James Lewisohn is a former investment banker. He is now a financial advisor and writer
Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write a fairy tale called ‘The Ugly, Pornographic Duckling’, yet his stories often feature alienation, exile and the struggle for acceptance. ‘Ugly and pornographic’, meanwhile, is how Politiken newspaper’s art critic, Mathias Kryger, has described the ‘Big Mermaid’: a 14-ton, 13-foot tall, notably buxom statue which between 2006 and 2018 stood on
Spring has arrived on the North Coast of Zealand, and my fellow Danes are busily scrubbing down their summerhouses for the season. Villages which were nearly deserted during the winter – Danes can generally only occupy their summerhouses for 180 days a year – are gradually filling up. Sadiq Khan said London’s second homeowners ought to
Greenland’s prime minister Múte Egede has responded to Donald Trump’s overtures to buy the island by saying it is time to shake off ‘the shackles of colonialism’ and hold an independence referendum. As Egede works out how to proceed on the path to independence from Denmark, and how to respond to Trump as he prepares
‘We failed’. An editorial in Ekstra Bladet, Denmark’s leading tabloid, berates the Fourth Estate – including itself – for failing to hold ministers to account during the pandemic. Worn down by repeated warnings of ‘the dormant corona monster under our beds’, Ekstra Bladet claims Danish journalists mostly took the government line. ‘We have not been vigilant enough
Nørrebro, Copenhagen’s hip, multicultural inner-city area, was crowned the world’s coolest neighbourhood by Time Out in 2021. Former residents include Denmark’s greatest living film star Mads Mikkelsen. If you’ve viewed Nordic noir TV dramas depicting the nexus of hip urbanism and the tribulations of mass migration, you’ll have seen plenty of Nørrebro (sometimes called ‘Nørrebronx’ in tribute
It’s official: weight-loss wonder drug Wegovy (also marketed as Ozempic) makes US celebrities shrink but makes the Danish economy grow. This week, the most amusing Oscars clickbait featured not the typical best- and worst-dressed actors, but instead celebrities who have experienced recent miraculous weight loss. The Daily Mail helpfully split this award category between those confirmed
Danish New Year’s Eves are to be savoured partly for their predictability. First, on the main Danish State TV channel, the vintage British TV comedy Dinner for One, with Freddie Frinton and May Warden, is broadcast. Then there is the countdown to midnight on the face of Copenhagen’s city hall clock, followed by desultory fireworks
Asked why he robbed banks for a living, the legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton allegedly replied, ‘because that’s where the money is’. Not any more, it isn’t. In Denmark, where only twenty of the country’s 740 bank branches still hold cash in their vaults, 2022 was the first year without a bank robbery. There
If Francis Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, he was right about one thing. Back in the scary days of March 2020 as the pandemic first hit the West, Fukuyama made one of the few predictions about Covid that turned out to be correct. It would be clear when the pandemic eventually subsided, he
Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Søren Kirkegaard, experienced only one epidemic in his lifetime, the cholera outbreak of 1853, which occurred after Denmark foolishly lifted the coastal quarantine that had saved the country from Europe’s miserable 19th century cholera pandemics. Yet he aptly sensed our response to indeterminate lockdowns: ‘the most painful state of being is remembering
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that the UK ‘systematically and persistently’ breached EU limits for nitrogen dioxide (NOx) emissions in 16 areas including London, Manchester and Glasgow between 2010 and 2017. It’s a judgement that means, despite Brexit, that a multi-million euro fine may be on its way. The UK is leaving the
Professor Sir David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, has finally said something about the diesel emissions scandal that desperately needed to be said. ‘These companies have blood on their hands – I say that without any doubt’, he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘The number of early fatalities in Britain is really very, very
Are the giant ‘Technology Trusts’ – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – on the road to the monopolists’ breakers yard? It’s received wisdom they soon will be. As Edward Luce writes in the FT, ‘Big Tech is the new big tobacco in Washington. It is not a question of whether the regulatory backlash will come, but
If Hillary Clinton is still unwell and proceeds to the Oval Office in November, she will not be its first incumbent suffering imperfect health. She will not even be the first newly-elected president with pneumonia, nor the first requiring antihistamines to control their allergies. HRC will be merely the latest in a very long line
Last week, visiting friends in Italy, I had an epiphany in two car journeys. The first ride was in a spiffy-looking new Fiat 500 I’d rented. I’d been excited about driving this pretty update of a classic Italian design. Yet the brand new cinquecento was wheezy even as I drove it off the airport, and
Denmark has been basking in a glorious June heatwave this past week, hastening the annual migration cycle. ‘Summer Danes’ are a delicate subgenus of the species. We roam the planet’s warmer regions every year between September and May, absenting ourselves from Nordic noir winters. But mercury rising brings us home; and last week was the
