The OECD published PISA 2025 on 8 September — the largest assessment it has ever run, and the worst results it has ever recorded. Estonia is sixth in the world and first in Europe. Latvia lost 45 points in reading in a single cycle. Denmark's minister called it a learning crisis. And the one domain where the North did well is the one nobody expected.

The government fell in May over a drone incursion and a timber contract. Fourteen lists and 1,428 candidates are on the ballot. A third of the Rīga constituency lives abroad — and in 2022 only about one in eight of them voted. A guide to the 15th Saeima election for readers in North America.

Scandinavian crime fiction taught English-language publishers that translated books could sell in the millions. Baltic literature never got the same lesson — and the funding numbers explain why better than any argument about quality.

Twelve chefs signed the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto in Copenhagen in November 2004 and changed how the world eats. Noma reopened last month under a new head chef, holding neither a Michelin star nor a place on the World's 50 Best list. Meanwhile the Baltics, who never wrote a manifesto, now hold ten stars — one of the countries having paid over €1.5 million for the privilege of being judged.

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.

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.

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.