Let’s pretend for a moment, for the sake of a nifty segue and the argument that follows it, that Eskimos do indeed have many precise words for snow because they are steeped in it — literally.

By the same token, then, it must mean something that the Swedish language has many more precise words for defining family relationships than does English. I’ve only just now realized this, because I myself have always been tone deaf when it comes to such words. This is something that I blame on my Dutch, by the way: That language is even less precise than English on this matter, since both nephews/nieces and cousins are called neven/nichten [Dutch].

In Swedish, the exact term for nephew/niece depends not just on the sex of the person in question, but also on the sex of the parent related to you. So the son of your brother is brorson, that of your sister systerson — and then there is brorsdotter and systerdotter for any nieces you might have.

This same logic applies to grandparents. With far meaning father and mor meaning mother, the four possible combinations are farfar, mormor, farmor and morfar. Unfortunately, this is farmor complicated than I can handle because I can never remember if the first bit begets the second or vice versaIt turns out the second bit begets the first.. But it gets farfar worse: Great grandparents also have precise definitions: quickly now, there’s farfars far, farfars mor, farmors far, farmors mor, morfars far, morfars mor, mormors far, and finally, mormors mor, who recently was eulogized in this Kylie Minogue song (iTunes URL). Do you even know the names of any of your great grandparents?

Some Swedish words are too good to be kept by Swedes all to themselves and should be adopted by anglophiles immediately. In English, for example, “stepmother” is far too monolithic a notion: Swedes understand there can be bad, neutral and good step parents, and have dignified each with a proper term. There is styvmor, the kind that Cinderella had; plastmamma — literally, plastic mother — which is neutral; and finally, the wonderful bonusmamma, which means exactly what you think it does.

Now, why do the Swedes have so many words for relatives? Because they are dysfunctional socialists intent on banishing the family? Or because family is so important that each relationship is lovingly given due recognition? Or maybe because it facilitates keeping track of the score in Strindbergian family feuds? My guess is that the truth lies somewhere between options two and three.

Discovered via the “Oddly Enough” section of Yahoo! news: A wallet lost by an 18-year old girl in southern Sweden 40 years ago has just been returned anonymously via the post, with everything in it intact.

Here is the original story [Swedish] from a local paper, with picture. Here is the BBC’s take, in English.

The story has intrigued a lot of news editors: The Reuters version has been picked up globally by at least 60 papers and news sites monitored by Google.

Why? Tritely, because it is an unusual occurence. A better reason might be that such stories resonate in us. We like to be assured that such occurences happen, if only occasionally. We like the idea that individuals make efforts on behalf of strangers, because it is a token of humanity’s ability to empathize. More broadly, we need to believe that we can sometimes trump the random small cruelties of daily life. And we like to fantasize that out there, the things we’ve lost continue to have a life of their own, perhaps one day to be reunited with us.

Finally, the story resonates because we are curious; because the return of the wallet must have a larger plotMy own theory: Like Aristides Silk, the kleptomanic pickpocket in Tintin’s The Secret of the Unicorn, somebody has been collecting wallets in Southern Sweden. That person has just died, and his widow is now disbanding the collection.. Is it a story of shame, or of benevolence? Did the anonymous mailer know the wallet’s owner? Good fiction tends to start this way — the wallet was returned to the town of Trelleborg, which is not far from where Henning Mankell‘s Kurt Wallander works; he’d discover a huge conspiracy involving stolen identities, human trafficking, and sex slavery.

Trelleborg is also not so far from Hässleholm, where the letter was written. That story, too, has not yet reached its end.

Stockholm is being overrun with small children. Everyone’s getting them. This is a wonderful thing, but where do they come from? How do Stockholmers proceed from single to parent? There are plenty of either kind around, but what is missing from view is a clear dynamic for progressing from the former state to the latter. There is no visible culture of wooing here; the actual process of couple formation must occur well out of the public eye.

What is propelling this baby boom? What is this black box into which you drop singles and out of which march families? After extensive research, I’ve constructed a working, falsifiable theory: The black box is binge drinking.

Binge drinking is on the rise in SwedenInfo on alcohol consumption is culled from the European Comparative Alcohol Study, published in 2001, produced as part of the Swedish presidency of the EU.. Swedes still do not drink as much as the average European, but they do drink it all at once, on weekends. This is a clever bit of adaptation: It allows for bacchic pursuits that do not compromise weekday contributions to GDP. It’s an entirely rational and considerate solution to to the problem of being rational and considerate and also horny.

Here is how I believe Swedes procreate, based on my research:

Let’s start on a typical Friday, at 5.45pm, 15 minutes before the Systembolaget at Skanstull in Stockholm is set to closeSystembolaget is the state alcohol dispensing monopoly run by the prime minister’s wife.: How to know when binge drinking is imminent? There is a queue for the machine that dispenses numbered tickets for the queue. Hundreds of people crowd in and await their turn. At 6pm sharp, policemen guard the doors against insistent latecomers. All purchased booze is hauled home, where it is consumed before heading out for the evening. The idea is to get drunk before going out because drinking anything remotely alcoholic at a bar is even more expensive.

Once at the bar, the buzz is maintained by buying “cheap” beer in copious quantities. Loose groups of mixed-sex friends sit around, eyeing each other up while clearly signaling they are drunk and hence to be absolved of any negative consequences subsequent actions might haveThere is little doubt that for Swedes, inebriation correlates strongly with sex. They even have a word for children born 9 months after midsummer’s carousing: midsommarbarn [Swedish, but with interesting birth statistics]..

Actual expressions of interest are managed by a process of attrition. As groups head home, those people with a mutual interest in one another contrive to be the last to remain as the pack splits up. Typically, then, moves are attempted in the pit of night at deserted busstops, subway platforms, and entranceways.

If it doesn’t work out, then both sides claim drunkeness. But if it does, the couple formation process accelerates rapidly. The pair, relieved at their gambit having worked, quickly opt out of what, frankly, amounted to a low-probability weekly crap shoot. Before long, larger economic forces come into play: Sharing an apartment is cheaper, but then you might as well get some perks from the state for doing so, and so you sambo.

This is how I think it happens. The remaining bit about how the children arrive should be self evident. One way to test this theory is to see if there is a correlation between binge drinking levels and birth rates, with birth rates hopefully lagging binge drinking levels by a year or two.

One question future researchers may want to look into is whether binge drinking is also an economic adaptation to the high price of alcohol. If it is expensive to get drunk enough to lose your inhibitions, you will tend to save up your resources for less frequent but more effective bouts. If this is indeed the case, we should see a less pronounced culture of binge drinking in Malmö, a city where the Systembolaget monopoly holds less sway on account of that city’s proximity to Denmark and its lakes of cheap booze. Eventual effects on the birth rate may be more difficult to tease out, however: Restricting one’s alcohol-fueled romantic pursuits to weekends may be a clever way of managing scarcity, but it should be a tactic jetissoned in times of plenty, in favor of a more sustained effort. Increasing the frequency of low-probability crap shoots is definitely an effective way of raising one’s chances as the price of alcohol drops. In Malmö, then, the disappearance of binge drinking may be a leading indicator of increasing birth rates.

Policy implications are clear: If the Swedish government chooses to keep alcohol prices high, binge drinking should be encouraged as a means of maximising birth rates; but a better policy may be to let prices fall, so as to generate increased opportunities for mating. There may be far more Swedes on the way.

The first in an occasional series.Ten: Predatory seating.

Why do normally civil Stockholmers turn French when they set foot inside McDonalds? All the tables are usually taken, but not by people eating — no, they’re taken by people hoarding tables with a view to eventually eating, when their accomplices are done queueing for food. Because of these predatory seating tactics, the tables are occupied twice as long as necessary, which means there are only half as many tables available, which means everybody scrambles to find a table as soon as they enter because there is a shortage.

Cleary, there is a better way. Everybody should look for a table only when they have food in hand. There would be twice as many tables available, hence no shortage, hence no incentive for this race to a patently suboptimal solution.

But try to sit down at one of these hoarded tables and have a reasonable conversation with its usurper as to why their behavior is noncollaborative, parasitic and, frankly, rude, preferably while you start eating your Big Mac. They call you rude! Clearly, we have different ideas about what that word means.

To be fair, Stockholmers only seem to express this selfish meme in cafeteria situations. I can think of far more egregious behavior elsewhere in Europe. In New York, smoking in a non-smoking area is rude; but in France, asking somebody to stop smoking in a non-smoking area is rude. In London, cutting the queue is rude; in Rome, telling somebody off for cutting the queue is rude.

I suspect that the French and Italians behave this way because they balance individual freedom and the public good differently. To massively overgeneralize again: Southern Europeans expect and tolerate more selfish behavior in social contexts, whereas those of the anglo-saxon persuasion expect and tolerate their behavior being constrained for the common good. Which makes for a counterintuitive conclusion, given the far stronger libertarian roots of American politics, especially when set against the socialist heritage of large chunks of Europe.

Blogged Wednesday afternoon:Historiska Museet’s cafeteria abuts the courtyard where Snövit is installed, and I am sitting there now, with an unimpeded view of the installation through the window.

What I saw earlier: The courtyard is much bigger than I expected. A cold snap (-10°C) and snow showers have greatly altered the installation’s surroundings — it’s covered in trodden snow, and the pool is a red slushy soup with a crust of broken ice sheets. The raft with its picture for a sail is stuck at a sorry angle, stained with red. Three standing spotlights illuminate the pool. Bach’s cantata plays, and is beautiful, though the lyrics are incomprehensible. Against the wall, behind me, in Swedish and English, is the text, printed in black and red on white, which everyone reads studiously. There is a bronze nude statue at one end of the pool, being entirely upstaged. Two very cold guards stand between the pool and me, arms flapping for warmth, ogling my satchel, and I respond by looking as suspect as possible. Could I make it to the pool if I dashed? I reckon I could. But I’m really not inclined to. It’s really cold.

A couple of things are clearer to me now that I am here.

Snövit‘s message suffers if discussed outside of the context of the exhibit. At the entrance to Making Differences, huge white on red writing announces that the theme is Lämnad ensam med sin egen svaghet, är människor i stand till vad som helst. — Man, left alone with his own weaknesses, is capable of almost anything. As a theme to accompany an international conference on genocide, it offers one perspective on the origins of evil — perhaps a controversial perspective, though one whose merits are usually only broached within the confines of seminaries and ethics tutorials.

This is the mindset you are invited to inhabit as you approach Snövit. It becomes clear that all the installations are meant to be concretizing instances of this perspective. The female suicide bomber actually figures twice in the exhibitThe poster in the subway is from “God made me do it“, a collection of works including one where the bomber’s picture appears on the front page of the Oct 6, 2003 edition of the International Herald Tribune, stuck against a wall (Yep, it’s art.) and I assume that her story is taken to be archetypal in some way. Nearby is a video loop of Geraldo Rivera interviewing various mass murderers including Charles Manson, Swedish papers from 1909 headlining a bomb attack against a Stockholm post office, an account of William S Burroughs shooting his wife through the head in a drunken prank gone wrong, a photograph of a mafia hit in St. Petersburg, and then some straightforward photojournalistic reportage from Laos now and Cambodia then, documenting genocide now and then.

Placed in this context, you cannot say that Snövit intends to glorify the suicide bomber. She is floating atop a bloodbath of her own making, and it is an image that is not conceivably triumphalist in intent, not with Charles Manson in the same boat, as it were. In tandem with the other works, the installation does purport to ruminate on how such a heinous act came about; but if you believe in a secular origin for evil, then this question is a valid one, if only for the sake of preventing future recurrences.

The argument that evil is born from human weakness is easier to stomach if you have the luxury of being at an emotional remove from the terrorist attack, because it is but a bland, psychological explanation. Yet it is perhaps a wiser tack than the black-on-white alternatives, which are that all Palestinians are temperamentally inclined to terrorism, or that the Israelis asked for it, or that she had always been mentally deranged, devoid of free will.

My visit to the exhibit, then, answered some of the questions I raised previously about the accessibility of the art’s message, and next time I’ll try to shut up until I see that which I’m supposed to have an opinion about. I’m convinced the message is in good faith, even if its content is something about which reasonable people will disagree.

But there remains the problem of the medium. The strength of the impression left by a pool filled with (half-frozen) blood, red and glistening under spotlights, is hard to overemphasize, even as a simulacrum. It is powerful imagery when used in horror films, where the characters are fictional. But with snövit, the blood is not of the fictional or the anonymous; it represents the blood of 21 real, named victims.

It’s colored water, yes. But if the function of art is to sublimate reality for the viewer, much like religious conviction can turn mere bread and wine into blood and flesh for the believer, then you have to conclude that what we are meant to see is — palpably — the blood of specific people. I got the sense that I was intruding on something private, something unsuitable as fodder for art, and made just so by the transformative power of that art.

You need not be a convert to capital-A Art for this sensation to creep up on you. You might know the restaurant in Haifa. You might know some of the people that died. You might even be their ambassador here in Stockholm, intent on cloaking their blood with darkness.

The piece is in poor taste. It has a right to exist.

The sky darkens, and the blood grows slicker and fresher under the lights. Just before the museum closes, I walk around the installation one last time. It’s just me and the guards. The wind nips at the the sail and it twists violently. Good, I think. With this weather, I don’t see the mast lasting the night.

I tried to go see the exhibit containing “Snow White and The Madness of Truth” todayFirst, read this morning’s post.. At the door, I was told, “it is monday,” and denied entry. Silly me.

Just now, while turning on the lights in my laundry room, an idea for a compromise occurred, one which would allow Israel, Sweden and the curator to save face:

Make the installation piece interactive. Put switches on the three standing spotlights, and let individual visitors decide, for a few minutes at a time, whether individual spotlights should be on or off. If you want to participate, you take one of those little numbered papers that comes out of a machine and wait your turn.

The ambassador, retroactively, is made the first participant in this interactive piece. He chose off, on the assumption that it glorifies suicide bombers. Other visitors might disagree on the message, but still feel that the work is in bad taste, and hence has no place “in the spotlight,” as it were. Yet others might think just the opposite — that the work is a condemnation of suicide bombings, and deserves to be seen, or that the woman suicide bomber does command some understanding for her actions, or that it is anti-Israel and hence worth promoting. Whatever your perspective, you get to command one of the three switches for a little while.

The beauty is, you will probably never quite get your way. I might turn my switch off, but you might simultaneously turn yours on. The result: A work of art at the mercy of an ongoing debate. What it means if the artwork remains mostly dark, or mostly lit, can become the grist for further analysis.

So now, if it’s no longer vandalism, would you turn the light on or off?