Manic Bookstore Cafe

This morning on my run I saw a dead cat on the path. And that was not the saddest thing I saw. Tito's listening? Near the train station in Zagreb I love running in the city--any city--and have had many adventures this year. A couple of runs along the Tiber in Rome, where there were tented homeless encampments, but also construction workers preparing for festival season by building booths on the riverbank. A run in Zagreb early on a very hot morning, very few people about, featuring sober and silly public art projects. I took a long and beautiful--if slightly dusty--run in the countryside in Russia. I stopped to drink from a natural spring and was passed by a silent Russian man, dressed in a proper outfit for the country--high rubber boots, long pants, a jacket--and carrying a bunch of birch branches over his shoulder. I saw him ... and then I didn't. If he had been in a Russian film or novel he would have earned the sobriquet " vechnyi ded ," Eternal Grand...

Last week I spent two days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where my friend and colleague Catherine O'Neil leads a STARTALK program every summer. This government-supported language school runs four weeks, from 8:30-3:30 every day, and features fabulous language teachers from the Naval Academy. With a goal of 90% Russian language every day, the teachers have to be imaginative (after all, they don't take total beginners, but some of their students have had only a year of formal language training). They do exercises and readings, have conversations, play games and watch films (including Volodymyr Zelensky in Servant of the People , conveniently available on Netflix this summer). All in Russian. I also learned about their coffee break every morning, during which students have to go to the "cafe" and ask the grouchy post-Soviet barista (one of the fabulous instructors) for coffee, tea, or anything else they like. That seems brilliant--on the one hand the students...