+ I've been hearing similar characterizations of the Swedes from a number of people, Swedes and non-Swedes alike. The way Louis described it at dinner on Friday, people in Stockholm (I wonder if there's a good adjective for this, maybe something like Michigander? Stockholmian sounds awfully gothic) do not know their neighbors, will sit as far away as possible from other people on buses and trains, and if they are forced to sit next to each other or in the same row, they'll angle themselves as far away from the other person as they can. Louis was comparing this to the relative openness and friendliness of Americans, and he lived in Virginia for a few years when he was young so perhaps it's a fair assessment of a more southern sense of hospitality - but my reaction, of course, as a hostile New Yorker, was yes! It's just like New York, except not nearly as bad. In New York there are constantly compelling reasons for avoiding crazy neighbors and deranged public transportation customers, whereas in Stockholm practically everyone is completely gorgeous and you would only be so lucky to have some of their Nordic charm rub off on you. And one might think that my years in Berkeley have softened me, but no! I still walk just as fast, even when I'm not in a hurry.

The analogy Amanda gave me, which comes from a friend of hers who is married to a Swede, is that Swedish people are like those big European/Swedish apartment buildings - they have big, slightly foreboding facades, and you need codes and keys to get in the front sets of doors, but once you're in, you find things like beautiful sprawling gardens in the courtyard, things that you definitely couldn't tell were there from the outside. I thought this was funny, and it seems true. There is not a sense of immediate warmth and openness, and it can be easy to mistake this for them being cold or disdainful or hating you for some unknown reason, but once you're in (and it doesn't take much), you're in.


+ A lot of the work and reading I'm doing deals with size at birth. When adjusted for length of gestation, birth weight acts as a very useful marker of conditions in utero. One of the main connections is with nutrition, which makes sense - if you are not well-nourished when you're developing, there are all sorts of changes and adjustments that your body makes that may set you up for greater health risks later in life. Aside from literal malnutrition (e.g. siege of Leningrad), there are all sorts of things that contribute to lower birth size - smoking is an extreme and obvious example. A lot of this work, in turn, draws on the "mismatch" hypothesis (Barker), which is basically the idea that if you experience adverse conditions early on, such as in utero, then your body makes all of these physiological and metabolic adjustments to cope with the conditions that it is experiencing and that it "thinks" it will continue to experience when it's on its own. If, as is sometimes the case, the cues that are received in utero do not match the actual environment for whatever reason, or if there are changes from malnutrition in utero to adequate nutrition later on, for example, there are greater risks for all sorts of diseases. The mechanisms for this are really complicated and I'm only just starting to understand a lot of it, but the point of writing about this was that the continuum usually ranges from inadequate nutrition to adequate nutrition, and something that came up when I was talking with Ilona this morning was the question of what happens when there's overadequate nutrition. In, uh, America, for example. I know there's a lot of controversy about the research on obesity, and I don't know much about it, but it seems like a safe bet that if the one extreme of low birth weight is correlated with certain negative conditions, the extreme on the other end is going to be connected with some bad stuff too. Interesting.