Frizz in the land of the frisør

More substantive posts to come, but in the mean time, here's what you're getting:

I know one shouldn't care about things like this. And normally, in my older-end-of-Millenial adulthood, I do not. But my hair looked awful the entire time I was in Norway. Which is, again, a stupid complaint - I was in Norway! In Scandinavia for the first time ever! It was gorgeous! There were fjords and mountain goats! But somehow appreciating the rest didn't stop me from caring about this.

And in fairness, my hair did look unusually terrible. What happened was, not checking bags plus packing light more generally meant that rather than the usual set-up (the right shampoo, conditioner, hair oil, and then, if feeling decadent, hair iron), I was using a "normal"-hair-oriented 2-in-1 that the CVS in town happened to have in travel-size; a very old container of Frizz-Ease, a product that for whatever reason stopped working for me a few years ago; and the occasional hotel blowdryer. Then, on top of that, there was the weather - the daily rain that would stop every so often, but there was always just enough mist that whatever smoothed-out or vaguely ringlet-ish situation I'd achieved (mid-century starlet waves, for the occasional fleeting moment) turned into frizz. And by frizz I don't mean curliness, kinkiness, or any other hair texture one might Embrace. I mean the classically middle-school result of using the wrong hair products for one's hair texture. The last time my hair had looked this terrible was probably when I was 12.

What didn't help matters was that the women of Norway didn't appear to have this problem. Around me, as my hair grew frizzier and frizzier, packs of Norwegians would pass by with long, glossy, hair-commercial hair. Because our society so often defines beauty as Scandinavian-looking-ness, I suppose, the percent of women who resembled supermodels beyond just hair was substantial. Or maybe just felt substantial, because I was so keenly aware that my own hair wasn't having its finest hour, and was selectively not noticing the women who weren't Uma Thurman to my Janeane Garofalo. That said, in Bergen there was this amazing poster I should have taken a picture of, in front of a hair salon, with a photo of the same young blonde model, a Before and an After. The Before showed her with long, straight Marcia Brady hair, and the After with a light-haired version of what my hair was looking like on the slightly-less-misty moments of the trip.

The grand (supermarket) tour

Hello from sunny-ish Norway! My husband and I decided to visit not-just-Belgium, and are making use of the fact that we'd already crossed the Atlantic to see a part of Europe neither of us yet had. We arrived in Bergen on the Norwegian national holiday, which was a bit of a concern because it just sounded like everything would be closed, but it turned out to be the best possible time, given that the entire town (aside from us and a few other tourists) was in traditional dress. A woman we met in our hotel lobby, a fellow guest who'd come for the big event, explained to us that everyone gets one of these outfits at confirmation (a Christian bar/bat mitzvah, I'm led to believe), and you wear the one from your mother's hometown. (What, I wonder, is the traditional dress of Brooklyn?) Men, meanwhile, were in these amazing felt (?) vests, shorts (?), knitted socks, everything incredibly involved. Outfits included special shoes. Everyone was waving a flag. Even the dogs had patriotic ribbons. According to the woman in the hotel, who is the ultimate authority as far as I'm concerned on all that was going on, Norwegians are nationalistic but not militaristic - a relief when all these young boys marched down the street bearing what looked like, but presumably weren't, arms.

Predictable observations: The fjords are beautiful - more so, even, than I would have guessed. The people are very, very blond - a man working at the tourist-oriented fish market asked us where we were from, guessing France, then, when we didn't respond, Italy and Spain - the obvious white-people-with-dark-hair assumptions in Europe, maybe, who knows. And everything is really, really, really expensive. A casual cafe sandwich or salad will be something like $25, anything in a restaurant-restaurant maybe $40, so what you have to do (unless you're paid in this currency, I suppose) is to shop at a supermarket... which is also expensive, so the thing to really do is purchase half the contents of a Belgian supermarket (packaged waffles, waffle cookies, chocolate, bread, and, less successfully, sliced cold cuts) for the price of one Norwegian cafe snack and just eat that for your entire trip.

Unpredictable, for me, was that Norway and Flanders aren't interchangeable. I'd just sort of assumed, being a provincial American, that Germanic-language-speaking Europe was all basically the same culture. It's hard to articulate exactly how these places are different, but it does seem they are. See also: New Jersey is not Texas. People do not march through my husband's hometown in Belgian traditional dress. There was once a thing where everyone in the main square was dressed as a circa-Liberation US soldiers, but that's something else entirely.

Belgium, meanwhile, did not have fjords, but did have family I hadn't seen in ages, as well as (as hinted at above) amazing food, coffee, and beer, the last of which they were (of course) giving out samples of at the supermarket. It was a new (?) beer called Waterloo, and the display included a life-size Napoleon cardboard cut-out with a space where you could put your face and pose for a photo which (of course) I did.

Time

Jeffrey Goldberg's opus on the future of European Jewry isn't quite as panic-stricken as the title - "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?" - suggests. Some thoughts:

-It's an extensively-reported piece, and not an easy one to brush off, not that it isn't being brushed off by some who've read it. Anyone who requires further evidence that Jew-hatred persists might want to check out the comments the piece is getting. It's hard to see, though, how an article about European anti-Semitism could exist that wouldn't attract charges of being overblown and propagandistic.

-That said, there are a couple small but crucial... I'm not sure if they're errors, exactly, so much as misleading moments. How is Dieudonné indicative of "[t]he union of Middle Eastern and European forms of anti-Semitic expression" and what does he - a non-Muslim (see the correction here) - have to do with "the European Muslim community"? And there's nothing particularly sinister about the Brussels Jewish museum being empty - I visited a couple years before the attack and, as is often the case with tiny museums, I don't remember it being overrun.

-There are some issues, too, with the framing, in the title but also in the piece itself. Repeating the idea that The Jews are a coherent entity, and that The Jews might up and leave an entire continent where they are, on a day to day basis, quite safe, is a bit... problematic might be the word. The sorts of questions you ask can determine the sort of answers you'll get. If you head out asking, "Is it time for the Jews to leave?," you're not going to hear from the people who are French, etc., of Jewish origin, and not considering emigration, or not any more than non-Jewish Europeans might be.

-There's also a question of methodology - if you're looking for Jewish Opinion, you sort of have to seek out people who are in one way or another active in the Jewish community. When plenty of Jews aren't, and may have different experiences. I had this issue when writing my dissertation - to figure out where 19th century French Jews stood on intermarriage, the obvious place to look was the Jewish press. But this offered only hints of how other Jews felt on the matter (hints like, columnists complaining that Jews weren't panicked enough). While I was able to counterbalance some of this with Alfred Naquet's writings (a fiercely secular and twice-intermarried politician of Jewish origin), the balance was inherently skewed. I think Goldberg, by necessity, runs into some of this issue as well.

-But Goldberg gets at something key with his follow-up question: "Is [Europe] still a place for Jews who want to live uncamouflaged Jewish lives?" That's precisely the issue - the "uncamouflaged" bit - and is a different one than whether individuals who happen to be culturally/ethnically Jewish are on the cusp of being hunted down. This comes up again later in his piece: "Of course it is possible, in ways that were not 80 years ago, for Jews to dissolve themselves into the larger culture. But for Jews who would like to stay Jewish in some sort of meaningful way, there are better places than Europe." It's not, to be clear, that it's somehow OK - somehow not anti-Semitism - if the only Jews who are in danger are the ones who worship at synagogues, or go to kosher supermarkets, or wear identifying clothes or accessories. It's anti-Semitism, but it's not racial anti-Semitism. And racial anti-Semitism is no-choice, no-opt-out, echoes-of-the-1930s anti-Semitism, and thus a different beast. Such is, at least, the impression I got from the piece. (See also, again, the UCLA controversy.)

On France

In light of some recent news, a couple thoughts:

-Americans following this story need to refrain from projecting American notions of race onto France, which has its own history. I, an American Ashkenazi Jew, am white. French Jews who look exactly like me aren't... whatever the equivalent of "white" is in France. The white privilege framework maybe doesn't apply to groups of white-by-US-standards people who are being attacked as a historical scapegoat minority where it is they actually live.

-It's possible both to worry about backlash against Muslims, and to avoid leading with that concern. That said, France hasn't been, ahem, all that fantastic about integrating its Muslim-or-of-Muslim-origin minority. Any analysis of these events that can't get past Terrorism is unlikely (as history has shown) to make much headway. Explain but not excuse and all that.

The personal, the political

Not a good news day. First, the young man in California who killed seven people because hot college women wouldn't go out with him. Then there were the three killed at the Brussels Jewish Museum, killed because, I suppose, anti-Semitism, although exactly which strain of it is yet to be seen. At first I wasn't quite sure what to say about either, beyond the generic, social-media demonstration of finding terrible things terrible. But as a woman who spends lots of time on college campuses (and who's dealt in the past with relatively minor, but still scary, versions of that man's attitude), and a Jew who spends a good amount of time in Belgium (including at that museum!), I may be slightly more unnerved than most by what are, to just about anyone, some awfully, well, awful news stories.

So. Re: the first, and Jezebel's already on the case, there's the bizarre Nice Guy entitlement angle. The women this man happened to be attracted to didn't reciprocate and, rather than, I don't know, pursuing other women, the guy goes and shoots a bunch of people in a college town. He was, it seems, fed up with being a virgin at... 22. So this wasn't even some kind of lifelong frustration at being someone intimacy has passed by - not, of course, that a 52-year-old man in the same situation would be somehow within his rights to respond in this way. Because the man who did this was rich and non-black, and because it's simply not done to talk about gun control, I suppose we're in for another national conversation about mental illness that also won't go anywhere. A crime like this seems as much about misogyny as insanity - clearly most committed misogynists don't do things like this, nor do most who are mentally ill. But we're probably not going to get a national conversation about Nice Guy Syndrome.

Re: the second, we can look at this as a reminder of why Jewish sites, especially in Europe, even the tiny little sites that only people working on their dissertations on obscure topics ever seem to go to, are so heavily guarded. Interesting that the NYT story about Belgian anti-Semitism describes Belgium as terrible, almost as bad as France. France is worse? Argh. I do wish, though, that some of the people I know within the American Jewish community, who have made it their mission to be critics-of-Israel, spent a bit more time recognizing and denouncing the tremendous global anti-Jewish sentiment that's also going around calling itself criticism-of-Israel. Not because these Facebook friends and such don't have legitimate criticisms of Israel - they do, if not all of them criticisms I happen to share. But there's just this sense I get that they're not seeing the wider picture, that "Israel" isn't just this country with some very serious flaws, but that it's also used as a pretext for old-school anti-Semitism, quite possibly including this latest tragic attack.

As for Belgium itself, I guess all I can add, personal-knowledge-wise, is that it would be a mistake to think of it as a uniformly anti-Semitic country. I've always been accepted, and I mean by people who know my background - that a white Jew in secular dress passes by unnoticed in Europe isn't all that interesting. And my impression is that racism and xenophobia in Belgium as in France are directed more at visible minorities at this point. That said, I don't know what it's like to live there - to live there as a Jew, that is - and have no experience with being a visible Jew (i.e. Orthodox) there or anywhere.

Up and down the stairs

Netflix did warn that "Upstairs, Downstairs" would be addictive, but there should be some special warning above and beyond that for people already somewhat addicted to that part of European history. To questions of emerging modernity, of the changes in family life, of the mingling of aristocrats and upwardly mobile Jews. I mean, I'm sure everyone has trouble not allowing the next episode to start, but if you're picking up on every last hint they're dropping that World War I is imminent, gah! It's the soap opera version of my dissertation, but across the channel.

As much as I get that it's, you know, fake, I start getting very much into the show, really living the history, really concerned about the outbreak of World War I. Now, this one's kind of new for me. As a child, I had many nightmares about the other World War (due to what may have been excessively early and explicit Holocaust education), but WWI is not something I'd ever feared on a personal level. But now! You just see what's coming! Someone writes "1914" in an inscription and you're like, watch out! They don't know about trench warfare, but it's imminent! Nothing will ever be the same! So much for Europe!

Where I'm at in the series, it's not looking good. The house just took in a family of refugee Belgian peasants. Because a good % of my family-by-marriage would have been war-torn Belgian farm-folk at the time, and because when it comes to this show I apparently have too easy of a time suspending disbelief, I start to think that this is somehow a documentary about whichever French-speaking relatives my husband may have had back in the day.

So I was alarmed, to say the least, when I heard this historical reenactment this morning. I had to remind myself that no, I'm not in Belgium (the bright-blue skies gave that away) and no one's invading New Jersey at the moment.

In defense of a cluttered countertop

According to the Guardian, high-end kitchen gadgets have recently (!) become status symbols. Is this new in the UK? British readers, fill me in on this. Johanna Derry cites increased sales of some such items since last year, so maybe? But how about the year before? Derry's nostalgic for the days "when the only kitchen appliances we kept on our counter tops were kettles and microwaves." But when was that the case (and student apartments don't count)? Is this because British people moved from tea to coffee more recently?

Regardless, grumpily complaining about the whosawhatsises that now exist for absolutely everything - asparagus peeler! avocado halver! - has been a thing in the States since I can remember. The ingredient-specific knick-knack devices represent the junk that accumulates in middle-class homes (and, more generally, Western decadence), while the really high-end machines, often in an unused kitchen, offend because they're evidence of the rich, who don't have to cook, playing at domesticity.

For a time, the status symbols were these luxury items, preferably housed in a giant suburban kitchen, or in Frasier's Seattle apartment on "Frasier." Then it switched over, and status became, I don't know, a small NYC kitchen where you prepare Greemarket produce? Or maybe it's always been the same - the gadgets have been like expensive workout clothes - cool to hate, but coveted all the same. It's the same dynamic re: wanting to be hardcore.

But allow me to more enthusiastically defend the having of kitchen implements. What I've found is, the anti-gadget brigade are people who romanticize domestic labor. I'm thinking of a recipe for buckwheat crepes I was looking at (I'm on a buckwheat crepe kick, don't ask), and it called for buckwheat and all-purpose flour (all you'd possibly need, flour-wise) and, because why not, some mortar-ground buckwheat kernels. It's as if home cooking doesn't morally count unless it's been made unnecessarily difficult, with a Luddite flourish.

These same commentators also tend to live in cities... where counter space is particularly scarce, but also, crucially, where restaurant meals and takeout are easy alternatives. If you can't so readily outsource, you want to make a wider range of foods at home, efficiently. I mean, I want to do this. Thus the rice cooker, etc. A significant, if not particularly luxe, "etc." that I won't elaborate on.

Very important questions, not all of which are shoe-related

-If Lululemon wants to make leggings that are too small for most Americans, should we storm the barricades? What about how they're also too expensive for most Americans? (Depending which is the greater obstacle to you buying them, your outrage shall fall accordingly.) It's as if there's a Lululemon paradox - while they apparently once made good yoga pants, the appeal of the brand no doubt partially does come from the fact that it's so deeply associated with the rich-and-thin on whose backsides you see the logo. The Whole Foods yoga moms, their Lululemon power-leisure suits accessorized with Liz Taylor-esque diamond rings and Chanel quilted handbags, their carts filled not with 365 Brand and bulk legumes but fresh everything, their smattering of produce somehow adding up to $500 but no worries. It's like the "Fight Club" episode of "30 Rock" - we all kind of want to be that woman, even if we fundamentally don't. But then the pants take on such power that it starts to look, to some, like almost a civil right to have access to them. How dare they not exist in a size 18, at an Old Navy price point! Jessica Wakeman's conclusion - one can just buy stretch pants elsewhere - is quite right, but seems as if it might have preempted the entire discussion.

-Can someone of non-German descent, but born in Germany, ever be German?

-Can the same person want shoes like this, but also shoes like this?

For non-blonds UPDATED

By now, everyone's seen the story of the blonde girl found in a Roma home. Commenter Quasimodo asked for my thoughts, which I started getting into in the comments, but this may merit a whole entire post of its own:

-Let's please not start assuming blond children of not-blond families are somehow suspect. This, for so many reasons. Such as: Adoption happens across ethnic lines. Lots of light-haired children grow up to be dark-haired adults. Police of the world, don't start swooping in and removing blond children from families to which they belong.

UPDATE: Too late, via.

-There isn't some great, global 'blondness belt' where everyone's rich, extending from comfortably socialized Scandinavia to New England WASPs, Southern belles, and California surfers. There's also this little thing called Russia. (Closer to home: Appalachia. Also: the "Gypsies" of Ireland.) Other Eastern European countries as well. This matters in terms of how we try to make sense of this incident. It's being discussed as if there's obviously some Western middle-class or wealthy family whose missing child this is. When the full story may - in any number of ways, some more upsetting than others - relate to the family of origin being poor and desperate. Of course, there could well be an impoverished Russian family whose child was abducted, or a rich British one, say, who for some reason dropped their baby by the doorstep. But point is, 'blond' doesn't say as much about socioeconomic or global origins as we might think.

-We don't want to overshoot the mark and start talking about the privilege of abductees who happen to be pretty blonde girls. Abducted is still abducted, and is still unthinkably worse than being dark-haired and/or plain in the comfort of your own home. Same deal if the abductee comes from a well-off family. This came up (where else?) in a Jezebel thread about Elizabeth Smart, with commenters debating whether maybe the real message of the story was that access to services for the abducted isn't as equal as we'd like. When something truly horrific happens to someone rich, it's still horrific. It's not as if being abducted from your childhood bedroom at knifepoint by a deranged would-be cult leader and getting raped by him and abused by his wife is an ordinary poor or working-class experience, either.

-Every time a minority is accused of refusing to integrate, I get suspicious. Are we sure it isn't that the majority won't have them? This, in response to anti-Roma bigots who - like everyone who's been to a European tourist destination - has a story, but feel compelled to extrapolate from that story that they were mugged or near-mugged not because Roma have no other options in some areas, but because they're just like that. When looking at issues of integration, what matters isn't just whether the government has some plan in place involving schooling or who knows. It's also how a minority's received socially.

-Can we please not make this a discussion about how those terrible, selfish Jews insist on claiming that they were WWII's only victims? Who exactly are the Jews not aware that Roma, gays, and the disabled also had the Nazis to contend with? Or aware but denying this? I'll grant that what we learned in Hebrew school or whatever might have been about roundups of "Gypsies," so there may be some misuse of terminology, if no more among Jews than the general population. But really. It would be nice if, every time the Roma came up, anti-Semites didn't come out of the woodwork to hold forth on how Jews think they're so special, with their fancy Holocaust. On behalf of The Jews, I'll say that what we don't appreciate is when other aspects of that period of history are brought up in such a way as to deny the Jewish experience. As in, without an 'actually Jews didn't have it so bad' angle tagged onto the discussion of the suffering of other groups.

-While this really doesn't have anything to do with Jews directly, it does bring to mind the blood libel. Not that this couple was falsely accused of having a kid they hadn't officially adopted (that may be right), nor that they were at all accused of planning to serve the kid for dinner. (They do stand accused, by Internet commenters, of prostituting her out, based on no particular evidence as far as I can tell.) But just this idea that there's something particularly squicky about a blond child being lost to the blond community, and something particularly nefarious going on in the non-blond population.

The gnocchi workout

The Canal Towpath! How had I not been jogging there before? If I'm going to run for a long time (and I'm going to say seven miles counts), far better that way than the treadmill, the tick-y woods, or running as many 0.7 mile road loops as I can stand. Apart from the bit at the beginning of the jog, when I had to dodge a couple men who'd gotten out of a van to pee on opposite sides of said van, thereby blocking the narrow road to the towpath, it was a bucolic experience indeed.

Nevertheless, I may keep on going to the gym as well. If only because the butt-toning machine - and none of the others - has instructions only in Italian:

Which fits with my earlier impression of Italy as a place unusually concerned with this area. This in any case became the only strength-training machine at the gym that interested me, the translation exercise a gateway into exercise. 

The only drawback is my strong association of the Italian language with food. Whatever "ginocchia" is (knee?), it brings to mind the potato-dumpling pasta (in a Gorgonzola sauce, or maybe pesto) I'd rather be having. Not that working out means abandoning pasta for kale juice. If anything, one may work out specifically in order to eat even more pasta. But not, like, during the leg-press. Or leg panino, as is the technical term.

Parental overshare: the children's revenge

The end of parental overshare may be afoot. And it has nothing to do with my attempts to get a campaign going to stop it. No, the credit goes to children themselves, who are apparently oversharing about their parents. The BBC Woman's Hour podcast (better than the title suggests) had a segment about technology in the home. It was mostly about children being spoiled entitled Young People Today with their gadgety whosawhatsits that presumably their parents bought for them.

But it was also about what happens when children post about their parents. Specifically, one kid went on the social media and wrote something like, 'you know your parents are alcoholics when the buy a wine refrigerator.' The implication on the program being that the parents are of course not actually alcoholics - which, well, maybe they are, probably they aren't, but either way, the parents won't want this online, even in jest. Think of their reputations!

It's also, in tone, exactly the sort of thing parental overshare usually consists of - an anecdote meant to amuse peers (not generally a newspaper audience, if a kid's the author), without a thought given to how the subject of the anecdote might feel.

Some connection was made on the show to parents oversharing about their kids, including one mother of a presumably adult child posting a photo of her daughter with a hangover and no makeup on. (A dry country, the UK, it appears.) The emphasis was on how kids don't know what is and is not appropriate to reveal, but the takeaway seemed to be that through their concern about their own reputations, parents come to recognize their children's privacy. A father said that he and his family made a pact not to write about one another without prior permission (and yes, yes, I'm skeptical of getting children's 'permission' for this sort of thing), and the first to break the pact was... the dad, who then had to pay a fine. The shoe on the other foot and all that. This is it - this is how the message will get across.

On being young and with-it

To the people who keep referring to the traitor-hero exile who looks just like the political-science prof... to the people who keep referring to dude as "a young kid" and the like, I thank you. He is 29. I am 29. 29, so young! Practically a child! The approach of 30 brings with it the list-of-things-I-will-now-hope-to-have-done-by-35-which-just-doesn't-sound-as-impressive. (Also decrepitude, but we women get used to being told we're over the hill from drinking-age on, so that I'm not so worried about.) So please, keep calling Snowden a little boy. For my sake.

Also flattering: I'm reading Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: the American version, and loving his enthusiasm for the University of Chicago, which he attended. I must drop my college's name more often. (Less fond of his take on American Francophiles, and on Americans who marry Europeans - but whevs, if you marry a Belgian, and buy that person a deep-fryer as an anniversary gift-that-keeps-on-giving, you get Belgian fries, at home, so it's Epstein's loss.)

But more surprising - and thus more flattering - is his insistence, in chapter after chapter, that there's some cachet to living in Princeton, New Jersey. Not to being affiliated with Princeton University - that's not hard to imagine. But with just living there. Not there, here. Princeton, according to Epstein, is one of a handful of "with-it" American cities. Right there on page 229 (or just in the version available at the Princeton Public Library?) It's... I hadn't even realized it was a city. What about the deer? The ticks? The turtles? But we are soon going to get a second independent coffee shop, which is something. And we do have better sushi than New York - not sure how that came to be, but there it is. And the beer-ice-cream. Could be worse.

Not so post-racial after all

-Count me among those who had no idea that in 1887, some Germans founded a colony in Paraguay based around the idea of Jews being awful. 1887. I need to remember that not everyone else is over-steeped in modern Jewish history, and thus not everyone is thinking, huh, so a year after Drumont's La France juive. Hitler didn't take power until 1933. The Dreyfus Affair? 1894-1906. 1887! Asylum-seekers, it seems, from the Jewish menace. Which is an often-forgotten angle, right? Anti-Semites weren't - aren't - just people who think they're better than Jews. They're people who think they're being oppressed by Jews.

-A reader sent me this story about being Jewish in a U.S. prison. It should be read in conjunction with Nick's post here (discussed here). Sample passage:

It is an inviolate rule that different races may not break bread together under any circumstances. Violating this rule leads to harsh consequences. If you eat at the same table as another race, you'll get beaten down. If you eat from the same tray as another race, you'll be put in the hospital. And if you eat from the same food item as another race, that is, after another race has already taken a bite of it, you can get killed. This is one area where even the heads don't have any play. 

This makes it difficult for me, of course, to fit into the chow hall. Jews, as we all know, are not white but imposters who don white skin and hide inside it for the purpose of polluting and taking over the white race. The skinheads simply can't allow me to eat with them: that would make them traitors of the worst kind — race traitors! But my milky skin and pasty complexion, characteristic of the Eastern European Ashkenazi, make it impossible for me to eat with other races who don't understand the subtleties of my treachery and take me for just another [white person]. So the compromise is that I may sit at certain white tables after all the whites have finished eating.

There's a whole lot to say about this, but one interesting takeaway is the reminder that anti-Semitism is listed separately from racism for a reason. The problem for anti-Semites is sometimes that Jews look different (the affront to blondness - see above), but it's also sometimes that Jews don't look different.

-And in more "traditional" racism, the cure to the late-20s, where-is-my-life-going Westerners' blues is apparently treating African women and children like zoo animals. Writes a British advice columnist:

Visiting some of the most challenged areas in Africa, rechristened by Bob Geldof the "Luminous Continent", you're surprised by an infectious degree of joy among women and children that's in direct contrast to their circumstances. Whether it's at a refugee camp in Chad or a malarial ward in Mozambique, kids kicking an air-filled plastic bag in lieu of a football in the slums of Nairobi or market women in central Monrovia packing up after an 18-hour day, the laughter is irresistible. 

Here we struggle to achieve similar degrees of happiness, pop antidepressants to get through the day and squander time living vicariously through soap-opera storylines and celebrity elevation and decline.

While snap-out-of-it advice may have been called for in this particular situation (or not - some funks are deeper and more biochemical than others), it's unclear what this digression adds, yet abundantly clear what it detracts.

When the hottest German is a Jew

So Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget not only share space in my dissertation, but also had the same Russian-Jewish lover. The rest of the afternoon will be spent reading the entire book someone has written about Maupassant's apparently vibrant and Judeo-centric love life. From the other reading I've done on this topic, I'm picturing something like "Portnoy's Complaint," but the other way around.

Well, Germany's having its own belle Juive moment. Jezebel cries sexism, which is on the one hand fair, and on the other, there's a bit more to this story, perhaps? It's kind of amazing, given that less than a century ago, a somewhat influential political party in Germany hosted a genocide largely based on the idea that Jews were hideous, that a Jewish woman - and a Jewish woman who does not look like Bar Refaeli, but like half the girls I went to high school with - is winning a desirability contest there among female politicians. Not sure what to conclude from this, so we're going to stick with "kind of amazing."

About those napping Greek islanders

Well good for them. Olive oil, sure, wine, why not, longevity, OK. No goats'-milk for me, thanks unless it's been turned into a cheese. Makes for a good most-emailed, I suppose, for there to be an entire island full of people's grandfathers who smoked like chimneys and nevertheless lived to be 100. Until the time comes when we learn they're all actually 45 but smoking didn't do wonders for their skin, let us congratulate them for their paradox-ness.

But I'm more interested in the fact that these people are not waking up while it's still dark out to meander their way through a total of seven legs of transportation. They don't leave their offices before 5 in order to make a train that gets them to a train that gets them at shortly after six to another train, connecting in turn to a shuttle, all of which gets them home close to 7pm, leaving approximately three hours until the too-tired-to-not-be-asleep feeling hits. They don't gaze out the window as Central NJ becomes Northern NJ and vice versa, scenery you could show to someone who's life goal was to visit the United States and they'd be like, meh. They don't run out of podcasts and end up laughing along to something about British politics without even getting the references. They drink lots of coffee, yes, but they don't put it into a thermos, forget to close that thermos, and discover that the odd drip, drip, drip on NJ Transit is coming from their backpack.

"Orders which must be obeyed"*

The best article ever: Kate Connolly of the Guardian reports on a coffee shop in Berlin that has banned, among other things, strollers:

Ralf Rüller wanted to create a sacred ground for coffee connoisseurs in the heart of Berlin, somewhere devotees of the bean could sip their brews free from distraction. 

This purist – not to say militant – approach to coffee-drinking extended to a long list of rules at his brew bar, the Barn Roastery, including a ban on extra milk, spoons, laptops, dogs, mobile phone ringtones, loud phone calls and "media" (apart from newspapers). Sugar is strongly discouraged. 

Nothing like a coffee shop with rules! But so many rules. And in Germany? Anticipating your thought, person-reared-on-"Seinfeld"-and-Britcoms - Connolly helpfully adds:

Before moving back to Berlin several years ago, Rüller worked as an actor in London where he often played Nazi soldiers in British TV war dramas. He says it feels as if he has been cast as the Nazi in his own coffeehouse drama.

Apparently Rüller is called a coffee Nazi in Germany, which will come as news to those who hadn't realized the culinary use of the term would be kosher-as-it-were in those parts.

But I don't know. It doesn't sound as if children are banned, just strollers, which isn't so out-there. And all the insane attention to detail? All the superior coffee? I think it sounds fantastic, not fascistic:

The staff, who come from as far afield as Australia and Mexico, include Rob MacDonald, a dairy farmer from Australia who claims his tastebuds are so refined he can tell what a cow has eaten from the flavour of its milk. "I love this artistic approach to coffee," says the 27-year-old, who as well as training to be a barista is – perhaps inevitably – learning to play the jazz xylophone.

And thus bringing hipsters-make-your-food to a whole new level.

*Ironic, I suppose, given how much the Barn Roastery approach to customer service reminds one of Fawlty Towers.

Those anti-circumcision Muslims

Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin makes an argument I'm having trouble wrapping my head around: that the new wave of interest in banning circumcision in Germany is evidence not only of anti-Jewish and not anti-Muslim sentiment (already a tough case to make, given current demographics and anxieties), but also of an anti-Jewish mood perpetuated by Europe's Muslims. At least I think that's what he's driving at, although I may have gotten lost somewhere around where he segued from Germany to France.

What this kind of argument illustrates is how awkward is to classify pro-Jewish or pro-Israel stances as conservative. Because one images that if circumcision were only practiced by Muslims, and not by Jews, Europe might be celebrated for cracking down on this oh-so-barbaric multiculti ritual. At the same time, because it's not very conservative to root for the marginalized minority in the face of hyphen-less white Christians (culturally Christian or practicing), it's unacceptable to suggest that anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe might actually be less about Islam and more about the fact that 1945 didn't change everything, and there are still plenty of white Europeans not so fond of Jews. Of course, these days that set is generally too busy hating Muslims to have much time to devote to hating Jews.

Sale season in Heidelberg

Recently I noticed that a hair salon across the street sells this super-cool Berlin-based nail polish brand. Not available in the States! At least not easily. This seemed the best possible sort of gratuitous treat-from-abroad - small, cheap, fun.

But it turns out I have my limits, and all the packaging in the world does not make a gorgeous sheer Pepto Bismol pink worth 19 euros. Non-toxic, they claim, but the same is supposedly true of that which is $8 back home. (Plus, with the money saved, I could get a professional manicure in the States. Or not, as the case may be.)

This was really the most straightforward case I can think of where I wanted something, could technically afford it (assuming I don't start doing things like this all the time), and simply deemed it too much for what it was. It is inconceivable to me that a nail polish could be worth more than, say, $15.50, and that's pushing it. Nail polish need not be more than a few dollars, and need not be purchased at all.

Glorified leggings for over 300 euros. No big deal.

Given that all we really need are lentils, "want" is an awfully big category, something I think about more in the summer, given the grad-school pay arrangement and, in this case, the change of scenery. It's new to me that there are, like, things, available for purchase, when I walk the dog. Not only that, but they're European and because it's summer, have been marked down. 

Happily, the part of Heidelberg I'm staying in is quite a bit like Princeton's Palmer Square, so most of what's on sale is for a woman blonder and more classic-looking than myself. Whatever dreams I might have had of not-quite-Nordic minimalist avant-garde whosawhatsis were satisfied at the COS (higher-end H&M, not yet in the States) in Strasbourg. Unhappily, my acculturation is such that I'm now noticing not just the sensible dress shoes (shoes are shoes, and I'm not big on heels to start with) but also the discounted hiking boots.

Posted without comment.

Via Facebook, international edition

-Unpaid internships: not just in the States, not just in glamorous professions.

-A Brussels woman, Sofie Peeters, makes a documentary about street harassment. Not sure at all what kind of website this is, but the comments suggest something unsavory. The documentary itself is maybe a bit naive (what grown woman in the West has only just now noticed that there are sexualized images of women on billboards and such?) or forced-seeming (how convenient that just as she's making this documentary, she glances out the window and notices a woman in her building is moving out of the building and neighborhood, asks why, and learns it's to escape the street harassment! and with that, its credibility for me was shot), but racist? Maybe? Maybe not? The documentarian insists repeatedly that she's not a racist, but, which doesn't necessarily clear things up.

The documentary follows Peeters around a predominantly immigrant-and-young-artsy-white-person bit of Brussels, where careful editing and her own choice to approach les jeunes du quartier give the impression that she literally can't leave the house without a horde of Arab men demanding her orifices. There are interviews with other women of different ethnicities and one Muslim man, but the overall impression one gets is that this is a woman with an inflated sense of the amount of attention she attracts, and a misguided notion of the danger of The Brown Man. Because she intentionally misrepresents the amount of catcalling anyone, even a naked supermodel, could possibly receive on the street, she comes across as someone who totally would mind if men weren't hollering at her, which makes her maybe not the best spokeswoman for what is, after all, a legitimate cause. Street commentary - depending the context, the recipient - can be anywhere from flattering to frightening. (The only time I ever found this kind of street harassment genuinely frightening was, as it happens, in Belgium.) If a woman can't live alone in a certain part of Brussels, and no one's looked into this before, then yes, that's groundbreaking and important.

But the documentary itself doesn't really convince. The sense one gets from it is that Peeters has no particular context for these "guest-worker" men in shabby neighborhoods, and only cares about minorities insofar as they impact her quality of life. Why do they live in these neighborhoods? Why are they mere "guests," and how might that produce - if not excuse - a lack of goodwill towards the natives? Why aren't they integrated into Belgian society, where they might have acculturated to whichever norms of not catcalling? (Or not - a couple years ago a friend and I were called "salopes" for ignoring some preppy French guys right out front of the hyper-prestigious Paris école whose dorm we were living in. I think it's safe to say Islam didn't factor into it.)

This would be a lot to ask if she were just complaining about this to a friend, but as a documentarian, it would seem appropriate for her to be curious about aspects of these men's lives that don't relate to her, that aren't about hollering at random Flemish women. The message might have been sound, but the perspective just felt off.

In offensiveness today

-From Slate France, the unsurprising connections between far-right politics (in France and Germany) and the local-sustainable food movement. A point that has to be made with the huge disclaimer that no, you're not a Fascist for liking farmers' markets. (Today I bought a kilo of German-grown plum tomatoes, and I suspect I'm not a neo-Nazi.) The issue is more that we have this false assumption that the food movement is all hippie-dippie left, when in fact xenophobia can absolutely enter into a movement based in part on the principle that food from elsewhere is dangerous. If you think elsewhere is a horrible place, why wouldn't its food be anathema as well? And it's not precisely a case of far-left and far-right being indistinguishable. The overlap is more between left-leaning yuppies and extreme-nationalists. My sense is that the far-left would be more bulk-lentils than artisanally-plucked mesclun.

-From Tablet - and not Vice, as might have been more appropriate - an "edgy" piece about how Holocaust survivors are sneaky and suspect for their entitled desire to go on living, by a writer who appears to have something of a Holocaust-awareness-raising allergy. I think the entirety of the Internet is on the case, but... yeah. Nothing like bad taste posing as bravery or originality.

-A Styles take on a somewhat different demographic from the usual haute-Park-Slope or Park Ave. norm: young women who require (shockingly expensive, obvs) prep classes to join a sorority. This article is of course designed to make you, whoever you are, feel like an amazing person for have not required quite so much intervention to make friends in college. But buried in this is a sadder story, as well as a more practical one. Sad, because these young women have social concerns more appropriate for middle-schoolers (an "image consultant" to make girlfriends?), and practical, because all this nonsense about looking just so will evidently come in handy for those who wish to, for example, become lawyers. I came away from reading (OK, skimming) the story feeling bad for the girls who want this, or whose parents imagine they do.