Culture in the Blender

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

A week ago, I flew to see my boyfriend and had to connect through O’Hare. Even without a snowstorm, there were weather delays – due to lightning this time. I brought along Ruth Van Reken’s book Letters Never Sent to read. While I can’t say that I recognized my own experience other than very occasionally, [...]

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

This seems to be the time to have deep things to say about celebrating the 4th of July, whether it’s about American hypocracy in some way or other or tear-jerking statements about freedom and liberty. What I have to say is neither.
Conversations with non-Americans have made me think about this country for a while now. [...]

While getting my iTunes library in order and exploring some new music suggested by a friend, I started looking up old Europop on YouTube. Following a trail of “Oh, it’s this song!”, I found Dr. Alban’s Look Who’s Talking. I do not feel that that listening to that song says anything about the race of [...]

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious has written a post about American hip-hop politics. The post and the comments revolve around weighing the poor quality of music on American radio channels in general (there are few non-commercial channels that focus on bringing quality or novelty to American radio, meaning that radio channels mostly cater to mass markets [...]

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 [...]