The annual Rīga Dialogue strategic communications conference winds up June 12, with another two days of academic, military and technological discussion having passed at the Latvian National Library.
Author's articles
A new Latvian-made documentary film receives its world premiere at the Sheffield Doc Fest on June 8.
May 25 is officially European Parliament election day in Latvia. The streets of Rīga have been adorned with posters and the airwaves have been filled with numerous candidates making their election pitches for weeks. But what have been the main issues discussed and the main solutions to Europe's problems offered by the political parties?
The state-backed Latvian Literature (LL) platform, which has had a busy couple of years promoting the country's literary output, outlined some of its future plans April 29.
Estonia's famous KUMU art museum in Tallinn is hosting a new exhibition focusing on the trailblazing Latvian artist Gustavs Klucis.
I have always preferred minor character actors to A-list film stars. They might only get a scene or two, but the presence of these strangely-shaped, broken-nosed, odd-looking and heavily-accented figures gives a film a human appeal and variety that can never be conveyed by the handsome and beautiful leading men and ladies.
Krišjānis Kariņš took over from Māris Kučinskis as Prime Minister of Latvia on January 23, 2019. Now one month into the job, he spoke to LSM about his background, his reasons for accepting the position and his future plans for his government.
One of the greatest compliments ever paid to Latvian literature occurred in the toilets of the London Book Fair 2018. I was on the Latvian stand when reports started to filter to us that Latvia's advertising campaign, as one of the featured countries of the book fair, was being censored – in the rest rooms.
Yesterday I climbed into my car on the way to work, clicked on Latvian Radio and heard that in the committee rooms of the Saeima they were discussing shutting down the LSM English language service of which I am the editor. This was a fairly disorienting and unexpected experience.
New Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš had his first joint meeting with his counterparts from fellow Baltic states Estonia and Lithuania February 4 - or rather he would have done had not the weather intervened.
This is the last Thing of Latvia. Looking back, we have written about more than 30 different Things of Latvia. Some have proved popular, some not. Some have been well written, some less so. But of one thing we can be certain, in one thing we can take some pride: we have never stooped to writing about the "caurvējš".
I am intrigued to find out why molecular biologist Vitalijs Skrīvelis has chosen to meet me at Zilaiskalns. It is certainly a special place, a hill that rises from the flat fields and forests of north Vidzeme that is rich in legend and folklore, but not perhaps what you would expect from someone of a scientific mindset.
In the 1970s and 1980s the United Kingdom had an amazing list of colossal and incomparable rock stars dominating the charts: David Bowie, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury et al.
If you find yourself in Lithuania, you have gone slightly too far.
With just a few of these Red Jackets interviews to go, I have an unpleasant thought: I haven't actually used any of the products they sell, with the sole exception of Latvijas Piens, whose cheese I have indeed nibbled.
A new documentary film examines the activities of the KGB - often colloquially known as the Cheka in Latvia - during Latvia's occupation by the Soviet Union, concentrating on the KGB's approaches to various well-known figures in politics and the arts even as the prospect of renewed independence for Latvia began to gather momentum.
As soon as you learn the setting for this meeting is Rīga International Airport, you will probably expect to hear it justified in a very predictable way: it's the gateway to the country, it's where clients arrive and depart, it embodies how modern, accessible and connected Latvia is, and so on.
“It should be easy to spot the owner of a fashion label,” I thought to myself as I checked if I had come to the right place at the right time, “after all, she is bound to be dressed head to foot in her own clothes, and the One Wolf look is quite distinctive.”
Pavilosta has a reputation as a summer retreat for a trendy Rīga set consisting of hipsters, bohemians and startup heroes. But it can't be like that really, I reason, on the long drive out to the Courland coast. It's probably the same semi-sleepy fishing village it was last time I was there. The rumors of gentrification must be overblown fantasies of envious journalists like myself.
If you believe the legend – and no Latvian has ever been known to disbelieve a legend – Kvēpene hill fort was where Rūsiņš, an allegedly mighty warrior chieftan lived, successfully defending himself from the incursions of dastardly foreign crusaders while running a highly successful protection racket levying charges on anything that happened to float by on the River Gauja, which still flows at the foot of his assumed stronghold.
Snēpele. The word is pleasant. The place, no-one has heard of. It is a long way from Rīga. It is 17 kilometres south of Kuldiga, on a road no-one really takes unless they have already taken a wrong turn.
If you happened to notice there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week, and you were in the mood to guess why, it would be reasonable to speculate that we at LSM were ill, lazy, drunk or out of ideas. Such surmises might be correct in one, several or all respects. However, we could quite easily maintain our dignity and reputation by answering that there was no ''Thing of Latvia'' last week tehnisku iemeslu dēļ or due to technical reasons.
I felt I was arriving at Ainaži well prepared. Halfway to the little seaside town in the very north-west corner of Latvia, I stopped at a cafe for lunch. On the table was the local Auseklis newspaper. The cover story was about tremendous interest in the first ever Blackcurrant Day. Page 2 featured the renovation of some steps. And then an absolute gift to a lazy writer: a detailed history of Ainaži.
The LSM Minutes From Latvia podcast makes an election-season return with an hour-long special.
From the outside it looks like a normal building in the Agenskalns district of Rīga. If you had to guess what went on inside, you would probably opt for the usual domestic dramas and dish-washing of any apartment block with perhaps a sprinkling of insurance brokering or book-keeping activity inside some smallish, cheapish offices.
A great deal of research has been done on the behavior of crowds, their psychopathology and their tendency to express the more regressive aspects of the human psyche, but as far as I am aware, none of these studies have focused on clapping in Latvia.
A couple of weeks ago our colleagues at the LSM Latvian-language service unveiled a new project they had been working on for a long time: a multiple choice quiz devised to give voters in the forthcoming Saeima elections some idea of their general political affiliation.
Few locations, except perhaps a battlefield or monument, evoke the idea of place as strongly as a film studio. Riga Film Studio is no exception as, quite apart from the sound stages and studios used to produce numerous classic strips of Latvian celluloid from the 1950s to the 1990s, the buildings in which these pieces of fantasy were produced themselves look like a mismatched film set with a tower of brick here, a rusting iron water tank there, peeling plaster on an elegant outbuilding and an apple orchard stretched incongruously across the middle as if it is insisting we are in the deep countryside and not the capital city.
Driving to Tērvete, I suspect it might be a set-up. After all, I am writing in English, about Latvia and Latvians. There is a high probability I do not know what I am talking about. So meeting at the former home of one of Latvia's most famous writers, in Tērvete, a location loaded with historical associations dating back hundreds, and even thousands of years, in order to meet someone who has perfected the art of translation, would be a very good way of exposing my shortcomings.
It's not exactly the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest, but by Latvian standards it's not bad, and by any standards the Zvārtes iezis (Zvārte rock) is certainly picturesque.
A bar-room acquaintance once told me that while travelling many years ago in Eastern Anatolia, he made the mistake of "tut-tutting" during a conversation. While a local was complaining at length about the difficulties of life in a remote village, he delivered what may even have been a tut rather than a full tut-tut as a gesture of sympathy and understanding at the many trials with which life likes to torture us.
The French writer Guy de Maupassant famously said that the view from the Eiffel Tower was the best in Paris – because it was the one place in the French capital where you didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower, which he disliked.