This week

I read…
Drunk, and Dangerous, at the Keyboard by Alex Williams
“The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends.”
Sorry, Dad, I’m voting for Obama by Christopher Buckley
“Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.”
The Global Cities Index from Foreign Policy
“The world’s biggest, most interconnected cities help set global agendas, weather transnational dangers, and serve as the hubs of global integration. They are the engines of growth for their countries and the gateways to the resources of their regions. In many ways, the story of globalization is the story of urbanization.”
A Six-Pack of Joes from BBC News
“The next president of the United States will not be called Joe, but Joes of various kinds have been all over the news from the campaign trail.”
The Comprehensive Argument Against Barack Obama by Guy Benson and Mary Catherine Ham
“As the saying goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Questions abound: Is this man prepared to be president? Does he hold mainstream values and policy preferences? Who has influenced his thinking, and where does he want to take the country? Has he been honest with the people from whom he seeks votes?”
It’s hard out here for a Mom… by Susie from the blog What Was I Thinking?
“So, yea, ever since her third grade teacher had her reading about how messy ejaculating boys are, I’ve tried to screen teacher-recommended books. (…) I guess my somewhat pessimistic view that there is no one who is going to look out for my kid’s well-being the way I do, was reinforced (…) there is nothing in the world more precious to me than her brain (…)”
And in Norwegian…
Om å gjøre det slutt med andre enn kjæresten by VirrVarr
“Når du begynner å date noen, kan du backe ut. Når du begynner å henge ut med noen, har du ingen høflig retrettmulighet.”

Countdown to Election Day

November 4th! It’s not that far off anymore! I don’t want to go to school; I want to stay home and read articles and polls and blogs. And I want to blog about the elections myself. As always, life gets in the way. So I’ll recommend some sites:
RealClearPolitics – all the polls, links to articles and blog posts from everywhere. This site was my curriculum when I studied American Presidential Elections in Paris.
CNN’s America Votes – facts and background on for example how the election works, CNN’s state-by-state predictions, plus of course news articles and video clips.
Monticello Society – election coverage in Norwegian, including poll updates every day (I recommend subscribing by RSS) and comments on the Norwegian media coverage.

Capitalism is dead – Buy souvenirs!

From The Economist print edition October 18th-24tg 2008

This week

I read…
The Things He Carried by Jeffrey Goldberg
“The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists,” Schnei­er told me. (…) “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schnei­er said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels.
Canadian Immigration Problems
The possibility of a McCain/Palin election is prompting the exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly. Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

American politics translated

As requested by Julie Balise, here is a pretty direct translation of my article explaining American electoral sociology to Norwegian readers. Until she succeeds at learning Norwegian through Facebook, I promise to blog in English as much as possible.

 

Fall 2008 Soundtrack

Thinking of music as the soundtrack to my life is just so white. Oh, well. Some of these songs are new, some are very old, but if this fall were a tv series, they would all be in the soundtrack.

In an alternate universe, I’m American

“I was so nearly an American,” writes Stephen Fry. So was I, as everyone knows. Stephen has an American alter-ego he calls Steve. Steve is confident to the point of rudeness, eats jelly, wears jeans and calls his mother “Mom.” I can pronounce Julie in English or in Norwegian. The idea of an alternate life – a Julie who moved to the US at age four and never went back to Norway – is fascinating. Whenever I speak American English with real Americans, or find myself saying “we” and meaning “all Americans”, I wonder who I could have been.

I’ve lived two incomplete lives – I was an American child without a future and a Norwegian teenager without a past.

It sounds dramatic, but I thought this idea for the first time when I was still an overly dramatic American little girl. “Julie can be a bit over-dramatic sometimes,” my kindergarten teacher wrote on my first report card. I didn’t care about report cards. I had an active imagination, and people who didn’t play along with the story line in my head, annoyed me. Every now and then, I would go to school and introduce myself as someone completely different – a princess, a witch, my own older sister. I spent at least an hour reading alone in my room every day. No one (except my sister who wasn’t allowed in my room during “quiet time”) seemed to think this was a problem. I had plenty of friends and prominent positions in several “secret” playground clubs. I was the girl who got the lead in school plays. I took writing classes and acting classes after school, and my short stories were five times as long as the other students’. I was bad at math – I got the answers right, but I was too slow. I didn’t care what my friends wore to school, as long as my own outfit was just the way I wanted it to be. I preferred dresses, but my mom made me wear sneakers to school, and sneakers with dresses was a fashion crime to me, so I started wearing jeans. I was a Girl Scout, which meant crafts and sleeping over in the Science Museum. Because I was Norwegian, I couldn’t eat candy except for Saturdays, my parents didn’t want me to watch TV as much as I wanted to, and I got the day off on May 17th. And I knew I was going to move away from everything and everyone soon.

This American girl didn’t grow up. Some time between age ten and eleven, she stopped existing. When I turned 13, I was a Norwegian teenager. I studied my classmates’ back pockets and learned that there were at most three acceptable brands of jeans in the world. I was thrilled when fashions changed and wearing skirts was finally “allowed”. I was the girl with “too many opinions”, the girl with the best grades in the class, serious, professional – elected into the student government every year, despite never running for office. I was really good at math. I still didn’t care about report cards, but I worried about seeming like a nerd. I was a walking dictionary, but I didn’t know the words to children’s songs. I got lost in places where my classmates had grown up. My friends had a shared childhood which I couldn’t remember.

At the start of ninth grade, I came back from a summer in the US, with layers in my hair, an unknown brand of jeans and “power bead” bracelets on my wrists. I had gotten a glimpse of American high school, and I desperately wished I knew which clique I should have been in. I didn’t fit in at my small town Norwegian school, but I wasn’t an outsider either. Because I had grown up in the US, there was a convenient excuse whenever I stepped outside the line. My clothes weren’t European designer brands, but they were American. I didn’t drink alcohol, but I organized Halloween parties and brought candy corn to class. Of course I was “good at school” – I got a head start by being bilingual. I was never going to do drugs, because that might make it difficult to move back to the US some day. My classmates seemed to accept these excuses. I did too. I had a single explanation for every difficult teenage emotion: I don’t really belong here.

As I write this, I’m wearing clothes from France, Sweden and Spain, and shoes from Germany. I’m listening to Swedish music. In Fake Plastic France – the American student community in Paris – I was so European. I didn’t wear flip flops, I didn’t go running and I would never drink soda with food. I casually paid a small fortune for underwear. I didn’t know what beer pong was, and I preferred wine anyway. In journalism class, I argued against the public’s right to know the names and addresses of crime suspects, but I impressed my teacher by knowing about Rawls’ veil of ignorance. I joked that I wished there were no other Norwegian girls at the American University of Paris. Being the only one would have given me another convenient excuse for weirdness.

But I know that I’m not me because I’m European or because I’m American or because I’m both. I like my Swedish indie pop, French lingerie, Italian coffee, and American television because my friends do. People don’t belong in places. People belong with people. As a Norwegian girl, I’ve met people who are so important to me I can’t imagine a life without them. Dreaming of an alternate reality in which these people don’t exist to me, actually hurts. But I still do.

I wonder if over-dramatic Julie would have gotten in to Harvard. If she would have followed American dating rules – if those rules even exist. If she would have been more confident, more ambitious, more naive than me. If she would have had an easier life, a more interesting life. She would have known what to vote in elections. She would have longed for Freia milk chocolate rather than Ben&Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream. Her classmates wouldn’t have held her responsible when the US went to war. She would idolize Norway, because she only saw it in summer. Her relationship with her grandparents would be uncomplicated, but distant. She wouldn’t ski, but she would ride a bike. It would take her longer to learn that race and culture are not uncomplicated outside of elementary school classrooms. She might have worried about being too average rather than too much of an individual.

Moving away from a friend is the least painful way to lose one, and having grown up in the same place as your classmates doesn’t mean you’ll never be lonely. American Julie might have learned that before I did. But she would have missed out on most of my friendships. It’s hard to imagine anything in her alternate reality life making up for that.

For Julie Balise, probably the closest I’ll ever get to meeting my American adult self.

Amerikansk politikk – presise fordommer

I en pause mens jeg leste til en eksamen i “American Presidential Elections”, åpnet jeg Aftenpostens nettsider om det amerikanske valget. Forsidesakene var deprimerende: rykter om Obamas kokainmisbruk og kåring av Obamas kone til mest sexy kvinne i amerikansk politikk. Heldigvis skriver Aftenposten også gode artikler om valget, men de skriver lite om hva kandidatene mener politisk. Det er imidlertid ikke Aftenpostens feil hvis norske lesere får inntrykk av at amerikansk presidentvalg handler om rykter, meningsmålinger, støtte fra de riktige menneskene, dramatisk medieomtale, skandaler og kun vage politiske uttalelser. Det er i stor grad det amerikansk politikk dreier seg om i praksis.

Artikkelen ble trykket i Argument 3-2008. Den er basert på en midterm eksamen i faget "American Presidential Elections" der spørsmålet var: "Who will win the Democratic primary elections in Ohio and in Texas?" Jeg forutså valgresultatene – så forutsigbart kan amerikansk politikk være.

Kaffebarguiden: Kaffe Gram

Julie drikker kaffe spiser gulrotkake.

Det er latterlig at jeg ikke har tatt turen  (fem minutter til fots) opp til Sagene for å teste Kaffe Gram før nå. Det er snart et år siden jeg leste om stedet, og et semester i Paris er egentlig ingen unnskyldning for manglende kaffebarblogging. Unnskyld. I anledning Kaffens Dag i september, var jeg på Sagene for å få gratis kaffe (i mengder) fra Kaffebrenneriet. Og først da!

Jeg vil egentlig ikke si noe definitivt om kaffen før jeg har testet den mer enn en gang. Min enkle cortado var god.

Så spiste jeg gulrotkaken.

Gulrotkaken på Kaffe Gram bør ikke spises offentlig, i hvert fall ikke hvis man er sjenert. Man mister konsentrasjonsevnen fullstendig, enhver samtale stopper opp og det eneste man kan tenke på er hvor fantastisk det føles. Mmmmmmmmmm! Det er det eneste man kan si, og det sier man – høyt – enten man vil eller ikke.

Ellers er det forfriskende med en café som ikke velger en av to caféstiler – minimalistisk eller påtrengende jeg-er-bare-tilfeldigvis-så-koselig. Kaffe Gram har flamingotema. Og et bad som må oppleves.

Jeg kommer tilbake. Om et år eller noe.

This week

This Weeks are normally a Sunday thing, but let’s just say I was busy/tired on Sunday. This is technically a combined This Week for this week and the last one.
I read
Fear of fairy tales “There’s a very important reason why these tales stick,” says Jack Zipes, a German professor and folklorist at the University of Minnesota, who has written such books as “Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion” and “Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry.” “It’s because they raise questions that we have not resolved.” What happens if we clean away unresolved conflicts in fairy tales? Joanna Weiss writes: It’s a great way to sell just about anything, but it’s also precisely the opposite of what makes fairy tales compelling in the first place.
Spare me the sermon on Muslim women
It’s easy to forget that Muslims are not inherently more sexist than folks in other religions. Muslim societies may lag behind on some issues that women in certain economically advanced, non-Muslim societies have resolved after much effort, but on other issues, Muslim women’s options run about the same as those of women all over the world. And in some areas of life, Muslim women are better equipped by their faith tradition for autonomy and dignity. writes author Mohja Kahf. I don’t even know if this is true, but it’s certainly very interesting. The main point is that faith in itself is not to blame – culture and interpretation of religion are the causes of the problem. (via Foreign Policy Passport)
Is the Vice Presidency Necessary?
The Vice President has only one serious thing to do: that is, to wait around for the President to die. This is hardly the basis for cordial and enduring friendships. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote this in 1974, and today, it made me feel a little bit better. By the way, I like that I can read articles from the seventies online. (Via Foreign Policy Passport)
Will somebody please leave this woman alone? (Via Foreign Policy Passport again.)
Ooh… a soft computer screen! (blog by Eirik in Norwegian, video and NYT article not in Norwegian) Could this be a way for newspapers to handle the layout problem?
And in Norwegian…
God gammel hårgang
Nesten alle eldre norske kvinner velger samme frisyre, skriver Benedicte Ramm i Dagens Næringsliv fredagsmagasin D2. Hvorfor det? Å gjøre en reportasje ut av det temaet er egentlig genialt. For en stund siden blogget jeg om en annen god reportasje i D2. Jeg er offisielt glad for at jobben min abonnerer.