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.

Helsinki shut all eight road crossings into Russia in December 2023 as a temporary measure. Three days ago the government moved to extend the legal machinery behind it by another two years — and the emergency law parliament passed for the same crisis has still never been used.

In 2021 Norway's Supreme Court held, unanimously, that two wind farms on the Fosen peninsula violated the human rights of Sámi reindeer herders and declared the licences invalid. The herders were paid, given a veto on renewal and promised replacement winter pasture. The pasture has not arrived, and every turbine is still standing. The clearest case in Europe of a court winning and a people losing anyway.

Harald V died on 28 August, aged 89, after thirty-five years on the throne. Fourteen months earlier he stood in Stavanger and watched a replica of the sloop Restauration sail for New York on the two-hundredth anniversary of Norwegian emigration. His son met that ship at the pier in Manhattan, and is now King Haakon VIII. A look at what the old king saw off, and at the Norwegian America waiting on the other side.

The white gown, the candle crown, the red sash, the song. It reads as something carried down from the deep Nordic past. In fact the public procession was invented by a Stockholm newspaper in 1927, the standard costume settled in the 1950s, and the tune is an Italian boat song from 1850. Which makes what has happened to it in North America — unbroken in Philadelphia since 1939 — more interesting, not less.

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.

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.

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.