The Beldonstevens Blog

A recipe for braided brioche with baklava-style filling.

A week into social distancing, March 16 2020, I wrote: "A thousand years ago, it was last Monday." Those first seven days felt so...

A quick first-night-of-Passover post, on a Passover that is both strange and good--and, so, exemplifies the holiday's central feeling:...

The Jewish holiday of Passover (in Hebrew פסח, pesach) starts this week: at sundown on Wednesday 8 April in the 'Gregorian' calendar, or...

In a previous post, I wrote about how I've been thinking through the present situation with help from students in my course on "Ancient...

For our final full day in Paris, Jenny and I had separate plans for the daylight hours before reuniting for a fancy dinner after dark:...

After the Louvre, Jenny and I managed--unusually on this trip, in a Paris in the grip of transit strike--to take the métro: it wasn't...

As a third stage of our visit to Paris, Jenny and I combined more focused explorations of the city's histories of Christian and Jewish...

For our third day in Paris (Monday--eep, I'm really behind), Jenny and I aimed at more recent histories of the city--of-'about' and...

At the end of our second day, the monument we'd walked to--and the universally recognized symbol of Paris, the fin de siècle, the...

And--to continue first off with the letter 'd'--our dimanche, Sunday, started in earnest with déjeuner, lunch. When planning the trip, we...

After months of planning, it’s finally nearly here: tomorrow, J & I leave for Paris! We’ll be there for a week, staying in Montmartre—we...

Etc, mise en abime