What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post the other day. Denmark appears to have beaten covid-19 — for now. Here’s how it did it.Michael Bang Petersen & Alexander Bor, Washington Post, Sep. 20 The lede is: “For the most part, Danes avoided blaming and shaming their fellow citizens.” That’s more than a lede:…
Toward the end of August, Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke announced that Covid-19 would lose its standing as a public health emergency (in Danish, a “samfundskritisk sygdom”). The Health Ministry’s press release was headlined “The government will not extend the classification of covid-19 as a public health emergency in Denmark.” A TV2 article about the…
Today is Sankt Hans Aften in Denmark: St. John’s Eve. The holiday is a celebration of John the Baptist’s birth, which the Gospel dates six months prior to Jesus’s: thus St. John’s Day is six months before Christmas. (More or less: changing calendars over the years have resulted in the slight offset.) Skt. Hans Aften…
I had some other stuff queued up to write about today, but all of that has to be set aside. As everyone in Denmark and very few people in America know, the Danish national handball team defeated Sweden 26-24 last night in Cairo to win the world championship. (The US team qualified for the tournament…
I don’t know how I overlooked this early December opinion piece in Berlingske: it’s hard to think of a headline more appropriate for this blog: Stop the Americanization of Danish Culture, Jacob Mchangama, Berlingske.dk, 7 December I should remind non-Danish readers that “Amerikanske tilstande” translates literally as “American conditions.” The phrase has a long pedigree…
I’ve spent a lot of time among Danes defending America from basic misconceptions about the country, and a lot of my time among Americans defending Denmark in the same way. I’m not talking about politics, but much more basic stuff. Geography. Climate. Cuisine. Education. The practicalities of daily life. Denmark and the United States are…
The American chattering class has been entertaining itself for the past couple of weeks with Jill Biden’s insistence on being addressed as Doctor Jill Biden. The right has been mocking her for it, the left has been attacking that mockery as sexism. Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an…
