Hi,The Queen died a few hours after I sent out my last newsletter. Sad news and certainly a seismic change for the UK.Other than The Queue, the most fascinating consequence is how you realise nobody really remembers the Queen not being around. You ha...

Hi,A short one this week, as I've been preoccupied with family matters.Polish stuffA few weeks back I helped prepare some of the materials for this online conversation next week at YIVO about Pola Nireńska. It's with Weronika Kostyrko, the author of...

Hi,A short one this week, as I've been preoccupied with family matters.Polish stuffA few weeks back I helped prepare some of the materials for this online conversation next week at YIVO about Pola Nireńska. It's with Weronika Kostyrko, the author of...

Hello!It's finally September. One of only two months with consistently good weather (the other is May). Very glad to be out of the heatwave months. Of course, I say that but we'll probably have the hottest September ever 🤷‍♂️Polish stuffI recently di...

Hello there!Our household had stomach flu this week and it kinda messed up a lot of plans. So I'm mostly just gonna ramble about Twitter this week.Polish stuffDue to the writing course I've been doing, I've been spending a lot of time on Twitter. Lik...

Several years after the war, a strange encounter in the heart of Paris made Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz prisoner, start wondering what it would be like to meet her camp overseer. Posmysz turned her fantasy in a successful radio play in which sh...

Get to know Piotr Szkopiak, a London-based film and TV director who’s spent a good portion of his life pondering the nature of his identity. Piotr Szkopiak was born in the United Kingdom but into a Polish family. As he grew up, he learned...

Nicolaus Copernicus, born in 1473, was the orphaned son of a copper merchant in Toruń. Thanks to his bishop uncle, he obtained a first class education at the Kraków Academy and then in Italy, where he became an avid observer of the night sky – even t...

Vera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave – although she remains relatively unknown outside of Central Europe. As the first female student of the prestigious FAMU film school in Prague, she had to fight in orde...

Stanisław Lem was a science-fiction writer whose works, abilities and quirky sense of humor convinced Phillip K. Dick that he was too brilliant to exist and must have actually been a committee of people! Indeed his rare gift for blending philosoph...

This year we have more great stories for you! There's going to be a bit of sci-fi, a pinch of socialist realism, a good portion of astronomy, and some old-fashioned moving testimonies from a region that never sleeps! Stay tuned: the first episode dro...

Like most Polish jazz musicians, Zbigniew Namysłowski learned the basics of jazz listening to Willis Conover’s “Jazz Hour”. Originally starting his musical career playing piano, cello and trombone, Namysłowski became infatuated with the saxophone...

Adam Makowicz grew up in a house where a piano was the centre of the home. His mother had long planned for him to become a classical virtuoso, but a meeting with a musician who introduced him to jazz changed this path completely. Adam packed his...

“Polish jazz group - 100$ a night” Displayed on the posters in Michał Urbaniak’s band’s van while playing across Europe in the 60s, this hippy traveling player was soon to become one of the most innovative Polish jazz musicians in history....

Urszula’s love for unruly musical experiments got her kicked out from music school when she was a young girl. A few years later, like many young Poles, she stumbled upon The Voice of America - a radio station meant to bring American culture and c...