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A Voice from the Velvet Curtain: Rediscovering Natalia Nordman-Severova

There are books that arrive in the world like footnotes to other people’s biographies, and then quietly, decades later, refuse to remain there. Intimate Pages, first published in St. Petersburg in 1910, is one of them. Its author, Natalia Nordman-Severova, has long been catalogued in art history under a single dependent clause: companion to Ilya Repin. The volume she left behind insists on something else. It insists on her.

🛁 Bubbles & Whiskers: Introducing “Sphinx in the Suds”

A purr-fectly elegant browser game for the discerning cat connoisseur

Picture this: a wrinkly, wide-eared sphinx cat lounging in a gilded clawfoot bathtub, candlelight flickering against vintage Art Nouveau tiles, iridescent bubbles drifting lazily up from a sea of soapy foam. Now picture yourself helping her swat every last one before they escape to the ceiling.

Welcome to Sphinx in the Suds — a whimsical, one-click bubble-popping game that captures everything we love about cats: the elegance, the mischief, and the absolutely unhinged need to attack anything that floats.

A masterwork of cynical intelligence, buried for 158 years. Now, finally, in English.

“Society is a state of war regulated by laws.” That single sentence, written in a Paris prison cell in 1867, contains more hard truth about human ambition than a shelf of self-help books combined. Maurice Joly, the sharp-tongued French satirist best remembered for his political reckoning A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, did not stop there. He wrote a second book, stranger, funnier, more dangerous. He called it Recherches sur l’art de parvenir (Studies into the Art of Social Climbing), published it anonymously through Amyot in Paris, and then the book itself slipped into obscurity for nearly two centuries, buried in catalogues and footnotes while the world pretended it had nothing more to learn about ambition.

Forest Voices & Forget-me-not

In an age of sirens and scrolling, the forest still tells stories. They are quieter now, half drowned by traffic and timelines, yet in the old tales of whispering trees and talking flowers there is a way of seeing the world that feels strangely urgent again. The nineteenth century legends collected under the title “Forest Voices” ask readers to imagine a living woodland, where every stone remembers, every stream feels, and every blossom has something to say about humankind.

From hippie dreams to platform power: When the nerds became a ruling class

In the popular imagination, the tech elite still wear hoodies and sneakers and talk about changing the world. Yet behind the folksy TED-talk gloss, a harder story is playing out, one in which a small, highly educated caste quietly rewrites the rules of society in its own image.