Sweden

Thursday

Amber Duke

Bill Maher lays bare Sweden’s refugee problem

Comedian Bill Maher is often a fascinating person to watch. His show, Real Time with Bill Maher, airs Friday nights on HBO and features monologues and a panel of guests who discuss the week’s news stories. What is interesting about the program is that Maher is a sort of “anti-woke” liberal — the weed-smoking, pro-choice, left-libertarian kind — that despises political correctness. This makes for entertaining viewing because Maher alternates between spitting out hideous ideas, hilarious jokes that cut both sides of the political aisle and occasionally stumbling upon — and being willing to vocalize! — an important but perhaps inconvenient truth.

Thursday

Amber Duke

How they treat trans children across the pond

England's National Health Service made the major announcement last week that they would limit the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs for transgender children to clinical trials. A report released by the NHS on June 9 states that "there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment and that they should only be accessed as part of research." The decision is the latest consequence of a multi-year review into how the medical community in England should treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

LGBT activists gather outside the Stonewall Inn (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Saturday

Amy Rose Everett

Opening a bottle with: Olly Bartlett, Stockholm Brewing Company

Quizzed on how best to assimilate a new culture, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once uttered the famous line: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” I never met the man, but still I miss him and his deft writing. The Opening a Bottle series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in whatever city I’ve washed up in. I land in Stockholm as the leaves start to fade brown, and the mercury is already dropping. My gloveless hands turn alabaster as I doggedly cycle around the island of Djurgården, or "museum island." I gape at the once-sunken Viking boat. I dodge the ABBA tribute. I take aim at hilltop open air museum Skansen, then ditch my wheels (out of bounds). I swear a lot. I get really fucking cold.

stockholm

Sunday

Lewis M. Andrews

Forget electric cars: America should invest in electric roads

As President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy begin to square off on a compromise debt ceiling bill, the subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for the purchase of electric cars will prove a major, if not the major, sticking point. McCarthy clearly knows that Goldman Sachs, Brookings and other respected observers have predicted that these EV credits could cost taxpayers $390 billion over the coming decade — or at least twenty-seven times the original estimate. Yet the president is also acutely aware that preserving the IRA’s role in facilitating a rapid transition away from gas-powered vehicles is the reddest of lines for his progressive base.

electric roads

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Turkey’s heavy price for pressuring the Russians

If you enjoyed the weeks-long intra-NATO spat about whether to send heavy tanks to Ukraine, then you’re going to love the ongoing kerfuffle about whether Sweden and Finland should be admitted into the transatlantic alliance. Whereas Germany was the lone holdout in the first instance, Turkey is the obstacle in the second — and going by the fiery words of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the squabble won’t end soon. Erdogan, in the midst of his toughest election campaign in two decades, has been using his veto over Sweden's and Finland’s NATO memberships to press both countries on one of his top priorities: cracking down on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group Turkey, the US, and the European Union all label a terrorist organization.

greece

Tuesday

John Pietro

Why Sweden and Finland still haven’t joined NATO

Sweden and Finland officially applied to join NATO last May, overturning their long-standing policies of neutrality. If their membership goes through, it will be one of the most consequential accessions in NATO history, bringing two technologically advanced militaries right on Russia’s doorstep into the fold. But as the eight-month mark approaches, neither nation has received the unanimous support from the other members that it needs. To date, twenty-eight members of the alliance have approved the Scandinavian nations’ memberships, with Hungary and Turkey as the two holdouts. Hungary has indicated it will vote to accept the accession in early 2023, which will leave NATO’s most undemocratic and troublesome member, Turkey, as the last hurdle.

Sunday

Amy Rose Everett

Self-preservation in Sweden and Denmark

I am completely naked, shivering and mildly terrified. The word “vulnerable” goes partway to describing my state as my toes curl over the edge of a slippery jetty, in pitch-darkness. Did I mention that I am completely naked? This is not a fever dream, but a midweek wellness pursuit on the island of Nacka, where Stockholm city and countryside meet. It’s 7 p.m. and the sun is long gone. I inwardly curse a previous incarnation of myself, who booked this intrepid getaway while holed up in my warm apartment. The trip grew from my preoccupation with two Nordic lifestyle concepts currently in vogue: Swedish lagom (loosely translated as “balanced living”) and Danish hygge (retreating somewhere cozy, often with friends).

hygge

Thursday

Ben Domenech

NATO vote shows conservatives are getting it right

Yesterday's 95-1 vote in the Senate to support the admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO is another in a series of signs the Republican Party is figuring out what it means to have an "America First" foreign policy. The additions of the two nations serve to strengthen the NATO alliance in ways long supported by national security-minded conservatives. But they are also a vindication of the more recent arguments, advanced by Donald Trump, that members of NATO must necessarily meet their obligations in terms of military budgets. Finland and Sweden are not freeloaders — they have advanced militaries and spend a great deal on them, and have a long history of taking the threat of Russian aggression seriously.

Saturday

Ben Domenech

Why expanding NATO is an America First idea

There is an open tug-of-war going on right now over the direction of foreign policy on the right. The attempts by various factions and individuals to seize and define the principles of an “America First” foreign policy has led to politicians and institutions using similar language and labels to defend very different positions. Yet the overarching direction of foreign policy on the right seems clearer in the results than in the conversations. Even as there are disagreements among Republicans in Washington — on Ukraine funding, for instance — they seem to have much more in common when it comes time to actually take a vote or make a decision.

america first nato expansion
a$ap rocky
Ben Sixsmith

Trump joins the A$AP Mob

Despite his slender frame and greater affinity with high-end fashion brands than street gangsterism, 30-year-old American rapper A$AP Rocky has never been one to avoid confrontation. Videos on YouTube show him threatening to ‘snuff’ a giant English man, who promptly tells him to ‘do one, bruv’. Thank God some people have kept the spirit of the duel alive.Last month, however, words ended and fists flew. Rocky was arrested during a tour of Sweden, and video emerged of him swinging a young man through the air and into the pavement. Frankly, it was an impressive, if acutely dangerous, display of physicality. This, and he and his colleagues’ subsequent kicking and stomping of the young man and his friend, made this look like an open and shut case.

Thursday

Calla Jones Corner

Swimming with the snakes

Perhaps being a Pisces gives me a natural affinity for water. Not all water, mind you. I’ve never liked to swim where I can’t see what’s beneath me. I prefer to believe that my love of water comes from spending so many early summers in our swimming hole in Weston, Connecticut. When my father was making a barn into our house and the surrounding fields into gardens, lawns and terraces, using boulders and rocks from the notoriously rocky Connecticut soil for foundations and borders, he was intentionally creating an unusual home. When he used more rocks to make a swimming hole for dipping his sweaty body, he unintentionally created a watery playground for the family — a summer haven.

snakes

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Is NATO about to get even bigger?

The last time NATO inducted a new member was in 2019. The alliance agreed to accept North Macedonia’s request for membership. The small Balkan country was an odd choice to become the alliance’s thirtieth member state. At roughly 7,500 troops, North Macedonia’s military was smaller than the Los Angeles Police Department. Its entire population was smaller than Brooklyn's and its economy was one fifth the size of North Dakota’s. Three years later, NATO is set to become even bigger. Finland and Sweden, two Nordic nations with a decades-long policy of military neutrality between the West and Russia, will very likely submit their own membership bids as early as next month. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, neither power was especially interested in becoming full-fledged members.

Friday

Calla Jones Corner

The need to knead

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.

bread

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Fact check: has Sweden really just renounced its anti-lockdown strategy?

Has the great Swedish mea culpa finally arrived? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, is quoted by the Financial Times saying that his country ‘should have imposed more restrictions to avoid having such a high death toll’. His 'admission', continues the FT, 'is striking as for months he has criticized other countries’ lockdowns'. The Guardian goes just as hard on the story. 'Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes,' screams Bloomberg. But turn to Wednesday's Swedish press and there’s something strange: they seem to have missed the scoop entirely. All the stranger, seeing that Tegnell's remarks were made to Swedish radio. So was something lost — or, rather, added — in translation?

sweden

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Trump picks a Swedish model

Donald Trump is moving toward a Swedish model. His vitality sustained by regular doses of hydroxychloroquine, President Prophylaxis is pushing hard for re-entry. His goal? Normality or, this being the Trump presidency, the next best thing. And that, as Trump so succinctly put it, means ‘a lot of death’.Our future is Swedish. Not naked saunas and reindeer stew, but the Swedish model: herd immunity against COVID-19. The Swedes went their own way when, as in Ingmar Bergman’s chucklefest The Seventh Seal, the plague swept up from the south. Being hardy northerners, they pursued their own corona-strategy and continued to live as normally as possible.

swedish model

Monday

Slavoj Zizek

Free Julian Assange — his fate is inextricably tied to our own

I visited Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison on November 21. One small detail, insignificant in itself, did strike me as emblematic of how prisons function with regards to welfare and human rights. All the guards were very kind and repeatedly emphasized that everything they do is for our own good. For example, Assange is in solitary confinement 23 hours per day. He has to eat all his meals alone in his cell, and when he is allowed out for an hour he can’t meet other prisoners. The communication with a guard who accompanies him is reduced to a minimum. Why such severe treatment since he is now just in protective custody? (He served his prison time and he is only there to prevent him escaping extradition.

julian assange

Tuesday

Matilda Olofsson

Greta Thunberg’s arch-nemesis, Matilda Olofsson, foils her plans once more

So, Greta Thunberg has declared her intention to sail to New York for the UN climate summit on a hi-tech eco-friendly racing yacht. The boat is owned by German property developer, Gerhard Senft, is based in Brittany and sponsored by the Yacht Club de Monaco. It has been fitted with solar panels and underwater turbines to generate zero-carbon electricity on-board. Greta’s transport will produce zero-emissions and is the ultimate carbon-neutral solution to long-distance journeys...or so she hopes. Greta has long been a foe of mine ever since she messed with my plans to wreak havoc by insisting that my school take part in a strike for climate change awareness. From that day forth I swore vengeance.

matilda olofsson greta thunberg

Friday

Dominic Green

Will Trump declare war on Sweden?

The nation waits with bated breath for news of one of its favorite and most delicate sons, the ‘rap artist’ A$AP Rocky. Mr Rocky is held hostage by the military of the barbaric regime of an anti-Western failed state called Sweden. The Scandinavian rogue nation is widely suspected of having colluded with the military of another barbaric regime of another anti-Western failed state, Iran, which last week kidnapped an entire oil tanker under similar circumstances. Mr Rocky claims to have been minding his own business with two of his minders when they felt it necessary to kick an Afghan asylum seeker in the body and head while taking an early evening stroll in the rubble of Sweden’s Mogadishu-like capital, Stockholm.

sweden

Thursday

Matilda Olofsson

My name is Matilda Olofsson and I am Greta Thunberg’s arch-nemesis

Greta Thunberg first came to my attention one Friday after I had spent the final hour of school putting cling-film over every toilet seat so that the following Monday, students and teachers would find themselves in a horrible mess when it came to do potty-time. The next week however, Greta encouraged the other children to join her in a strike, the purpose of which was to demand the Swedish government take steps to reduce carbon emissions. While this was going on, the school caretaker discovered my plan, and undid all my hard work. Curses. I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for Greta and that pesky janitor. From that day, I swore revenge.

matilda olofsson

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

Sweden’s political panic attack

 Uppsala, SwedenWhen I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told me, ‘but how can I explain this to my young kids?’ As Sweden goes to the polls next weekend, its politicians face another conundrum: how do they explain all this to the country? I live in Uppsala, a leafy and prosperous university town north of Stockholm. Around Gothenburg, the attacks have been far more dramatic: in mid-August, 80 torched vehicles made the city’s normally dull boroughs seem more like Aleppo.

sweden democrats fire