Link Banana

Alissa Quart does an admirable job tackling the difficult issue of transmen (and others who don’t identify as female) fit in at traditional women’s colleges.

Many trans students feel themselves to be excluded or isolated at women’s schools and at coed colleges. Some talk of being razzed or insulted by fellow students. And even within a college’s gender-nonconforming population, students are often divided among those who define themselves as men but don’t transition medically, those who do and those who prefer not to define themselves as either male or female.

These difficulties are a natural part of being a minority that is still fighting for acceptance. But trans students’ problems can also be institutional. The presence of trans students at women’s colleges can’t help raising the question of whether — or to what degree — these colleges can serve students who no longer see themselves as women.

My apologies for the cringe-worthy title — it took all my creativity to think of and now I can’t think of another. Despite that, Carol Paik’s essay about how she’s really not Vera Wang but has made similar mistakes is unexpectedly funny.

The Economist’s Charlemagne column has a fun way to judge Europe and understand it in contrast to the rest of the world. It’s an entertaining thought, even if sometimes feels like a stretch.

In the hunt for a distinctive European identity, consider toy brands, such as Denmark’s Lego or Germany’s Playmobil.

These firms may be dwarfed in America by titans like Mattel, but in Europe they are cultural giants, vying for top spots in markets such as France and Germany. In their designs, business models and philosophies, they offer a striking snapshot of European aspirations, anxieties and foibles. (Tellingly, toy bosses see Britain as a case apart, closer to the American market in taste, and showing what they call an “Anglo-Saxon” fondness for heavily marketed novelties tied to films or television.)

The Economist has an interesting story about the new dynamics within Germany’s rapidly-growing Jewish community.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population.