Börek

In the end, the students and I decided to shorten the morning statistics class to three hours – but those were, on the other hand, well spent. I know I have said it before, but teaching is really what I like most about my job: the connection with the students, seeing their horizons broaden, and watching them master new skills.

Energized, I headed over to the new Nordic Wellness that just opened less than a kilometre from my office and did 5k on the treadmill, feeling controlled despite progressively pacing down toward 4:10 min/km – nothing at all like last Saturday. With twelve days left until my half marathon in Piedmont, I have no plans to “catch up” on the kilometres I lost while being sick.

In thirty minutes, I will have a Zoom meeting with the Singapore-based editor of a new Routledge volume on ideologies and environmental politics, to which I am contributing a chapter together with scholars from all over the world. But first, I have to finish the excellent spinach-feta börek that I picked up at Willys.

Thinking about these small, everyday manifestations of globalization – Turkish pastry in a Swedish supermarket, an online meeting spanning continents, an Italian race on the horizon – the tragic and anachronistic nature of Putin’s war of aggression (now entering its fifth year) becomes even more apparent. The world is so evidently intertwined and the violence truly feels like a relic from our savaged past (to paraphrase StarTrek).