I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to The Christian Science Monitor. My career as a foreign correspondent was essentially dormant when I filed my first dispatch from Estonia, for the Monitor following Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014. Since then I have covered a wide gamut of stories from around the Nordic/Baltic region for the storied newspaper. Movies, hacking scandals, KGB informer lists, you name it, I have reported on it for CSM.
The greatest number of stories have been from Finland and Estonia, where my “Baltic thing” began in the early 90s when I wrote for The International Herald Tribune and The Chronicle of Higher Education and other assorted publications. However I also have reported from Sweden, Lithuania, as well as Latvia, where I am currently based—30 stories in all, which are archived below.
In the course of reporting these, I would like to think, the Monitor and I, including my editor, Arthur Bright, have helped spotlight some of the interesting and newsworthy developments in this still poorly misunderstood quadrant of Europe, while occasionally helping to correct an egregious wrong: my 2018 CSM story about the continued use of the swastika by the Finnish Air Force was reportedly instrumental in persuading the Finnish government to retire that fraught insignia. We also have tried to highlight some of the positive, under-the-radar developments in this part of the world. My 2021 story about the Latvian government's energetic campaign to persuade some of the Latvian diaspora to return to the motherland is an example.
My career as a foreign correspondent is in good shape these days. Today I also report for The New York Review of Books from Northern Europe, as well as a number of other noted outlets, including The Washington Post and Foreign Policy, amongst others. But if it is, I will never forget that my foreign reportage, which was my first great journalistic love ever since I published my first dispatch from the Netherlands for The New York Times all the way back in 1976, is back to snuff thanks to The Christian Science Monitor.
