On 27 August the Helsinki Court of Appeal overturned a ruling that had let the crew of the tanker Eagle S walk away from the Estlink 2 cable cut on jurisdictional grounds. It is the most consequential legal development yet in a three-year pattern of damage to Baltic Sea cables and pipelines — and the question it turns on is not who did it, but whether anyone can be tried for it.

Three migrations, four neighbourhoods, and a claim worth examining. Chicago's Lithuanians built parishes, a hospital, a newspaper that has printed since 1909 and an archive holding 300,000 pages from the displaced-persons camps — then moved to the suburbs. A look at what the community actually built, what it lost, and why the phrase “largest outside Lithuania” needs handling with care.

In 2023 a Michigan university founded in 1896 closed, and the largest Finnish-American archive in the world came very close to being dispersed. It was bought, building and all, by a foundation that raised $5.5 million from 900 donors. That story is the reason to publish a directory: here is where the North is actually kept in the United States and Canada, what each place holds, and which ones you have to phone first.

Sauna is having a moment in North American cities, sold as recovery, longevity and cold-plunge discipline. It has been here since the 1880s, built by Finnish miners on the Iron Range and in the Upper Peninsula, where a public sauna in Virginia, Minnesota served the community from about 1912. UNESCO inscribed Finnish sauna culture in 2020 — and what it inscribed was not the heat.

The United States has proclaimed 9 October as Leif Erikson Day every year since 1964. The date has nothing to do with Leif Erikson — it marks a Norwegian emigrant ship arriving in New York in 1825. The holiday was built by Norwegian-Americans as a counter-claim to Columbus, decades before any archaeology existed to support it. Then the archaeology arrived.

Estonians once kept a season for the dead rather than a day — weeks in late autumn when the souls came home, food was left out, and nobody worked. It is among the first things a diaspora loses, because there is nothing in the North American calendar to hang it on. Valev Laube on hingedeaeg, what it actually asked of people, and why it is worth reconstructing.

The first generation carries it, the second half-carries it, the third has the recipes but not the hands. An American historian named this pattern in 1938 and it has held up uncomfortably well. Valev Laube on what actually survives across three generations, what is lost first, and why the third generation is not failing at something — it is doing something else.

Sweden elects its Riksdag on 13 September. Swedish citizens abroad could vote by post from 30 July and in person at missions from 20 August — but the embassy in Ottawa stopped taking votes on 4 September, and a ballot posted from North America now is unlikely to arrive in time. A look at how out-of-country voting quietly fails, and what is still possible.

Latvia elects its 15th Saeima on 3 October. Citizens in North America can vote in person at twenty-two polling stations across the United States and Canada, or by post — but postal registration closes on 25 September and cannot be extended. Here is what to do, and by when.

On 29 August, Iceland voted 52.8 to 47.2 against reopening European Union accession talks, on a turnout of 82.5 per cent. The practical answer to what changes tomorrow is: nothing. The more interesting questions are what the vote settles, what it leaves open, and what the 47 per cent were actually voting for.

Mushroom season has started in Estonia, and Valev Laube spent an afternoon being outclassed by someone who could not explain how she does it. On tacit knowledge, why the most valuable expertise resists being written down, what identification apps get dangerously wrong, and why a picking spot is worth less than the afternoons it takes to learn one.

Marimekko turns 75 this year. But the category it belongs to — “Scandinavian design” as North Americans understand it — was largely assembled here: by a touring exhibition that crossed more than twenty US and Canadian cities from 1954, a Cambridge shop, and eight dresses bought during the 1960 presidential campaign. The objects came from the North. The story about them was written in North America.

Black Ribbon Day was not carried west by refugees. It was invented in Toronto in 1985, launched in twenty-one cities in 1986, and reached the Baltic states three years before the human chain that most people now credit with the date. Canada was the first country on Earth to recognise it nationally. The story of a diaspora that manufactured a commemoration and exported it home.

The legal foundation for moving European data to the United States has now collapsed twice and is being contested again — and AI has quietly turned stored personal data from a liability into fuel. A practical, non-alarmist guide to what actually reduces your exposure, which alternatives are genuinely good, and what Estonia's X-Road already figured out.

In the middle of August, the darkness returns to the Baltic — and for a few weeks it arrives as a gift rather than a burden. Valev Laube on the Perseids, the science of light pollution, and why we keep defining the most useful things in our lives as absences.