her early 20s. Until then, she thought she'd go to university, get a normal job, etc etc. But in prison, she decided to become an artist. Here are a couple of extracts that didn't make it into the final piece, but that stayed with me long after the interview:

"If you think about it, everyone has certain childhood dreams that just go away at some point. And when I was in prison, I'd lost everything, and then I remembered: oh, you used to want to make art. And now you've lost everything anyway... when you get out, you'll be poor, you'll have nothing. So you might as well make art."

"I wasn't afraid. After prison, I wasn't afraid of anything anymore. And it was clear to me that I wouldn't stop."

Christine Schlegel, Rollo (painted window blind),  1983-84

(About painting on window blinds and concertina books, like many other underground artists at the time):

"We didn't have official exhibitions. They'd take place in a church, a flat, you'd send out invites saying we're having a birthday party, or a christening... I'd go there, unroll (the folded paper), pin it to the wall, and take it down again. It had a certain performative character... and it was about evanescence. Because we didn't actually exist at all... It was an existential cry. The Stasi wanted to destabilise, isolate, spread loneliness, silence people, or drive them into suicide. It was everywhere, this extinguishing. Sometimes I didn't know who I was. So I made my own pottery, just to know: I am. And I ate from my plates and drank from my cups. You know, sometimes one was so desperate and isolated and alone. That was also why one needed groups. They made me believe that I was. And that I was an artist."

Hope you enjoy the piece! And do visit the Dieselkraftwerk in Cottbus if you get the chance. It's easily accessible by train from Berlin, and as I mention in the article, has art from the GDR era that you won't see anywhere else. There is so much more to discover!

Annemirl Bauer, Woman and Child behind Bars and Barbed Wire, 1985

The kids who smuggled out an East German defector

It's not often that you get to revisit your little hometown, speak to a group of people who grew up around you, and stumble across a story involving a Stasi file, a bugged Trabant, an East German defector and a bunch of teenagers on a school trip. And then have someone make it into a podcast with brilliant 1980s tunes.

This feature for the Guardian took me back to the 1980s, and stirred up memories of my own childhood in the divided Germany. It made me look at my hometown in a different light, and led to lots of conversations about family, politics, belonging - and how hard it can be to do the right thing when the world around you is wrong.

One thing that struck me was the timeliness of this story. It's about young people challenging conditions that the older generation has accepted as the norm. Today, as children are separated from their parents at borders around the world, teenagers are taking to the streets to urge action on the climate crisis, and refugees are risking their lives to cross the sea to Europe, it's a good reminder that we do have the power to help.

Teach yourself to echolocate

Awakening your hidden senses can be a life-changing experience. It can help you compensate for the loss of other senses (like vision), improve your confidence and everyday safety, or even just enrich your experience of the world. Researching and writing this feature for BBC Future on the power of our hidden senses really made me appreciate the untapped resources that lie within all of us.

And also, I now know what "bimodal precision advantage" means and why it's crucial to something as simple as safely crossing the road.