The Tebow Family:
Doing the Lord's work in a "howling wilderness"

THE WEEKS OF CONTROVERSY preceding the thirty-second Tim and Pam Tebow anti-abortion ad during the 2010 Super Bowl have drawn national attention to the “Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association,” which Tim’s fat… Read full post »

 
750 snowmen demonstrate against global
warming on Berlin's Schlossplatz

IT WAS A CLEVER idea, I'll hand them that: inviting 2,500 citizens and tourists to build 750 snowmen on Berlin's Schlossplatz in the very heart of the city. Artist Ralf Schmerberg had originally conceived the demons… Read full post »

 
Lockdown!
A security incident closed Munich's
international airport for three hours on Wednesday

A RECENT ANTI-AIRPORT security demonstration by the Pirate Party at three German airports, in which several dozen young people took off their clothes to express their anger over the imminent/… Read full post »

German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle (right) and
his partner Michael Mronz in Bayreuth (July 2008)

ONE OF THE GREAT pleasures of living abroad is sitting back and observing how different other countries are from the US. Just imagine a story like this one hitting the press in the land of Pa… Read full post »

   
Kicking out the "black sheep" -
The Swiss People's Party campaign "Creating security:
Popular initiative to 'sheep out' criminal foreigners" 

FOR GENERATIONS, SWITZERLAND HAS enjoyed a global reputation as a place of tolerance, neutrality, democracy, and basic decency. But… Read full post »

Confessions of a small press YA author

 
Sarah Palin signing her new book in
Grand Rapids, MI on November 18, 2009.
Total sales so far: more than 1,000,000 copies.

FORGET COLUM MCCANN, FORGET Elizabeth Strout - although how can you forget them if you've never heard their names before?… Read full post »

 
The 164-foot bronze statue "African Renaissance"
is scheduled to open in April, 2010

IF, LIKE ME, YOU had the privilege of traveling widely in Eastern Europe both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you will also remember a certain style of monument – usually called &ldquo… Read full post »

WHEN THE GERMAN PIRATE Party first raised its black flag last spring and stormed ahead to receive a promising but ultimately unremarkable 2 percent in the September Bundestag election, I thought this event was worthy of a thorough write-up in an OS post. I also assumed the movement/… Read full post »

 
The backscatter full-body scanning system:
This is you embarking on your next vacation

THE RECENT FAILED "CHRISTMAS" bombing of Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit is focusing attention on an ingenious but controversial remedy to the scourge of international air terrorism: high-tech sca… Read full post »

IT'S TAKEN NINE DECADES, but the unclaimed female torso that was fished out of Berlin's Landwehr Canal in the spring of 1919 has finally been released for burial. It had been kept on display in the pathology department of Charité Hospital as a classic example of a water corpse or "fl… Read full post »

 
Official poster for Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

AS EVERY CONNOISSEUR OF horror films knows, the scariest monsters aren’t the ones you see but the ones you don’t. In his latest film, The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story, winner of this year's Palme d’/… Read full post »

  
"Work makes you free"

THE THIEVES CAME BETWEEN 3:30 and 5:00 this morning. Somehow they cut a gap through the fence and circumvented the guards without being seen or heard. The four meter long sign was impossible to miss – it spelled out the words Arbeit macht frei and could/… Read full post »

A RECENT PRESS REPORT about a tomato that was inexpertly tossed in the direction of former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin in the Mall of America recalls a similar incident that occurred in Frankfurt forty-one years ago. That time the thrower not only had a better aim, but her historic tos/… Read full post »

 
Peter Lenk's sculpture "Peace Be With You"
on the taz building in Berlin

IT'S STORIES LIKE THIS that drive home just how different Europe and America can be from one another. On 15 November, 2009 the left-wing German newspaper Die Tageszeitung ("taz" for short) unveiled a provocative/… Read full post »

 
Johannes Heester, 1903-

WHILE IT IS NOT exactly what people in his adopted homeland call a "round birthday," by the time you turn 106 every birthday is a cause for celebration. This time it is the turn of the Dutch-Austrian singer and actor Johannes Heesters. He is not only the wor… Read full post »

ACTUALLY, THIS POSTER WAS created when the virtually unknown Christian Democratic politician Herman Van Rompuy was voted in as prime minister of Belgium in December of last year. Yesterday evening, over a private dinner in Brussels, he was surprisingly chosen as the chief representative… Read full post »

1,000 giant dominoes are lined up from the Reichstag
to Potsdamer Platz to recreate the fall of the Berlin Wall

TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARIES ARE OFTEN melancholy affairs, no matter how happy and festive the occasion is. We can't help but think of how much time has passed and how few of our… Read full post »

 
The Brandenburg Gate on November 9, 1989

FOR AS LONG AS there have been calendars, specific dates have marked significant historical and spiritual events in their respective societies. The Americans celebrate their independence on the fourth of July, the French mark the storming of the… Read full post »

EVERY MORNING, ABOUT HALFWAY into my daily jog along… Read full post »

EVERYBODY HAS SEEN THE images, but how many have sat through the whole thing? In 1927, when Fritz Lang first unleashed his 204 minute-long studio-busting sci-fi thriller Metropolis onto a bewildered public, the answer was “precious few.” Set in the year 2000, it bombed alrea/… Read full post »

 
Dr. Martin Goldstein, alias "Dr. Sommer"

THE TERM “SEXUAL REVOLUTION” has become such a cliché in recent decades that it is hard to imagine that it ever had a tangible meaning. And yet, the transformation of global sexual mores that picked up steam in the 1960s… Read full post »

CHANCES ARE THAT IF you come from a small town you are sick and tired of always having to describe to people where it is located. But if you're lucky, you won't have to explain why it… Read full post »

A blogger called Andreas Fecke apparently liked my recent article on Youssou N'Dour so much that he immediately translated it into German and put it on his own blog (giving me all due credit). I am, of course, touched by this, and what better way to repay the compliment than by… Read full post »

 
"Home" at last:
The Bust of Nefertiti in Berlin's New Museum
(14th century BCE)

IT TOOK ONLY A few hours to obliterate Berlin's New Museum, the brightest jewel in the capital's proud crown of cultural heritage sites. British bombs blasted holes through its roof on the night of November 22… Read full post »

   
The Leipzig Monday Demonstration
of October 9, 1989

IT WAS ALEXIS DE Tocqueville who wrote that “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.” While this observation clearly applied to Eastern Europe’s doomed communist governm… Read full post »