“Dear Elders, You may already know that I am legally required to send my sons to school because we live in Germany and home education is not permitted here. In this country, all children are taught a curriculum designed with only white children in mind. A quick flick through most standard school atlases will reveal… Read More »
My friend Hani Yousuf: A few weeks ago I met a pleasant Austrian woman at a party in a bar in Prenzlauerberg, the formerly East Berlin area now home to the young, professional and cool. It was a weeknight, lights in the bar were violet and dim and conversation was possible. We were celebrating a… Read More »
As you’ve probably heard, the Pirate Party got elected into the Berlin state parliament late last year. They got 8.9% of the votes, which gave them 15 seats. Last month in local elections in another state, Saarland, they got 7.4% of the votes, but more importantly, they got 25% of the first-time voters and about… Read More »
Elizabeth Grant at Open Democracy: … so long as the narrative of a tolerant Germany is more important than the experience of those who are testing that dream, the country will be condemned to repeating these traumas and disgraces. Racism has much to do with accepting what you don’t understand, and, as such, the fight… Read More »
In the current edition of The Economist: In some countries it [citizenship] is, in effect, on sale. In others, such as America, it may be an accident of birth, with no conscious choice involved. Rather than making a fetish out of passports, a better approach would be to use residence (especially tax residence) as the… Read More »
First some ground explanations. Here in Germany, the favourite fashion label of neo-Nazi’s is Thor Steinar. The brand was banned in Germany in 2004 because its logo lookred like that of the Nazi period SS. The label subsequently rebranded itself and now has a legally acceptable logo. In any case, the neo-Nazis love it and it is… Read More »
I recently read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a very instructive book on the recent financial that looks at the crisis from the point of view those who made money from it. So when I learnt from the Planet Money blog that he has written a piece for Vanity Fair on the country I now call… Read More »
John Lanchester in LRB: If European monetary policy is run according to German national interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances, or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German national interests. If they are unwilling to do either of… Read More »
On 11.01.10, I had a public defense of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The questions were firm but fair, and I came away with a nice grade (yes, German Ph.D. dissertations are graded). Thanks to everybody who in one way or another made writing the dissertation less… Read More »
1. Google’s Africa play 2. Microsoft opposes a filing by Apple that seeks to trademark the phrase App Store 3. When the whole family is staring at screens, maybe it is time to try tech detox? 4. The informal economy: a story of ethnography untold