Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. September 2008.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. July 2009.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. May 2010.

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson's books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn't expect. In this Sweden, the country's well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it's often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world's most comprehensive welfare system.

In Larsson's trilogy it's also the case that most, if not all, of these crooks hate women. The first volume's Swedish title is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor—in English, Men Who Hate Women—a title international publishers chose to tone down. (The French put the problem in the past tense, Men Who Didn't Love Women.) Sweden may have attained heights of gender equality only dreamed of in other parts of the world but, if we're to believe Larsson, that apparent moral superiority is merely cosmetic, concealing pervasive misogyny at every level of society.

These are Larsson's twin themes: the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women.

Ken Burns. The National Parks: America's Best Idea. PBS. October 2009.

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. The National Parks: America's Best Idea, An Illustrated History. Knopf. October 2009. 

The first thing that struck me when opening the massive coffee table book that Ken Burns compiled to accompany his most recent documentary—this one about the national parks, the latest entry in America's Greatest Hits—was not the sheer size but rather the comparative puniness of the park system. The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets, at least on paper, to the appropriation of property by the people. The numbers are well known: 85 percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government, 57 percent of Utah, 50 percent of Idaho, even 45 percent of California. The national parks, outside of Alaska, where they play a fundamentally different role, comprise only six percent of federal lands. This seems to make sense: the parks are supposed to be "exceptional." But for a system that Burns considers an extension of the claim that "all men are created equal," the question remains—an exception to what? Read More

Yesterday was a special day for hockey fans. Never before in the sport's history had so much talent played on the same day on the same rink. Over twelve hours, the six best hockey teams in the world played three games—Czech Republic vs. Russia, USA vs. Canada, Finland vs. Sweden—each one an arch-rivalry as well as a rematch of the last three gold-medal games.

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In the weeks leading up to the final round of the 2010 Chilean presidential elections, Eduardo Frei, the candidate for the center-left Concertación coalition, ran a political advertisement in which an invisible hand scribbled words such as "ass" and "go to hell" on a white ballot. A sober voiceover stated: "You may be angry and you may think there's no way out, but submitting a blank or annulled ballot is a vote for the Right." Similar ads concluded with a pencil sharply crossing the line next to Frei's name, as if reminding viewers of the proper way to mark a ballot. The underlying sentiment was equal parts desperation and exhaustion, as the coalition that has governed Chile for twenty years was reduced to begging voters not to graffiti their ballots. Read More