Culture in the Blender

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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All day today, I’ve been listening to a song by S. H. E. (Taiwanese band) called Ni kuai le wo shui yi.

It has some clear r&b influences in both singing and the music, and the play with the words is fun. (On a more third culture analysis level, I think the American influences are easy […]

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While watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica that had originally aired on Australian television, I recognized the song they used in the trailer for the next episode. I couldn’t remember who sang it, but I remembered the name of the song - Spaceman. A little YouTubing later, I remembered it was by Babylon Zoo and […]

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An older Racialicious post made me think of the attitude I’ve seen both online and in real life from some Americans, who seem to think it’s endlessly cool to be Japanese. I’m not really sure where this meme comes from. Americans are very patriotic, so what makes a subset of probably the most patriotic people […]

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I learned something interesting in my culture and psychology class the other day. Americans think that the world is more malleable than the self. (Whereas Chinese, and probably most everyone else, think that the self is more malleable than the world.) Maybe that’s why so many Americans play their music out loud without headphones on […]

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One of the most obvious differences between the United States and Europe is how racism is structured. In some ways, racism in Europe seems rather simple. Perhaps it seems simple to me in part because I’ve seen it so much more than in the US, but the key concept seems to be xenophobia. The people […]

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