Culture in the Blender

It seems almost unfair that such a small part of the world population could vote in the US elections. Luckily, the Americans came through.
Sweden had a very bad prime minister for quite a while, up until the last election. But who cares if Sweden’s prime minister is an idiot other than the Swedes? No one. […]

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The IHT reports that WTO negotiators are suggesting that the WTO structure needs to change to accommodate the global south in order to simplify negotiations.
Is this the beginning of the re-balancing of economic power from the global north to the global south? Is this the moment?

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Although I’ve witnessed first-hand the kinds of campaigns that Europeans that fear more integration can put on, it surprises me every time how strongly people can feel about avoiding it. Today’s article in the International Herald Tribune about the Irish voting ‘no’ to further integration was no less of a surprise than why so many […]

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Pollock and van Reken mention in their groundbreaking book that one of the unique properties of third culture kids is that we experience the world as three-dimensional, meaning that we can easily imagine that we are on the scene of a news report and understand the consequences, suffering or difficulty reported on.For me, the 四川 (Sìchuān) earthquake is […]

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I’m back in Hotelland. I’m at a conference and staying at the conference hotel, the San Fransisco Marriott. (In line with being a typical TCK, I am becoming highly educated by getting a PhD in materials science and engineering.) Last night, I sat in the bar on the top floor looking out at the San […]

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Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, is using her global, cosmopolitan outlook to both make the world a better place and money, says CNN Money. This woman is fantastic. Not only has she made it to the top as a woman of color/foreigner relative to the United States, she might get a US government post (Haha! […]

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I have heard a lot of statements to the extent that the future does not belong to America lately. I have to seriously ask myself whether that is true. If the future does not belong to America, then it may be in my best interest to leave after my Ph. D.. My task must therefore […]

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I’m reading my daily round of news on the Globalist and on BBC News. In light of what I read yesterday and the day before that, I can’t help but wonder what these backlashers make of news items like that the UK will help pay some of Africa’s debts, that the train fire that prompted […]

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“In regions in crisis, nostalgia for the past and religious fundamentalism appear as shelters from the storm. In a globalized world, not paying attention to this is tantamount to paving the way for the clash of civilizations.” -Jaques Chirac in the Globalist, 01/13/05
If nostalgia for the past is a major divider of American society as […]

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logodaedaly pointed out to me what the culture wars are, and in my happiness over a new-found word I googled for it. I found something interesting: an article that argues that the divide is over modernity, not politics per se. This made much more sense to me than the culture wars as apparently usually thought […]

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