Nordic items archive - January 2025
A collection of things I have read, found, listened to or watched this month - all with one thing in common.
Books
The Löwensköld ring by Selma Lagerlöf. I heard about it in Comodino. The author won the Literature Nobel Prize in 1909 and was the first woman to do so. The book is written in a simple, almost child-friendly way. It feels like it’s set in a magical world, but it’s actually Sweden.
Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse. He won the Literature Nobel Prize in 2023, and in terms of style is very much at the other end of the spectrum. The book itself is not very long, but in about 150 pages there is barely any punctuation.
Movies
Pioneer by Erik Skjoldbjærg. I watched this after learning about commercial offshore diving in Norway between the 60s and the 80s. Thanks God today we have robots to do this stuff.
Togo by Ericson Core1 . Incidentally, the only semi-decent first screening of a movie aired on the italian TV during the Christmas holiday.
Data
I have randomly bumbed into this Instagram story by chlamidiamagazine, showing a number of Nordic countries at the top of a ranking of confirmed cases of Chlamydia in Europe in 2022. ECDC numbers tell the same story. Will not speculate on why.
Podcasts
Listened to an episode of Behind the Money (produced by the Financial Times) with Richard Milne titled Why Northvolt failed to become Europe's battery champion. Northvolt is swedish. It doesn’t look good for the production of batteries for EVs in Europe.
Articles
The political diatribe in Sweden around Herik Landerholm, an advisor to the Prime Minister (ilpost.it).
N.B. He has resigned on January 27th.
The strategic imporance of Greenland due to the presence of many rare materials on the island (freitag.de).
Pictures
A picture taken at Mette Frederiksen’s house during a meal with the Prime Ministers of Norway, Sweden and Finland (reddit.com).
The movie is not directly linked to the Nordic countries, but the protagonist is a Norwegian immigrant named Leonhard Seppala who settled in Alaska during the Nome gold rush and later took part in the 1925 serum run to Nome. A memorial dedicated to Seppala has been built in Skibotn (Troms, Norway).