What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
Tom Jensen is the editor in chief of Berlingske Tidende, and after years of coddling the American left he seems to be waking up to the fact that something is rotten in America: I’m not “cisgendered.” I’m a man.Tom Jensen, Berlingske.dk, May 1 Jensen is apparently trying to bring his newspaper’s Danish readers up to…
Personal update: Covid appears to have completed its course through our household. The girls are back in school and Herself is up and about, although the virus seems to be lingering with her. And once again I was left untouched as covid struck everyone around me. One would think that by the time February 2022…
This is my nineteenth Christmas in Denmark, so the Danish Christmas traditions no longer trouble, discomfit, or surprise me. They’re the traditions my own children have grown up with; I’ve not only metabolized Danish Christmas internally, but helped advance it forward to a new generation. And yet it was never my intention to raise my…
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…
