Being a fully-fledged Norwegian patriot who celebrates our national day religiously, the deterioration of the social democracy is painful to behold. Since Norway became wealthy on oil in the ’60s, it’s prided itself on its commitment to the weak and…
Visit pretty much any metropolitan center in the U.S. — from Boston, Newport News, and New York City to Chicago, St. Paul, Cleveland, and even all the way out west to Los Angeles and Seattle — and the chances are…
When I moved to Norway from the U.S. in 1999, one of the new pieces of information that most surprised me had to do with its national holidays. In the U.S., all but one of our 11 federal holidays could…
It started back in the 1980s with the construction of Aker Brygge, a tourist-trappy wharf on the Oslo Fjord packed with pricey restaurants and bars. In 2008 came the eye-catching, blindingly white Opera House, which, poised at water’s edge, was…
Back in the heyday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the stated goal of the civil rights movement was to strengthen the harmony of American society by persuading the nation’s less enlightened white citizens to transcend their preoccupation with skin color….
Charles Fourier, the communist ancestor of Karl Marx dismissed as a “utopian” by Marx because geniuses do not allow for antecedents, declared his sexual orientation “sapphianism,” which he defined as a male lover of lesbians. As a sort of unintentional…
Years ago, I read a novel that impressed me deeply. But I couldn’t recommend it to anyone because it was in Norwegian, the English translation long out of print. I’m happy to report that you can now get the English…
Recently I dropped my cell phone somewhere between our home and the supermarket across the street. When I opened our front door with the intention of going out and looking for it, I saw that somebody had found it and…
Five hours, baby. Of course, by Netflix standards, it’s the flicker of an eyelid, the flap of a hummingbird’s wing, the life expectancy of a sandwich in the vicinity of Jerry Nadler. But given that the five hours in question,…
