When Will Smith stormed onto the Oscar stage to strike Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife’s short hair, he did a lot more damage than just to Rock’s face. With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.
As the Ukrainian city of Mariupol faced continued shelling from Russian forces, as many as 1,000 civilians—including women and an indeterminate number of children—took shelter in a theater located in the center of the besieged city. The word “CHILDREN” was visible from the air on both sides of the theater to indicate its status as a humanitarian safe zone for children…
Most people like animals. Cats and dogs are favorites. But the good feelings many people have for whales and dolphins, baby seals and elephants show that even wild animals can come within the mantle of our affections. Animals don’t have to live with us to be liked by us. Children reveal how generous we are in our natural love of…
Finland’s 36-year-old female Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, heads a governing coalition of five political parties—all led by women and almost all aged in their 30s. It is a nation largely run by women. This is the culmination of a national push for gender equity that started even before Finland’s independence in 1917. In 1906, Finland, then a duchy of Russia, was…
I lived in Berlin from the ages of six to twelve … no, actually, I grew up in Berlin. My father moved the family to Berlin a few weeks after the conclusion of the Berlin Airlift in 1949 until 1956. Dad worked as Religious Affairs Advisor to the U.S. Commission, liaising with the churches in East Germany and addressing their…
In 1993, when Simon & Schuster published the first edition of this book, the world in many ways was very different. The Berlin Wall had only just fallen; the Soviet Union had collapsed, leaving the United States as the sole global superpower; and the year before, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development had been convened in Rio de…
When our family left Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1949 (I was six) on our first trip to Berlin, our arrival was only a few months after the end of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift. We were housed in the American sector of West Berlin, where my father, Dr Richard Solberg, a history and political science professor and, incidentally, a Lutheran…
I floated lazily downstream on a makeshift raft I had created, the hot afternoon sun tanning my young skin, bees buzzing the honeysuckle that grew along its banks, a green-eyed dragonfly hovering before my hand-shielded face. There weren’t any other sounds for miles, just the running water emptying into tranquil pools that slowed the raft and spun it slowly before…
When it rains deep in the jungle, the Indonesian people of the Mentawai tribe huddle for warmth and safety in a community hut they’ve built of wood. They eat a prepared pulp of bamboo mush, an assortment of plant life, and an occasional wild pig they’ve caught, penned for fattening, and then collectively killed. The people of this tribe have…
This memory was sent to me by my sister, Lois Johnson. Her husband Richard was a close associate of my dad, Dr. Solberg, a teacher of History and Political Science—a pastor and a man who spent his time in Germany from 1949 to 1956 serving the refugees fleeing out of Soviet eastern Europe into Berlin (the free island city in…