In the world steel industry, China’s exponential lurch from small bit player to dominant producer (far and away) in just ten years serves as good illustration for the country’s sudden dominance in all kinds of industries. Just look at shipping—China, as the world’s biggest steelmaker, rather necessitates being its biggest iron ore importer. As such, [...]

News of E. coli-tainted hamburgers from Lidl hospitalizing seven French kids yesterday reminded me of “America Week” last week at my local Lidl, Germany’s hyper cheap grocery chain. Lidl often has ethnic themed weeks (Greek, Scandinavian, “Asian”, Italian, French, etc., assuming “American” is an ethnicity) when they stock limited food items firmly based on national [...]

Off to Pittsburgh!!!

Unless you’re living under an U.S.-sized rock, you know that the Greatest Show on Earth, the Football World Cup starts (“kicks off”) today in South Africa. And even the Americans are supposed to have their best team ever this year—though we’ll see how that pans out in the Brit v. Yank match tomorrow. Here, a [...]

Once upon a time there was a guy named William F. Buckley. He was sharp, opinionated, well-spoken and avowedly conservative. But he was a delightful sparring partner and obviously considered his positions—even if you disagreed with every last one of them (though he was for legalizing marijuana — can you imagine a conservative taking a [...]

Seems to have the U.S. at the top, the first time in 80 years. Of course, it won’t count psychologically if Canada beats the U.S. in hockey tonight. And look at Germany up there. View the vancouver2010.com medals’ table

The United States is—so says Klaus F. Zimmerman, convincingly.

One of the New Yorker’s best writers just spent the last three or so months on a stint with the American Academy. And before I could post something about it, he’s already returned to the U.S. But not before blogging about Berlin’s life-threatening bike paths and aggressively-named streets. Or writing about 1989. Or getting into [...]

For obvious historical reasons, Germany has a conflicted relationship with its military forces. For more than a few pacifist Germans (and in a way ‘pacifist’ is nearly synonymous with being German today), the fact that the country even has active armed forces is barely tolerable. That’s why Nicholas Kulish’s piece No Parade for Hans resonated [...]

Not satisfied with desecrating the memory of Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5, Bon Jovi managed to make Monday’s rained-on Wall celebrations a little soggier with their new song about following or not following. T’was a poor choice by any measure of taste, but there’s no accounting for popular taste (though the song was no [...]

The “my first banana” cover of German satire magazine Titanic‘s November 1989 issue is easily its most famous. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and East Germans coming into the West were buying bananas like crazy, like the exotic unknown fruit of freedom it was. The cover shows Gaby (upper right), fresh from the East, [...]

Tech writer David Pogue is too much of an Apple cheerleader to get my regular read, but I accidentally learned something from his column today, which I accidentally read. (Because it was a list and had cocktail-party in the title?) Q: I’m always losing cellphone calls. How come that never happens in Europe or Asia? [...]

The NYT’s young Berlin bureau chief, Nicholas Kulish, sees a connection between Germany’s refusal to pony up stimulus funds in proporition to the U.S. with a red line guarding a “barefoot zone” beyond which no shoes my trod. Everyone strictly obeys the line and grown men freeze in place when they see it, demonstrating a [...]

Ryan Lizza’s full-on fellation of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in last week’s New Yorker is not journalism per se but it does offer a helpful history of the office, which I mistakenly thought always existed. I didn’t. The office of chief of staff was created by Dwight Eisenhower, who redesigned the working structure of [...]

Scion Space – Fairytale Of Berlin from Scion ART on Vimeo.

1972 (c) Annie Leibovitz from the current American Photo magazine excerpting Leibovitz’s new photobook At Work. This relationship of sorts (and this shot) is covered in the film Gonzo, produced by Alex Gibney (Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) and one of the best documentaries of the year (trailer below). [...]

Google’s ongoing Street View project has turned scarily comprehensive as it fans out across the earth. They just doubled their U.S. coverage yesterday. What’s possibly next? Google Ocean Floor? This is the building (“Edwards”) where I lived my final year of college. Top floor. Those were the days. View Larger Map Berlin Street View isn’t [...]

Sorry for the bad pun, but I’m not quite awake (after getting to bed at 8am this morning) and haven’t even begun to process all the post-election news today, but I still feel giddy and intoxicated from what happened last night — and that’s not just post-party chemical residue talking: I think I’m nursing a [...]

Die Zeit blogger Jörg Lau got my star spangled dander up a tad today describing Boston area infrastructure (and by (his) extension, America’s) — in the “power region” of MIT and Harvard even! — as laughable and amazingly unmodern. That was until I saw the the American Society of Civil Engineers has graded its current [...]