Thirteen
Thirteen years abroad today, and my life elsewhere has reached its adolescence. It has some questions about the promises it was raised on. How can a place become so much of who you are while remaining unsure what to do with you?
alyssa Author of 42 Articles
Customs to Declare
Where I grew up, toughness included turning up when someone needed a hand. In the Nordics, I found beauty in making that care a public promise. I want a society that offers both without making obedience the price of belonging. Perhaps steel, smoke and social democracy have more to offer one another than either of my homes suspects.
The List
The autumn equinox arrives with a checklist. Naturally, I have supporting documentation. Beauty, fierceness, care, reckoning: a little personal accounting as the season turns. Loving balance and possessing it are, apparently, separate boxes. And the woman who thinks so much about what makes a life worth living would quite like to live some of it, thank you.
Everyone Can Speak
Micke Larsson welcomes discussion. Fredrika Fellman would like an answer. His latest interview and his summer talk raise a question about ambition, power and social sustainability: what changes when a leader’s account of himself meets somebody else’s experience? It is possible to leave Wimbledon without leaving the VIP section. Everyone can speak. But power must answer for what it does.
The buck stops here.
Åland’s government has offered its explanation. Its own emails leave rather more to explain. Here are the demands, the evidence supplied in response, and the question still waiting on the Lantråds desk: who takes responsibility?