Norway

Tuesday

Orson Fry

Meeting Karl Ove Knausgård

On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane is now cropped short around the ears. Gone, too, are the cigarettes, traded for a vape. The School of Night is the fourth novel in Knausgård’s “Morning Star” series. It takes its name from a secret society of Elizabethan poets and scientists, which included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the play-wright Christopher Marlowe.

karl ove knausgård

Thursday

David Whitehouse

Greenland and the new space race

Donald Trump’s desire for Greenland is not just about access to oil, minerals and control of the new strategic and commercial corridors opening in the region. It’s also about data. Specifically, the most important data in the world. For decades, Pituffik Space Base – formerly Thule – in Greenland has been central to US space defense and Arctic strategy. It’s the US military’s only base above the Arctic Circle and their most northerly deep-water port and airstrip. It’s home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron. Its massive AN/FPS-132 radar has 240 degrees of coverage surveying the Arctic Ocean and Russia’s northern coast, especially the Kola peninsula where it has concentrated its strategic nuclear weapons.

greenland

Monday

Kara Kennedy

Oslo Freedom Forum: where dissidents blow off steam

It was on my third glass of James Bond’s favorite Champagne, Bollinger, that I suddenly remembered why I was here in Norway. “I’m going undercover in Russia next week,” a woman told me. I can’t remember her name — and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you. I wished her luck; she looked confused. “I’ve done worse,” she said. This wasn’t her first rodeo that could potentially end in imprisonment or death.  I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual event put on by the Human Rights Foundation. It’s marketed as a global gathering of human rights and pro-democracy activists.

oslo freedom forum

Thursday

John Phipps

Our Struggle is the worst idea ever for a podcast — and it’s great

Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to talk around Knausgaard. Or to talk through Knausgaard, towards the sense of what the Knausgaard phenomenon means. Or, it sometimes seems, they want to talk about everything but Knausgaard — cigarettes, Constance Garnett, the history of literary criticism, to what extent hotness is a function of tallness, Clarice Lispector, media hype, backlash, cancel culture, sneakers, Gen X, how Geoff Dyer got where he did — until the only territory left uncovered by the conversation is Knausgaard himself, described only through omission, in negative outline, raising yet another cigarette to his smoldering, craggy face.

knausgaard struggle

Monday

Nick Solheim

Time to crush China’s Arctic influence

Eyes are opening to the evil of the authoritarian Chinese regime that represses its people, genocides entire cultures, and influences investments and policy all over the globe. As most of the world is under coronavirus lockdown, the Chinese Communist party detains hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in east China. Not to mention the brutal occupation of Tibet, where China is also allegedly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans over the last 70 years due to its brutal occupation.The CCP’s mishandling of the viral contagion from Wuhan may have exposed its obsession with power at all costs, but its next, greater threat is still developing in the shadows: imperialism.

arctic