WorldcrunchCarl is a Swedish freelance journalist based in Paris. He has previously worked for a monthly magazine in Colorado (5280 Magazine) and later spent two years in Africa as a business reporter. As a freelancer he covers culture and politics (Foreign Policy, PRI, Huff Po, Longreads, Task & Purpose) and authors Worldcrunch’s special series “Son Of A Gunnar.”
It was a sunny, Scandinavian afternoon when Even Nord Rydningen spotted something in the still waters beneath Oslo’s Gullhaug bridge. “It looked like a trout, but it also looked a bit like a shark,” he told Norwegian daily Aftenposten. Upon closer inspection, Rydningen realized it was in fact a pike, a sharp-toothed (but tasty) species […]
Exactly a decade after Anders Breivik’s calculated massacre of terror shocked the world, we still struggle to make sense of the evil that cut short 77 lives.
As the first coronavirus wave finally abated late last spring, experts warned us that the pandemic was far from over. Second and third (and more) waves were likely, and new restrictions would be necessary to limit the death toll. There was only one sure way out of these pandemic times, a vaccine, which could take […]
But in the end… is it enough?
Now 18 and officially an adult, the climate activist’s message isn’t changing. And what about our own grownup rationalizations?
With 9 out of 10 current streets in Bergen, Norway honoring men, the city council has decided that every new street name will be a woman’s.
There was only one problem: the weather.
God speaks to me in Norwegian. This will seem treasonous to my Swedish compatriots, so let me explain. Way back, I spent a couple of years waiting tables on a 600-passenger cruise ship on the Norwegian Sea, where the sparsely furnished staff cabins — located on the lower levels, underwater — featured two elementary amenities: […]
-Essay- — What does it say at the bottom of a Norwegian ketchup bottle? — Opens at the other end. As a Swede, I know about a hundred jokes like that, and it wasn’t until I moved to Norway in my early twenties I realized Norwegians tell the exact same ones about Swedes. This fraternal […]
It was quite an entrance earlier this week in Stockholm, when a man came rushing into a local bar holding a revving chainsaw. The guests managed to flee through the backdoor and no one was harmed, reports Swedish daily Expressen. Following the suspect’s arrest on Tuesday, it was revealed that he had a history of […]
When I was a kid — 12,13 — my dad’s shrink friend was a frequent guest in our house. His usual business on these visits was to review for us the degenerating state of the world, and list the ways it all made his profession difficult. “Wanna catch a glimpse of the future?” he asked […]
MALMÖ — On one of the final Fridays of 2020, I passed through the Malmö airport customs and underwent that subtle metamorphosis from The Swede to a Swede. This crossing from the definite to the indefinite is familiar to all returning expats, and its downside (deflated exceptionalism) and perks (nostalgia, familiarity) are felt at the […]
It is a speech that stands out from all those we’ve heard from world leaders in the 10 months since the pandemic began — a far cry from the fact-defying rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro or the cool logic of Emmanuel Macron. As Germany reported a record 590 deaths in one day from Covid-19, Chancellor Angela […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has reached every corner of the planet, and we remember those we lost from more than 20 different countries.
Why are some of society’s most crucial employees still fighting to get paid a fair wage?
PARIS — Like much of the rest of the world, Sweden is now facing a second wave of coronavirus infections. But while other countries are debating which mix of restrictions to reinstate, the Swedish government has finally decided to announce its very first ban: closing bars and restaurants after 10:30 pm starting tomorrow. As a […]
-Essay- PARIS — Every aspiring strongman must fulfill a number of prerequisites. He should be skilled at demonizing his opponents and intimidating his allies, manipulating the media and restricting free speech — all the while mixing different doses of serial lying, fear-mongering and nationalism to rile up the masses. But, of course, the long-term success […]
More than ever, last week’s U.S. election was a global event. And as the four days of collective vote-counting finally culminated in a win for Joe Biden, the rest of the world seemed to react with a unanimous burst of hope for a clear change of direction. Yet already in the wee hours of November […]
Sweden’s youth see caring for the old and sick as the business of the public sector. But as the welfare state gets weaker, the elderly can rely on neither the system nor the family.
From security and trade to COVID and climate change, the candidates differ on nearly every global topic. On Nov. 3, the world will be holding its collective breath.
What began as a small U.S.-based conspiracy theory on the fringes of the internet is shaping up to become a global movement. QAnon today boasts adherents in more than 70 countries around the world, according to research from Canada’s Concordia University. In some of these, the movement is estimated to have tens of thousands of […]
Swedish-born, Paris-based writer Carl-Johan Karlsson has been seeing “dead museums” since the pandemic arrived… and even earlier.
From Brazil to Canada, Finland to Israel, and well beyond, the impact of the new uptick in coronavirus is being measured across virtually every aspect of society.
“Amazon is ‘un-Swedish”…” Yes, in my country too, you’d probably hear something called osvenskt in one of those low-budget conference halls where “patriots’ gather to drink domestic beer and worry about the Moderland. So, you’ll be surprised that slap at the U.S. e-retailer was delivered by my old Swedish Econ101 professor, 10 years ago, as […]
It’s now been four months since most of the world reached the agreement that Sweden’s no-quarantine strategy had failed. In the end, it was the only European country to never go into lockdown, and as the virus spread inside nursing homes, Sweden’s death toll raced beyond that of its Northern neighbors to eventually pass the […]
Long before his sex scandal took over the front pages, every Swede knew Paolo Roberto. The son of an Italian father and Swedish mother, Roberto gained some notoriety in his teens as a street fighter, eventually earning a place on the police’s national list of “10 most dangerous youths’. After turning things around following a […]
It’s just one of many images of schoolchildren circulating around the world this week, but it comes with extra symbolism: 1.4 million students returned to their classes today in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where COVID-19 originated last last year. Eventually, nearly one billion children around the world — and their parents — faced months […]
As borders closed and lockdowns were rolled out around the world, the steady flow of illegal immigration that has plagued southern Europe for years was also temporarily halted. But new arrivals are now accelerating again, and some of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic are now also forced to deal with a worsening refugee […]
For a long time, urbanization has been one of the defining features of our societies — a tendency that has accelerated with the growth of the information economy, with now half the world’s population living in cities. But some believe that we may have reached a peak, as COVID-19 has not only paused the trend […]
The world found out quickly that COVID-19 would be a major interruption to the way we worked. By now, there is little doubt that the health pandemic — and resulting lockdown measures and travel bans — will leave permanent traces in company policies, employee behavior and our relationship with work spaces and technology. Yet it […]
Real estate markets are starting to stir from their Covid-induced slumber. After months of plummeting listings and frozen transactions, new deals are finally being made and prices have begun to recover. But the extent to which real estate will share the longer-term pain of a global economic downturn is still unclear, with some predicting that […]
In our already fractured times, virtual reality is edging toward ‘hybrid’ reality — and that’s a problem that the gaming industry must face.
“The nation-state on its own has no future… ” Angela Merkel’s apparently ominous declaration in late May was actually part of what might be the strongest vote of confidence in recent memory to ensure the future of the European Union. After years of touting austerity and protecting national fiscal sovereignty, the German Chancellor has suddenly […]
The most common symptoms are fever, a dry cough and loss of taste and smell. The majority of deaths are due to respiratory failure. But more studies about COVID-19 are now focusing on neurological factors in what is still a largely mysterious pandemic. In the last few weeks, findings from around the world give support […]
The late American essayist Susan Sontag theorized that people are drawn to watching disaster films to help normalize and rationalize what we find psychologically unbearable. Watching a fictionalized apocalypse on the screen, she argued, inures us to the possibility that a real one may arrive. Sontag’s idea in 1965 about the need for a remedy […]
PARIS — That people should be judged by the content of their character was one of those rare elementary-school concepts that actually stuck. It was no doubt the candor and simplicity of the idea, but it may have helped that my history teacher Mr. Hansson for once deviated from his trademark text-heavy PowerPoints — and […]
PARIS — For each passing day, as a perfect storm where both demand and supply plummet together across the world, the 2008 crisis starts to pale in comparison. Economists are thinking hard behind the scenes, with some pondering post-War recovery plans and others looking to earlier pandemics, like the 1918 Spanish flu, for guidance. But […]
Not surprisingly, early indicators point to a less bleak future for Sweden’s still-open economy than for that of its European counterparts. A recent study by Swedbank shows that private consumption in Sweden shrank 17% between April 6 to April 19 compared to the same period last year, while revenue from hotel and restaurants was down […]
We’ve heard repeatedly the past two months that the coming economic crisis only compares to the rubble after World War II. It would then follow that leaders would look to the Marshall Plan as a model for economic revitalization. That is indeed the reference for European Commission chief Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, who added […]
Sweden’s lax regulation during the coronavirus crisis continues to perplex the outside world. From Italy, one of the hardest hit countries and the first in Europe to impose strick lockdown measures, this is how the contrast with Sweden looks: “We’re inside our homes and they’re not. Our schools are closed and theirs stayed open. We […]