"I have gone to the forest."
—Knut Hamsun

"Many people think they can take the welfare state with them in the suitcase when they leave home. … We are not a travel agency or an insurance company."
—Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Foreign Minister

Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet—ready from birth for a life in harmony with the inhospitable Nordic nature.

Maybe my mother was lacking some important vitamin during the pregnancy. No skis accompanied me into this world. Instead of seeking the woods and mountains like a true Norwegian—"There is no bad weather, only poor clothing!" as we say—I came to prefer asphalt under my feet, the safety of skyscrapers, and the soft breeze from passing subway cars, deep underground. I am allergic to trees.

But I didn't miss out on the other thing Norwegians are born with: citizenship in the world's most generous and equitable welfare state.

This is about what happens when rich, well-traveled, and well-educated children from a tiny Viking country covered in forest grow up and try to write fiction.

In the weeks leading up to the final round of the 2010 Chilean presidential elections, Eduardo Frei, the candidate for the center-left Concertación coalition, ran a political advertisement in which an invisible hand scribbled words such as "ass" and "go to hell" on a white ballot. A sober voiceover stated: "You may be angry and you may think there's no way out, but submitting a blank or annulled ballot is a vote for the Right." Similar ads concluded with a pencil sharply crossing the line next to Frei's name, as if reminding viewers of the proper way to mark a ballot. The underlying sentiment was equal parts desperation and exhaustion, as the coalition that has governed Chile for twenty years was reduced to begging voters not to graffiti their ballots. Read More

If anyone was worried that the Obama administration would represent a break with the past, the President's recent actions in Latin America should assuage any lingering concerns. As Obama was preparing to announce an escalation of American commitments in Afghanistan, he was also preparing, more quietly and furtively, to recognize Sunday's elections in Honduras, which took place under a military coup government, as well as to expand the US military presence in Colombia to seven military bases, under the pretext of enlarging the limitless "war on drugs." Latin America has long been the testing ground for US policies that found more forceful expression elsewhere—"empire's workshop," Greg Grandin has called it. From the 1901 Platt Amendment, which legitimated US indirect control over Cuba, to the proxy wars in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the essential character of the US was seen most clearly in the countries just to the south. The events of the last few months reveal no fundamental change. Read More

Old Berliners in the media complained that twenty years ago even the Wetter was better. In 1989, the stars apparently shone down on revelers dancing on the Brandenburger Tor as they tore the wall to pieces. And the next day, when the East Berliners chugged onto the Kurfürstendamm—then the main drag in West Berlin—in their gas-guzzling Trabbies, the sky was blue. 

Of course, when I flip through photos from the famous day, the newly reunited Berlin of twenty years ago looks as grey as grey can be. Helmut Kohl (the then Chancellor) and Willy Brandt (the Social Democratic Party hero who partially reconciled East and West through his Ostpolitik) stood on a balcony above the Schöneberger Rathaus, in the midst of mist and rain, in front of thousands of people. Read More

Last Friday morning, the world turned its gaze toward Norway, the narrow, fjord-fringed country that Americans associate with all things un-American: a comprehensive cradle-to-grave welfare program; a devotion to universalistic foreign policy and international philanthropy; a taste for rotten fish and bitter aquavit. At ten o'clock, I walked out of my news agency office and across Oslo's leafy Palace Park to the Nobel Institute. It's there that the Nobel committee's chairman announces the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Built in 1867, the canary-yellow gilded-age mansion that houses the Institute has a warm, tranquil air. Its interior—three stories of lightwood parquet floors, soft colors, and high casement windows—does too. The American embassy, a jaggedly angular, obsidian structure, cater-corner to the Institute, with a high fence and cadre of machine gun wielding guards, throws its neighbor's tranquility into sharp relief. As I walked past the embassy, it struck me that even on this beautiful October day—sunny and warm yet decidedly autumnal, the leaves on downtown Oslo's many lime and maple trees just beginning to turn—the place still managed to look severe and foreboding. If I were superstitious, I might have seen this observation as some kind of portent. Read More

Late in 2007 I arranged a meeting in Arusha, Tanzania with an American in the travel business. Underneath a pile of titles and affiliations, this big gregarious dude, whom I'll call Morgan, worked to bring tourists to desolate villages, a specialty sometimes called 'poorism.' I'd planned to write a magazine story about delivering tourism dollars to the Barbaig, a polygamous tribe who wear plaid blankets and sandals cut from tires, like the more famous Maasai. Read More

Every time we speak of certain cities, we are saying something about Venice.

When CNN.com asked its readers for their thoughts on the reconstruction of New Orleans, one Mississippi resident responded, "New Orleans has always had a European feel to it. Why not enhance this by making it like Venice, Italy? Leave the areas that didn't flood as they are and make the rest like Venice with canals for roads and the houses and properties on concrete ‘islands.'" This was not one individual's fantasy. Elsewhere, numbers of Americans confirmed the idea. "Rebuild New Orleans as a water-street city," wrote a blogger. "It's the natural way to solve all its problems," a post that received a significant number of affirmative comments: "Good idea …"; "I really like this idea"; "It's interesting that you've posted this idea, because I was thinking the exact same thing today"; "I think that this is a beautiful idea as long as someone finds a new home for all of the alligators." Read More

As the rest of the speakers greeted each other on stage with warm effusions and European pecks on the cheek, literary critic Michael Hardt, the sole American-born speaker at the London conference, stood apart from the crowd. With folded arms, he gazed out not just into but somehow beyond the audience of the packed lecture hall.

Hardt's behavior seemed to be a defensive performance of self-sufficiency, as if to pre-empt his inevitable failure to fit in with the rest of the "glittering array of Continental academic rockstars," as Terry Eagleton put it, that had assembled that weekend for the conference titled "On the Idea of Communism." Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, Hardt's mentor and collaborator—as well as their translators and champions in the English-language academy and a few other European notables less well known outside the Continent joined Hardt at the conference. Hardt's reputation has always been doubled by a secret tendency to diminutivize him in relation to Negri—his more famous (or notorious), frequently jailed co-author on Empire and Multitude—and it was hard not to regard Hardt in this light when one saw him onstage next to the old masters. Yet he seemed even more out of place among the rest the other scholars who, Eagleton quipped, had "married in" to the elite circles of Continental philosophy, a group that included the two Badiou scholars—Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward—who joined Hardt in the first panel of the conference. Read More

Like many academics, I attend a lot of conferences. When you're first starting out, there's a certain glamor to these affairs. In a line of work in which infantilization rules—imagine yourself as a 40-year old graduate student anticipating your first good paying job, while your college friends have two kids and a summer house on the shore—traveling on planes to other cities and staying in hotel rooms on a university department's dime can feel very adult indeed.  

Eventually the excitement fades. After a few trips on Southwest, a few nights spent sharing hotel bars with salesmen from Buffalo, and one or one hundred panels on Elizabeth Bowen or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, the luster begins to dull. If you are the sort of academic who tries to make his or her work something more than scholarship—something that bears directly on political life—you are bound, usually quite quickly, to encounter a fundamental conundrum. So we can quote Milton on the freedom to publish, and talk about the effects of late capitalism on literary form. Our papers, we tell ourselves, are incisive critiques of the status quo. But how intimidated is the status quo by a rigorous Marxist analysis of  Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" anyway? It doesn't help that Power, despite our repeated invitations, rarely shows up at events like "Rethinking Modernities" to suffer our blistering remarks. 

The talk at my Thanksgiving table—as no doubt at every Indian-American household—was all Bombay. We watched CNN through eating, with its hysterical headline blazing, "Mumbai: City Under Siege." Years of suicide bombings had suddenly given way to a wholly unexpected takeover of the major hotels, more typical of James Bond-villainy than latter-day jihadism. They differed in their attire as well: News reports insisted on pointing out that the attackers and hostage-takers wore jeans and t-shirts. Read More