Culture in the Blender

My experience of attending school in Sweden was that the Social Democrats have a serious case of delusional thinking regarding what to reward and communicating that you have to work hard to get what you want in life. Conservative Swedes tend to agree, as far as I can see, but I was somewhat surprised to [...]

The trial of Shell regarding the execution of Ogoni human rights and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa has started. This post will not be what one usually reads regarding multinational corporations (MNCs) and globalization and general evilness. Don’t get me wrong – what Shell has done is absolutely terrible. But having your life caught up with one and becoming a TCK because of one makes it difficult to just say that MNCs are evil and should behave. Some nuance and better understanding of why some MNCs misbehave is needed.

Ruth van Reken has written a post about Obama’s TCK-laden staff – check it out! Thanks to Ranterraver for the link.

This morning when I switched on the BBC, the first thing I saw was an Al-Arabiya interview of Obama. The words coming out of his mouth – that he’s there to listen first, and that the United States all too often commands – were words I never thought I would hear in a hundred years [...]

So now it’s over – the world has its first third culture kid president, and Americans their first Black president. I have nothing to add to the ramifications of Obama identifying with the American African American community and the history of racism in the US. Others can say far more consequential things on that (important) [...]

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. [...]

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

A friend of mine sent me a link to an opinion article in the New York Times by David Brooks on the effect of the cognitive revolution on discussions about religion. He argues that the materialist-religious debates about the existence of God will be replaced by debates in which scientists whose spiritual beliefs overlap somewhat with Buddhism who challenge [...]

When I was a college freshman (first-year university student in the US), I wrote a paper arguing that CNN delivers objective news, because their market niche is just that. The professor gave us an assignment to write about bias in the media, or something like that. The only thesis I could come up with was [...]

The two classes I’m auditing intersected in an interesting way recently. In Judy Wajcman’s book Feminism Confronts Technology, there is a chapter on technology as masculine culture. One of the subsections is on engineering. Wajcman argues that
“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the [...]