Amanda Soto, Берестейський проспект, 26, Kyiv (2025)

22/09/2025

Berthe Morisot's The Cradle: The overlooked painting that unlocks Impressionism
While many have focused on Monet's Impression, Sunrise as a key Impressionist painting, another image was pivotal to the movement that launched 150 years ago.

In art, it's all about the hands – those that make it and those that they create. Take, for example, the hands that weave the intimate narrative of young motherhood in the small canvas The Cradle, 1872, a masterpiece of absorbing gestures by Berthe Morisot, the only female artist invited to participate in the inaugural exhibition of French Impressionist work, which opened 150 years ago in Paris on 15 April 1874. A portrait of Morisot's sister Edma, lost in contemplation as she gazes down on her newborn daughter, Blanche, The Cradle is an onion of a painting – its alluring, if unreachable, essence swaddled in layers of semi-lucent veils that our eyes can never fully unpeel.Though less well-known than works contributed to that era-defining show by her male counterparts – including paintings by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne – Morisot's The Cradle is key to appreciating just how revolutionary the consciousness of Impressionism was. The painting reveals the ways in which Impressionism's temperament and techniques challenged the sensibilities of the powerful Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris that had routinely rejected many of the emerging artists' work.

The apparent placidity of The Cradle, which, at first glance, exudes a nursery calm, is only superficially serene. Look deeper and it is lit from inside by an inner angst whose urgency was unprecedented in art. The divergence in Edma's hands – one supporting the weight of her weary head while the other fidgets with the hem of a delicate voile that softens the light falling on her baby as she rests – creates an edgy energy in the work. The young mother's hands are pulling her, and us, in two directions.
Though less well-known than works contributed to that era-defining show by her male counterparts – including paintings by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne – Morisot's The Cradle is key to appreciating just how revolutionary the consciousness of Impressionism was. The painting reveals the ways in which Impressionism's temperament and techniques challenged the sensibilities of the powerful Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris that had routinely rejected many of the emerging artists' work.

The apparent placidity of The Cradle, which, at first glance, exudes a nursery calm, is only superficially serene. Look deeper and it is lit from inside by an inner angst whose urgency was unprecedented in art. The divergence in Edma's hands – one supporting the weight of her weary head while the other fidgets with the hem of a delicate voile that softens the light falling on her baby as she rests – creates an edgy energy in the work. The young mother's hands are pulling her, and us, in two directions.
It is difficult not to see in the tense twiddle of Edma's fingertips a repressed urge to rip aside the veils that keep us from the possibilities of our latent selves. Morisot's virtuosity in weaving variable densities of diaphanous fabric from the pigments on her palette, thereby sieving our eyes' access to what lies beyond, is as captivating as anything that was put on display at that opening exhibition of some 31 Impressionist artists – an event celebrated for its radical revelation of the movement's sketchy gestures, outdoorsy spirit, and love of light. Those qualities are there too in the 10 paintings, pastels, and watercolours contributed to the show by Morisot, but it is the psychological complexity of The Cradle, its commitment to capturing the challenges of motherhood, that is so modern and moving.
There is empathy in Manet's lament that the sisters' gender would work against them and unmistakable admiration in the dozen portraits that he would go on to paint of Berthe, whose hands, in particular, he handled with care. In 1871, the year before Morisot painted The Cradle, Manet caused something of a stir with his portrayal of her in a posture rather too relaxed for many contemporary eyes. In The Repose, Morisot's hands are seen variously clutching the stiff extent of a closed fan and resting weightlessly on the inviting velvet couch on which she lounges.

17/09/2025

Four arrests after Trump and Epstein images projected on Windsor Castle
Four men have been arrested after images of Donald Trump and convicted s*x offender Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle on Tuesday, as the US president arrived in the UK for a state visit.

They were arrested on suspicion of "malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor" and remained in custody, Thames Valley Police said.

Those arrested were a 60-year-old from East Suss*x, a 36-year-old and a 50-year-old from London, and a 37-year-old from Kent.

The force said an investigation was under way after officers responded "swiftly" to stop the projection on the castle, where Trump will meet King Charles during the first full day of his state visit on Wednesday.
The president was friends with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trump has never been officially accused of wrongdoing in connection with the deceased pa******le financier.

The visit comes a week after the prime minister sacked the UK's ambassador to the US, Lord Peter Mandelson, over his relationship with Epstein.

On Wednesday morning, a van could be seen in Windsor displaying an image of Trump and Epstein with the message: "Welcome to the UK, Donald."

15/09/2025

If our culture survives, then so do we': The Caribbean island defying the existential threat of hurricanes
A year after record-breaking Hurricane Beryl, the Caribbean is still reeling – but on one island, defiant traditions are fuelling its climate resilience.

In the predawn darkness, the streets are still damp from the night before as thousands gather, ready to parade through St George's, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Chains scrape against the asphalt and horns jut from helmets pointing skyward.

A conch shell sounds, the rallying call that heralds J'Ouvert morning, the official start of carnival, called Spicemas. As dawn breaks, people flood the streets with their bodies blackened with oil and charcoal.

This is Jab Jab, one of Grenada's oldest carnival traditions, born of emancipation, resilience and resistance. These masqueraders raise chains as symbols of liberation and dress this way to embody the very figures that oppressors of the past once used to demonise them – using mockery and satire to turn insult into power. Its unruliness is deliberate, a rejection of the order once imposed by colonial rule.

That same spirit of defiance is what Grenadians are leaning on today in the face of deep challenges brought by extreme weather. In July 2024, Grenada was left badly damaged when Hurricane Beryl swept over the island and those around it. Fuelled by hot seas, the strongest storms, like Beryl, have arrived earlier and intensified explosively.
As a second-generation British-Grenadian returning to join these carnival celebrations a year after Hurricane Beryl, I wanted to take the temperature of the island's climate resilience. How is Grenada building back after the storm, and where is the country in its longer-term pursuit of climate justice?
David A Farrell, principal of the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology, says Hurricane Beryl was unlike anything the region had seen. "It became the earliest category five storm on record in the Atlantic, developing when people were still preparing for the season."

For Farrell, it's a signal that things are shifting. "This suggests that the baseline for the start of the hurricane season may be shifting to earlier in the year and the season getting longer."

Ageing infrastructure, highly erodible soils, steep terrain and wide stretches of low-lying coastline all magnify the impacts of storms. "These factors combine to make the impacts of stronger storms far more severe in the region."
In Grenada, and on its tiny sister isles of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, Hurricane Beryl flattened homes, tore up crops, shuttered schools and left clinics struggling to reopen. Recovery is ongoing, but the financial burden has been immense and the psychological toll on residents is huge.

Jab Jab is resistance and revolt against a system that was deliberately meant to break you – Ian Charles
When it comes to richer nations stepping up to offer financial support for hurricane recovery, "there is a lot of talk and no action", says Tevin Andrews, minister for Carriacou and Petite Martinique affairs and local government.

Andrews and other politicians in Grenada warn that outside finance still lags far behind what's needed. Global promises often stall in bureaucracy, leaving countries like Grenada to rely on debt or insurance schemes that cannot cover the true scale of loss, he says. The question, experts argue, is not only how to rebuild stronger and with limited resources, but how an island adapts when storms themselves are changing faster than the systems designed to withstand them.

08/09/2025

The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb
The Boeing B-29 was the most advanced bomber of World War Two, and more expensive to design and build than the atomic bombs it dropped. It also helped influence the airliners we fly on today.

It was two years before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour dragged the United States into the war. But the US Army Air Corps was looking for a new bomber aircraft. What they were after was a "superbomber", capable of flying up to 2,000 miles (3,200km) at a time and at altitudes never achieved before.

The aircraft they got would go on to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ultimately bring an end to World War Two. It would also pave the way for a civil aviation boom that led to the everyday air travel we have today.

This is the story of how an aircraft that cost more than the entire Manhattan project – the B-29 Superfortress – changed the world.

It was January 1940 when the US Army Air Corps (USAAC) approached five American aircraft companies with the request to build a bomber bigger than anything the world had ever seen. Although the US was yet to enter the Second World War, in Europe it was already raging: N**i Germany and the Soviet Union had only months earlier invaded Poland and divided it between them. The US knew it was a matter of time before it might be dragged in.
The aircraft the USAAC wanted would have to fly further and higher than any aircraft that had yet been built. That turned out to be an enormous challenge, even for the world's biggest industrial nation.

Two of the companies approached, Douglas and Lockheed, soon abandoned work on their submissions due to the problem it posed. Boeing, however, had a head start, having begun work on a design as a private project a few years earlier.

A budget-busting bomber
Boeing's XB-29 design eventually won the USAAC's competition, but it would be another four years before the aircraft that became known as the B-29 Superfortress entered service.

It was the most expensive and complex industrial project US industry had ever undertaken and would not be surpassed until the space programmes in the 1950s and 1960s. And it pushed aviation technology almost to the limit.
The B-29 project became the most expensive of the entire war – costing nearly 50% more than the Manhattan Project that built the world's first atomic bombs. In today's money the aircraft, from design to completion, cost the equivalent of $55.6bn (£41.2bn).

The bombers that Boeing and other plane makers built for the first few years of World War Two tended to carry out their missions above 20,000ft (6km). The higher you fly, the longer you can fly, because the air is less dense, but it presented the crews inside the planes with many challenges.

The high speed of attacking planes in World War Two meant gunners often only had a split second to pick a target
"You have to be on oxygen the whole time," says Hattie Hearn, the curator of the American Air Museum in Duxford in the UK. "Within two minutes of not being on oxygen you probably lose consciousness, and that was a real common thing that air crew had to had to consider. They had to have electrically heated flying suits, all this other gear which is going to be impeding movement. Very cumbersome, if you had to escape, for example. Often you could get too hot, and then that would again impede how you operated, if you're sweating, and then suddenly that sweat freezes."

Conditions were bad enough at 20,000ft. At 30,000ft, the height the B-29 needed to fly, they would be even worse.
Boeing turned to a promising new concept: pressurisation. This meant the plane's cabin had the same air pressure and oxygen content you would find on the ground – which meant crew didn't have to fly with oxygen masks. The air would be pulled out of the engines, cooled, purified and then pumped into the crew compartments. It could also be reheated so the crew didn't have to wear bulky flight suits.

The technology had been under development since the 1920s, but the concept was still relatively experimental. The B-29 would become both the first bomber aircraft and the first mass-produced aircraft to be pressurised.

"Allowing a crew to operate in light flight suits, because the compartments are heated, that allows them to take these long missions in a much more hospitable way," says Jeremy Kinney, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
Pressurising the aircraft's entire hull would be both difficult and expensive. Instead, Boeing devised three separate pressurised compartments for the B-29's 11-person crew. The first compartment in the nose of the aircraft housed the pilot, co-pilot, bomb aimer, navigator, radio operator and flight engineer – the latter responsible for monitoring the airplane's four enormous, temperamental engines. Between the first and second crew compartments – and above the first of the plane's massive bomb bays – was a tunnel that the crew members could crawl through. The middle compartment, where the gunners and radar operator worked, even had a chemical toilet and some bunks to nap on.

"There were some risks involved," cautions Hearn. "If you suddenly had a loss of pressure and you're in the tunnel moving between the different cabins, you could be shot out pretty much as fast as a bullet, which is a bit of a worry."

Remote-controlled guns
The high speed of attacking planes in World War Two meant gunners often only had a split second to pick a target, especially if they were approaching from the front. In 1944, fighters were getting faster. The B-29's pressurised compartments let designers think outside the box, and they came up with a novel concept: remote-controlled turrets.

Gunners no longer had to point the guns themselves, hoping for a lucky hit as fighters flashed by at hundreds of miles an hour. Instead, a new fire-control system calculated the gunners' aim using a radar that could account for both air temperature and bullet drop. It was the first time an aircraft had a gunsight that wasn't actually physically connected to the gun it is firing. The master gunner could even take over control of certain guns if one of the gunners was incapacitated.

The engine issues didn't take long to make themselves evident
"It's the last major system in which all the different angles and approaches to the aircraft are covered with guns," says Kinney. When the B-29 was no longer in danger of being attacked, the turrets could be pulled back into the aircraft to reduce drag.

The aircraft's other innovations included three sets of wheels – called tricycle landing gear – which are commonplace on airliners today.

The B-29's long missions at great heights meant the aircraft needed four very powerful engines. The designers turned to an 18-cylinder behemoth built by engine maker Wright called the R-3350 Duplex Cyclone.
In order to cut down the amount of drag, the designers made the engine housing more aerodynamic. But this starved some the R-3350's rear cylinders of air needed to cool down properly and made engine fires more likely.

The engine issues didn't take long to make themselves evident; the aircraft's first flight in December 1942 had to be cut short after one of the four engines caught fire. Worse was to come. In February 1943, the second prototype, flown by Boeing's chief test pilot Edmund T Allen, crashed near Seattle due to an engine fire, killing all 11 crew, 20 workers in a meat processing plant and a firefighter.
"The idea of the air-cooled radial engine is being pushed to its limit by the time it's installed in the B-29," says Kinney.

The radial, air-cooled R-3350 would later go on to power some of the first successful post-war airliners, but only after some serious refinement.

Arnold set in place a rescue effort that became known as 'The Battle of Kansas'
The B-29's engines were far from the only problem. Getting the aircraft into production was a gargantuan industrial project, requiring four separate giant factories across the US. Hordes of new aircraft construction workers had to be hired, many of whom had never built aircraft before, says Kinney. The scale and pace overwhelmed Boeing, especially at their factory in Wichita, Kansas, which was making the planes for the first B-29 bombing group.
One of the USAAC's top generals, Hap Arnold, was told to find a solution. Arnold visited Wichita in January 1944 and told factory bosses that he wanted 175 bombers ready by March. Not a single one was ready two months later.

05/09/2025

Inside Italy's secret mosaic school
Hidden in a quiet Italian town is one of the world's most unique art schools – and a rewarding destination for curious travellers.

Walking the corridors of the Scuola dei Mosaicisti del Friuli (Friuli Mosaicists School) on a Friday morning, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I had expected the chatter of students, the hum of conversation between teachers, the shuffle of footsteps. Instead, the air was still, broken only by the occasional tap of a hammer and the delicate click of tiles sliding against tiles.

The second thing was the mosaics – everywhere. In the entrance courtyard, where a full-scale tessellated version of Picasso's Guernica greets visitors. In the hallways, where tiled reproductions of artworks like Michelangelo's Pietà and the Virgin and Child from Istanbul's Hagia Sophia line the walls. Mosaics climbed across flat surfaces and curled around corners, turning the entire building into a living archive of pattern, precision and patience.

Those same qualities were on full display inside the classrooms where students sat bent over their workstations, eyes locked on the fragments beneath their fingers. Mosaic, I would learn over the course of my visit, demands this kind of concentration: a craft shaped not just by hand and material, but by a collected atmosphere where meticulousness can thrive.

The school has been nurturing this kind of dedication for more than a century. Founded in 1922 in Spilimbergo, a small town of medieval lanes, a stately castle and Renaissance palazzi in Italy's north-eastern Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, it was originally created to provide formal training to local artisans and preserve the area's ancient mosaic tradition — one that dates to the Roman Empire and has left its mark on everything from Byzantine basilicas to modern monuments.
Today it's the only academic institution in the world entirely devoted to the mosaic arts. Students of all ages, from high school graduates to mid-career creatives, come from across the globe to enrol in its rigorous three-year programme, during which they learn historical mosaic techniques – from intricate Greco-Roman patterns to luminous Byzantine compositions — before experimenting with more contemporary, freeform designs.

In recent years, the school has also become a destination in its own right, drawing design-loving travellers intrigued by the singular world of mosaics to explore its grounds on both public and private tours. Some 40,000 visitors do so annually, making the Scuola Mosaicisti one of the most visited sites in Friuli.
"It takes a lot of hard work and discipline to become a maestro mosaicista," said Gian Piero Brovedani, the school's director. "This is an art that's both humbling and exacting. It teaches you to slow down, pay attention and find beauty in repetition."
Indeed, mosaic-making is an incredibly precise specialty. It requires the artist to painstakingly place together hundreds, sometimes thousands, of small pieces called tesserae (which can measure as little as 0.5cm) to form intricate patterns and lifelike scenes. Made from marble, glass, smalto (opaque glass tiles) and even shells, these tiny inlays demand thorough craftsmanship and an intuitive sense of rhythm and placement.

As Brovedani noted, it's also deeply collaborative. Mosaicists generally work solo on sections of large compositions, but the true effect of that work emerges only when viewed in unison. "It's a craft that asks you to 'erase' yourself, in a way," said third-year teacher Cristina de Leoni. "One tile on its own doesn't say very much, but together with others, it creates an artwork. There's no ego in mosaic-making."
Glancing at the craft's rich history – which dates to Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE and stretches across countries and cultures, from the Greeks to the Maya, the Byzantine Empire to the Islamic world – it's easy to see her point. There are no Giottos or Raphaels in the mosaic arts, no singular Mona Lisa. Instead, this expressive form has always relied on anonymous virtuosity, walking a fine line between art and artisanship.

That's been all the truer in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where mosaicists never stopped honing the craft, even as it slipped from the spotlight from the Renaissance onwards. With its abundance of stones from the Tagliamento (Friuli's main river) and close cultural ties to Venice – a city long at the epicentre of European art and craftsmanship – the region quietly became a stronghold of mosaic tradition, its skilled artists sought after across continents. In the 19th Century, Friulian artist Gian Domenico Facchina even helped usher mosaics into the modern era, devising the rovescio su carta (reverse on paper) method to assemble panels off-site – a game-changer for scale and speed. The foyer of Paris' Opéra Garnier was the first to showcase it.
Since then, Friulan mosaicists – most trained in Spilimbergo – have made their mark worldwide: from Rome's iconic Foro Italico sports complex to the New York City subway station at the World Trade Center; from the dome of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Tokyo galleries. These works are proof of a tradition that continues to evolve, tessera by tessera.

"The duality of mosaics makes them endlessly fascinating," said Purnima Allinger, a third-year student who left a marketing career in Berlin to pursue mosaics. "It's a precise and meditative-like craft, but also expressive and emotional like art. You're always shifting between the two – it keeps you completely engaged."

03/09/2025

How Europe's oldest language ended up on US trees
The US' Basque immigrants turned to sheepherding in order to survive. Today, their legacy can be found in unique wooden tree carvings they left throughout the American West.

Iñaki Arrieta Baro remembers the day he trekked through the sagebrush, desert and wooded trails of Northern Nevada with a Basque-American family to locate a very special ancestral heirloom. Tracing their grandfather's footsteps, the group followed GPS coordinates to a remote location on what is now a private ranch.

Among a grove of aspens, they found what they were looking for: a tree engraved decades ago with their grandfather's name.

"We were standing in the same place where their grandfather stood," says Arrieta Baro, head librarian of the Jon Bilbao Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It was very emotional."

Between the US Pacific coast and the state of Wyoming, stories from the region's 19th and 20th-Century Basque immigrant sheepherders unfold across the malleable bark of quaking aspen trees, turning rugged alpine forests into history books. From names and cartoon images to hometown homages and political messages etched in Euskara, Europe's oldest living language, these arborglyphs – tree carvings – offer a quiet glimpse into these often forgotten lives.
"The arborglyphs are a lens through which to understand the Basque immigrant community and sheepherding," says Arrieta Baro.

Carefully placing a piece of tree trunk in front of me, he directs my attention to its inscription: "Jesús María El Cano, 26-7."
El Cano was one of many Basque men who found themselves at the helm of sheep flocks in the American West. Initially drawn to the Great Basin region across California, Nevada and Idaho in the wake of the 19th-Century gold rush, Basques continued to migrate through the next century in search of better economic prospects.

Amaya Herrera, curator at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center and one of an estimated 16,000 Basque-Americans living in Boise, Idaho, descends from one such family. "My great-grandparents immigrated in the late 1890s. They worked in ranching and then later ran a boarding house in Northern Nevada," she says, "That's how my family ended up there."

Boarding houses like the one managed by Herrera's great-grandparents were the infrastructural beginnings of Basque communities in the West, such as Boise's Basque Block. They provided not just lodging, but a place to connect with other Basques and, very importantly, find employment.
Though the newly-arrived Basques had no previous experience with large-scale herding, they adopted the vocation out of necessity – primarily because they spoke little to no English.
Sheepherding didn't require much speaking at all.

"They spent a lot of time in the mountains by themselves," says Arrieta Baro, referring to the transhumance herding technique that saw sheepherders move flocks up to the mountains to graze during the spring and summer and back down to the valleys for the colder seasons. These long stints of isolation were as unfamiliar to the Basques as the landscape.

Far from their families and homeland, the sheepherders turned to the trees in their solitude, whittling messages and illustrations to communicate "their inner selves, their emotions, how much they miss gure ama", Arrieta Baro explains, adding that gure amameans "our mother" in Euskara.
Spoken today by upwards of 900,000 people in the Basque regions on both sides of the Pyrenees is Europe’s great linguistic mystery: unrelated to any other living language, with roots thought to predate Indo-European tongues.

That Euskara is the lone survivor of an unknown language family dating back to Neolithic times only amplifies the mystery of finding messages like "Gora Euskadi" (Up with the Basque Country) on trees thousands of miles away.

Since early researchers like Basque-American Joxe Mallea Olaetxe began documenting arborglyphs in the 1960s, the trees have garnered attention from academics, Basque descendants and others curious about the unique cultural artefacts. Collectively, they've helped amass more than 25,000 recordings of arborglyphs in photographs, muslin fabric rubbings and, most recently, 3D photogrammetry images.

Among their observations was the herders' clear choice of canvas: Quaking Aspens, typically in meadows with "lots of forage for the sheep and a source of water", said Jean Earl in an interview with the Archaeological Legacy Institute in 2015. A Nevada native, Earl began recording carvings alongside her husband on camping trips in the 1970s.

Common arborglyph findings include short poems, erotic messages, human portraits and animal figures – though never any sheep – while stiff sketches of Basque farmhouses and buildings suggest a degree of homesickness. Some illustrations are so intact that Arrieta Baro believes he's identified a carving of the town of Iruña's City Hall. The most prevalent type of carvings, however, are names and dates. So-called "calendar trees" show herders coming back to the same spots year after year to record their visits.

"Traditionally, the Basque peasants and farmers, because of the oral nature of their society, had written little or nothing," writes Joxe Mallea Olaetxe in his book Speaking Through the Aspens, "But in the American West, these nearly illiterate people were somehow persuaded to change and started to write, not with pen and paper but with knives on trees"

But the carvings are fragile. Aspens rarely live beyond a century, and drought, wildfire and disease accelerate their decline. Earl noted in 2021 that around 80% of the trees she recorded had since died.

At the time of writing, the Jakes Fire has burned more than 80,000 acres in Elko County, Nevada – an area where researchers suspect far more arborglyphs exist than have been collected.

Amanda Soto

22/09/2025

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