We missed this at first go, as my kids got bored about mediocre song number 20. But this musical number from the show pretty much sums up Sweden … and you have to love the men with strollers (about 3 minutes in).
I also wrote a post for Quartz about Eurovision, calling the competition to pick the Swedish winner the Swedish equivalent to March Madness.
America’s “driving boom” is over. So says a study by U.S. Public Interest Group, which found that after six decades of steady increases in drivership, the trend has reversed.
via Driving Is Dropping In The U.S. – WNYC.
I am in Gen X but it seems I really should have been a Millennial hipster giving up driving to live in the city. It’s also mildly funny to me that driving in the US peaked just when I moved to Sweden for the first time. And I still can’t drive here, though the prospect gets ever more tempting. Just for big shopping trips and jaunts to the country. Really.
“Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees,” wrote Thomas Friedman in his Tuesday New York Times column, “It’s a 401(k) World.”
via Planet 401(k): Tom Friedman’s bleak vision : Columbia Journalism Review.
I missed this whole debate when it happened. But, as other commentators pointed out, it totally misses the fact that the social welfare states of Northern Europe are thriving. This withering away of the state is not inevitable, only in far too many American political circles.
I’ve started writing about Daddyland again, this time around at a new business publication called Quartz.
It’s a mobile and international-focused startup from Atlantic Media, which publishes The Atlantic, among other publications.
So I’ll be taking more of a big picture economic and societal view on all the work/life issues that come up when you start talking about mass paternity leave, like we have here in Sweden (though not enough of it!).
My first Daddyland-centered post for them was about … Legos:
At our house, we’ve got a box of hand-me-down plain brick Legos tucked in a corner of the kids’ room. My six-year-old daughter tends to build ”cities,” and they are tall and sprawling, though mainly vehicles for role-playing with friends. But, honestly, she plays with the Legos less often than she does with random objects—a steel tube, a broken reflector—found on the sidewalk and turned into homemade dolls.
I don’t push the Legos either, and I’m starting to wonder about this. Am I depriving my daughter of a future as a filthy rich mobile game app developer in Silicon Valley? Am I squashing her inner geek as I applaud her dancing and pictures of flowers?
And is the answer Lego Friends?
Lego Friends is the new line of girl-focused Legos that caused a firestorm when it was announced late in 2011. The new “slimline” Lego girls and their convertibles and beauty salons outraged bloggers, inspired a protest petition signed by more than 50,000 people, and earned a pro-Lego cover story at Businessweek.
Finish reading the story here.
I’ve been absent from the blog for a while now, as I needed some time to think about how to proceed with my personal writing. But I’ve also been busy editing a couple essays for The Morning News. And here is the first one, on jet lag:
It is hard going east. It is harder going east with small children. It is hardest going east with small children into the gloom of a Swedish winter.
The planes are fast but the adjustment is slow, and I get caught in the gap between. This seems true of so much of modern connected life, but especially with kids, who ground me in their urgent and eternal needs, and in Sweden, with its fundamental tyranny of light and dark.
I’ve always taken jet lag as something to either cure or endure. But this proves impossible with my children, who cannot, or will not, fight the time shift. Instead, we linger in our altered state, and it is not fun, and it evokes death and madness but also transcendence, all at 2 a.m. as the little ones jump off the couch on a dangerous quest for buried pirate treasure.
You can finish reading here.
More work from my five-year-old daughter, this time … portraiture.
Of Tigger. Notice the thoughtful composition and contrast with a princess purse and a Swiss book about flowers.
And then a different kind of animal shot: dragon with little brother.
The hare out the window
Died on a rock two winters ago
This spring, a new one
