Dog Point

After spending the day preparing for tomorrow’s thesis seminars, I found a very summery recipe in the June issue of Monocle which just made it up to Umeå from Switzerland. Not only does pistachio always remind me of that backstreet baklava when I was a student in Örebro, the mix of sundried cherry tomatoes, pecorino cheese and basil definitely lifted my spirits after reading all the sad news from the US and witnessing the resurging localism at home. As for the latter, history unambiguously shows that, far from being a solution, national stockpiling and trade restrictions will always come at someone else’s expense and, ultimately, only weaken us all.

Apparently, Ivan Krastev has written a new book called “Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic” which highlights the disconnect between the globally shared experience of the pandemic and the closing of borders. In Monocle, there are a further fifty interviews about the pandemic and what the world that comes after may look like. For one thing, I guess there will be fewer homeless dogs around as more people have found a new homebound and more canine-friendly existence.