What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
My first career was in politics. My jobs involved a lot of writing: memoranda, speeches, whitepapers, presentations, letters, reports, talking points, even monographs. I’d studied classical rhetoric in college and had a lot of preconceptions about effective political communication; these quickly fell by the wayside as I was forced by bosses, clients, and circumstances—that is,…
One of the top stories on DR’s homepage this morning was the one I wrote about Monday: Bretman Rock’s appearance on the cover of Playboy. DR’s headline proclaimed, ” ‘Huge’ with a homosexual man on the cover of Playboy.” The image accompanying the headline featured a heavily made-up and mostly bare-chested Rock against a wall…
Big stories tend to get covered simultaneously by major media outlets around the world, but smaller stories sometimes take a while to percolate their way around the world, and they can change along the way, sometimes significantly. So when I see a European headline about a story I’d seen covered days or weeks earlier by…
Good news, everybody! Turns out it’s not racist to require voters to provide identification after all. Not only that, but it turns out Critical Race Theory is no big deal: it’s just about teaching kids about the history of slavery and race relations in the United States. These revelations are brought to us courtesy of…
An article published on Berlingske.dk this afternoon doesn’t have much “news value” at first glance, but I’m glad to see it because I so desperately want Denmark not to follow America down the road to hell. The headline is “American elite university drops Latin and Greek to fight racism,” and that’s a straightforward summary of…
If you believe in communism—that is, if you understand and adhere to its tenets—you’re a communist. If you believe in socialism, you’re a socialist. If you believe in capitalism, you’re a capitalist. If you believe in nudity, you’re a nudist. If you believe in race, you’re a racist. That is, if you first of all…
There’s a passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905) that I’ve cited a few times on this blog. It’s a typically playful Chestertonian spin on a bit of the Gospel, specifically John 20:29, but since most of us aren’t as fluent in scripture as Chesterton’s readers were back in the day, let’s refresh: Jesus saith unto…
If you still don’t understand why so many of us consider “wokeness” to be a toxic blend of stupidity and racism, invest 139 seconds of your time in watching this video. It was recorded on April 23 but was released on Twitter yesterday and has already been viewed several million times. The Daily Mail has…
Nothing excites the Danish press more than international recognition, so the headlines this Monday morning were overflowing with coverage of the “Best International Film” Oscar awarded to Druk (the English title of which is apparently “Another Round”) at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony: Druk receives an Oscar for Best International FilmBerlingske.dk, April 26 Thoms Vinterberg wins…
There’s an awful lot of “woke” in the news these days. So much that it’s hard to keep up. For example, I learned while browsing the Danish news Saturday morning that established European translators had been blocked from translating Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Shakespeare translator…
