Hi folks. I’ve been off-line a bit fighting with my landlord and trying to get my new apartment straightened out. I’ve moved as of the first of December. My new Internet connection is up and running, but my workstation hasn’t been able to talk to my monitor since the move. I [...]

One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and [...]

David is right. Islamist terrorism has now finally reached Europe for real.
Not just because the tragic terrorist attacks against the Neve-Shalom and Beth-Israel Synagogues took place in the undisputedly European part of Istanbul. Not just because the fear of a rising tide of al-Qaida triggered fundamentalist terrorism could once again lead to a round [...]

Posting under the header: ‘More Signs That We Are In the Twentieth Century After All’ my young Argentinian co-blogger notes crypically “I don’t know what a XIXth (or XXth) century englishman would say, if we told him that English unions would one day protest against losing skilled jobs to India”……… adding…………”and, in the heels [...]

A few months ago on my other blog, I made a point about how the costs of multilingualism have to be set against the costs of monolingualism. It seems certain quarters of the CIA and the American Republican party agree with me, according to today’s New York Times.
C.I.A. Needs to Learn Arabic, House Committee [...]

Even though it may appear that this post runs along much the same lines as my last two or three, I should warn you: appearances are sometimes deceptive. The origins of what I want to say here stretch back in time two or three days to some comments I made on an earlier post [...]

I was listening to a programme on French radio about whether the government should intervene to prohibit investigation related to genetically modified food when I came across this piece about obesity in the US. Food and the way we eat it seem to constitute an important part of our cultural identity. Do we have a [...]

[Nota Bene: Due to the deeply inane nature of JavaScript, clicking the "continue reading" link may not display images linked to posts. It doesn't work for me in Mozilla or IE. If you click on the permalink, you will see all the content.]
Reader Christophe Kotowski sends a link to today’s International Herald-Tribune (a.k.a. [...]

Today’s Le Monde points out the odd dichotomy in American policy towards “Old Europe.” It seems that the US has been playing nice with Germany and giving the French government the cold shoulder.

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Today, I attended a lecture Columbia University political scientist Jean Cohen gave at the annual congress of the German political science association. She made a long, complicated theoretic argument about the future of sovereignty in a global society to support her real point that the (alleged) American imperial project needs to be stopped.
Interestingly, on [...]