What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
Herself and I were startled when Joe Biden’s inaugural speech, being broadcast live by DR, was suddenly accompanied by a real-time audio translation into Danish. One doesn’t encounter a lot of English-language dubbing in a country where 85% of the population speaks English (the ratio is higher among the younger generations and lower among the…
Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, so the reign of happy sunshine and rainbows has begun. Here was taxpayer-funded DR’s lead story on their website the morning of Inauguration Day: ANALYSIS: Farewell to Trump – not to the anger and the hate, Steffen Kretz, DR.dk, January 20…
Everyone called it the Wuhan virus because that’s where we saw it start. Saying “Wuhan virus” was just shorthand for saying, “that virus that’s spreading like crazy in that city called Wuhan.” That’s what we thought. It’s what we told ourselves. We didn’t know any better. Fortunately there were people who did. People with eyes…
A little over a century ago, a young man died of tuberculosis while in prison, just three months before his twenty-fifth birthday. According to various sources, he had etched a bit of free verse into a wall of his cell: Our shadows will walk through Vienna wander the court, frighten the lords. Gavrilo Princip had…
NOTE: Danish coverage of recent American events has been universally awful: whether on television, radio, web, or print, it’s all had the calm tone of MSNBC, the editorial equilibrium of the New York Times, and the penetrative historical insight of Vox. That is, it’s been a dumpster fire of unhinged and often uninformed hyberbole. Rather…
The Politiken editorial board wants the U.S. Ambassador called in because “there’s a coup attempt in progress.” I got a breaking news alert saying so on my phone the night of January 4th. They also put out a Tweet: The text of the Tweet: “Denmark and others must speak up.” The text of the headline:…
SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve never seen Grease, there are spoilers galore ahead, so I recommend you run along on your merry way and come back after you’ve seen it. None of this will make sense if you haven’t, anyway. TRIGGER ALERT: This piece uses words and defends ideas that people who are wounded by words…
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…
As the annus horribilis 2020 draws to a close, the media are full of the usual “year in review” pieces. Australian wildfires, the deaths of Sean Connery and Eddie Van Halen, the murder hornets, the BLM “movement” and civil unrest, the American election, Tiger King, and, of course, the global pandemic and its consequences. People…
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…
I could go to any number of Danish or American articles for this, but let’s take one NPR article as our crash test dummy because it’s the one that caught my eye: Stanford Apologizes After Vaccine Allocation Leaves Out Nearly All Medical Residents, Laurel Wamsley, NPR.org, 18 December It’s a simple story: the leadership of…
The headline is the story: Two years ago Denmark had 900 inpatients during the worst flu epidemic in a long time, but the system didn’t collapse, Signe Stoumann Fosgrau, Berlingske.dk, 18 December Remarkable! Not the information itself, but the fact that we’re first hearing this from the press a full nine months into the pandemic….
A few recent and unrelated stories in the Danish and American news are worth considering together: Bodega owner fined for offering free shots to women, Christian Krabbe Barfoed, TV2.dk, 16 December Cornell offers ‘person of color’ exemption for flu vaccine requirement, Benjamin Zeisloft, CampusReform.org, 7 December Tulsi Gabbard introduces bill that ties Title IX protections…
A specter is haunting Europe. Europe in meltdown as Covid death tolls soar and progress unravels, Emma Reynolds, CNN.com, 11 Dec Europe’s Deadly Second Wave: How Did It Happen Again?, Josh Holder, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Allison McCann, New York Times, 4 Dec …it’s not the specter of covid, but the specter of broken journalism. From…
Pretty much everyone knows Aesop’s fable of the ants and the grasshopper: the grasshopper frolics the summer away while the ants work hard to set aside enough provisions to survive the winter. Come autumn, the sick and starving grasshopper begs the ants for food. “You made music all summer,” the ants say, “now dance!” And…
