Welmer

It strikes me that in our contemporary culture there is a basketful of negative stereotypes about men from which people can pick and choose and subsequently hurl like stones at the hapless scapegoat for family and social ills. There’s the “deadbeat dad,” “abusive husband,” “batterer (or wife-beater),” “couch potato,” “unromantic husband,” “stalker,” “predator” etc. A [...]

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To start with, I’d like to go back to the origin of the term “alpha male.” It is a biological designation given to the members of mammalian social communities with the highest reproductive success. It is perhaps most relevant when applied to canines and apes, highly social animals that have hierarchical social rankings that determine [...]

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For centuries the people of Beijing have dwelt in neighborhoods defined above all by the hutongs, clusters of small, brick houses built around a communal courtyard, surrounded and connected to each other by a labyrinthine network of narrow alleys. Hutongs are usually enclosed by brick walls, upon which broken glass is set in a thin [...]

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The last decade of real-estate hysteria has been more than just an economic catastrophe — it has dragged the American lifestyle in the wrong direction at the worst possible time. Just as energy shortages were on the horizon, we pumped up suburbs and exurbs, building prefab communities far away from the centers of economic production. [...]

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Or so says a May 18 Guardian Observer article I came across today. Written by John Carlin, the piece extols the virtues of divorce, illegitimacy and the “patchwork families” that Carlin claims characterize Icelandic society. He goes so far as to write “Iceland could not be less like Africa on the surface,” and describes the [...]

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