top of page
A father’s letters to his daughter
Sandro Pertini
It was 1980. Sandro Pertini, President of the Italian Republic, had travelled to Urbino to meet with a group of university students. At one point, a young man heckled him. Pertini didn’t flinch. He had known censorship, the real kind, first-hand, and had paid for it with prison and internal exile. He took the floor. He restated his position. And then he did the most extraordinary thing of all: he defended that young man’s right to challenge him, reminding him that being able
Earlier letters
Nineteen
I am writing this one month late. The candles came in a box of twenty-four. Nineteen went on the cake.Five stayed inside. Eighteen has a ceremony.Twenty sounds like a threshold. Nineteen is quieter. It is an age that does not announce itself. It passes almost unnoticed, somewhere between what has already begun and what has not yet found a name. At nineteen some things already feel familiar. Others are still impossible to imagine. There are people not yet met who will become i
Sep 301 min read
Try changing the question
There are notebooks many of us keep, hidden away somewhere. Inside are the big questions. We rewrite them for years, in the same patient handwriting. We add a pro, cross out a con. We wait for the page to tell us something. Those questions get answered only one piece at a time, inside the days. A phone call made instead of put off. Two days in a city that had been calling to you. An evening with someone you barely know. An attempt that goes wrong and leaves you lighter than b
Sep 261 min read
A bit of chaos
Naples. A missed train. Three hours to kill. I left my bag at the luggage drop and walked up toward the Quartieri. Narrow alleys, laundry strung between balconies like festival banners when there is no festival, the smell of espresso brawling with fried street food. Then down toward the water, down to Santa Lucia. An old man was sitting on his doorstep with a fishing net across his lap. He gestured for me to sit down, with that warmth of ours where any stranger is just a cous
Sep 122 min read
Kairos & Cronos
My phone rang. It was a friend. He asked if I had five minutes to grab a coffee. We met at the corner coffee shop, one of those places you walk into expecting a quick turnaround. We were standing at the counter. The air smelled of freshly ground coffee; cups clinked against saucers, the espresso machine hissed out steam behind him, and bright morning light sliced through the front window. In those five minutes, he told me he was leaving. Moving across the world. For good. I r
Sep 52 min read
But what is Norway?
Norway is high mountains and deep fjords. It is plains and coastal landscapes, islands and islets. It is lush fields and gentle heaths. It is dark winter days and bright summer nights. It is both salty and sweet, dried fish and fermented trout, mutton stew and cured lamb ribs. But Norway is, above all, people. Norwegians are people from Northern Norway, Central Norway, Southern Norway—and people from all the other regions. Norwegians have also immigrated from Afghanistan, P
Aug 292 min read
An inch of sky
There are men who spend what feels like forever inside one inch of sky. I met one of them. He was restoring the ceiling of an old church in a nearby town. The church was no longer used for worship, and they were turning it into a music hall. He worked lying on a scaffold, with his face only forty centimetres from the plaster. A very fine brush. A magnifying glass. A lamp that was too hot. He knew that blue better than anyone else. He knew it came from a stone brought from Afg
Aug 222 min read
Aug 150 min read
The shore and the sea
There is a moment when the boat pulls away from the harbor. The sound of the rope slipping into the water, the cry of the seagulls, the houses slowly drifting away. Staying on the shore may always seem safer. No waves, no storms. But that is not where things happen, the great, life-changing things. There is no need to wait for the wind to be perfect before setting sail. Sometimes you set off anyway, trembling a little, but with a fire in your heart. It is out there, between o
Aug 91 min read
1%
Even if there is only a 1% chance, if this is truly what you want, keep going. Fight for it. Solutions will come.
Aug 91 min read
bottom of page