Lazy Sunday
One of the nice things about Sunday mornings here (other than listening to the birds sing and the church bells chime) is reading the International Herald Tribune. At home, we got both the Washington Post and New York Times on Sunday morning, which is roughly 12 pounds worth of newspaper when you throw in the ads and magazines. As much as I always loved reading them, there was almost a weird sort of pressure to get through them--like, I know it's a beautiful day outside, but let me just read the Week in Review and Travel sections first! I typically pick up the IHT--which basically is a condensed NY Times with a few more international articles thrown in--on Saturday (I don't read it during the week), and on Sunday can just drink my coffee and skim the 20-30 pages and not feel pressure to spend the entire day reading (added bonus: the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle, which I clip and save to kill time on international flights).
Anyway, that was a long way of getting to a few interesting articles: first a couple of opinion pieces, one on how U.S. policies are causing many foreign students to look elsewhere to study (so many people I meet have studied at least briefly in the U.S., and regardless of what they think about U.S. politics and foreign policy, the experience typically gave them a good feeling for the U.S. as a place and as a people, and I fear we may lose that in the future), and another on how one way to deny responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib is to simply blame American (or rather, liberal) culture instead. Finally, efforts to get expats to vote, primarily against Bush, and, lest this whole post becomes too political, something that hits close to home...people who blog too much.
Anyway, that was a long way of getting to a few interesting articles: first a couple of opinion pieces, one on how U.S. policies are causing many foreign students to look elsewhere to study (so many people I meet have studied at least briefly in the U.S., and regardless of what they think about U.S. politics and foreign policy, the experience typically gave them a good feeling for the U.S. as a place and as a people, and I fear we may lose that in the future), and another on how one way to deny responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib is to simply blame American (or rather, liberal) culture instead. Finally, efforts to get expats to vote, primarily against Bush, and, lest this whole post becomes too political, something that hits close to home...people who blog too much.
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