What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
On January 7, Ekstra Bladet published an editorial in which they apologized for not having done a better job questioning the government on all things covid: We FailedEditorial, EkstraBladet, Jan 7 I only became aware of the editorial today when I stumbled over it on a conservative American website (AceOfSpades). There are two reasons I…
Batya Ungar-Sargon has an article in the October 18 edition of The Spectator that provides a lucid and well-documented timeline of how the New York Times has reached the sorry state they’re in as a news organization and touches on some of the related questions about the state of American media more generally. It’s a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
An honest assessment that deserves acknowledgment. From my own American experience in theatre, radio, and publishing, the kind of self-awareness shown here by Peter Aalbæk is not something often encountered in the creative class. I’ll never forget my literary agent—a very nice guy—advising me before we embarked on a series of meetings with publishers, “Don’t…
