This month's cover story takes us to Zaragoza, where the EU is testing the future of European defense.
It wasn't until I started chasing bylines that I began to forgive my parents for saddling me with such a ridiculous name. Even in a country where 4% of the population was named Carl, showing up on the playground as Carl Karlsson took a certain fortitude.
But as a rookie reporter, my parents' apparent cruelty began to look a lot like foresight. Editors seemed to be forever looking for a Nordic angle, a Scandinavian peg, someone to explain why the Swedes had done it differently. It often took a little narrative gymnastics (and the occasional leap of logic) to make the pieces fit. Still, who was going to question Sweden from someone named Carl twice?
Of course, I soon learned this wasn’t so much about a bad name as it was simply about good storytelling: looking to the fringes, or looking harder at the center, to make the familiar feel new.
Since joining The Parliament as features editor last year and, more recently, taking on the role of editor-in-chief, I've had the pleasure of welcoming several new reporters and editors. Some arrived as seasoned Brussels insiders; others are just beginning to cut their teeth. What brought them all to our door was the chance to spend more time on journalism that travels a little further, lingers a little longer and, hopefully, leaves readers a little wiser.
As we continue to grow our operation — hiring new reporters and editors in the months ahead as well as expanding our freelance roster — we'll invest even more in the stories that set us apart. Like every newsroom, we have pages to fill and readers to keep. But the best way to do both, we think, is to keep looking where others may not.
This month's cover story is a case in point. Paula Soler travels to Zaragoza, where the EU is putting its rapid deployment force through its largest military exercise yet — a dusty training ground that reveals more about Europe's defense ambitions than any Brussels press conference could. On neighboring pages, Federica Di Sario follows the trail of Russian spies through Vienna, while Peder Schaefer unpacks a fictional AI doomsday scenario that has set Brussels' technologists on a collision course with lawmakers.
Finally, I'm glad to welcome Eva Hilinski to the team. Eva brings experience from The Brussels Times and has already done outstanding work for The Parliament as a freelancer covering Ukraine. It's a pleasure to have her on board.
This is our last edition before the Brussels summer scatters our staff to beaches, mountains or anywhere with functioning air conditioning. We'll return in September with a fresh edition and plenty more stories from Brussels and beyond.
As always, our staffers and contributors from different corners of the world will bring their own sensibilities to our quest to understand where Europe is heading. But if you come across a story about how Swedish meatballs shaped European labor policy or an IKEA instruction manual for better governance, you'll know who to blame.
— Carl-Johan Karlsson, Editor-in-Chief