30A

After crossing the Atlantic twice on the upper deck of the 747, it only felt fair that I ended up in seat 30A at the very end of the bus on my morning flight back to Scandinavia after two perfect days in Prague. With the CFM turbofan engines loud enough to block out any music, I find myself exploring the Hebrew concept of “timshel” (תִּמְשֹׁל), or “thou mayest”, in Steinbeck’s East of Eden: the possibility of overcoming what we inherit and, more specifically, the extent to which we can choose to be good.

With clear skies over central Europe, we are just passing Berlin, and I am reminded again of how close all of this is now that I no longer live in Umeå. Having taken Monday off, the rest of the week will be pretty wild, with different statistics classes between 8 and 17, but it was so obviously worth it.

Last night, sipping a “Madalenha caipirinha” and sharing a molten chocolate cake, I found myself thinking that, much like Steinbeck’s novel, these twenty years of blogging have created almost too many cross-references and layers upon layers. Still, tomorrow remains unwritten, and I am very grateful for having you all along for the journey.

Twenty years

When I composed a blog post to celebrate a decade of writing Rawls & Me back in 2016, I hinted at the idea of continuing for yet another decade, even as it felt almost unfathomable.

Obviously, it is impossible to sum up everything that has happened since, both on a personal and a political level. Yet, throughout, I have kept blogging, as toddlers have turned into teenagers, ultra distances beyond my wildest imagination have been conquered, and Halland has come to replace the High North.

There have been moments of existential bliss but also many foregone futures. Democracies have faltered and new wars have broken out. Still, sitting here in Prague on the rooftop of Grand Hotel Europa turned W, it is with a certain Panglossian optimism that I take on the task of continuing Rawls & Me into the future. Over the coming months, I hope to take you along as William and I travel to Montenegro and then, just in time for Christmas, Linnéa and I plan to cross the Atlantic and make landfall in la France d’outre-mer – or French Guiana to be more specific. Beyond that, the road is just as open as it was ten years ago with plenty left to chronicle.

3x Prague

Election watch

From last night’s election, it is clear that Sweden, like many other European countries, has become sharply divided into two blocs defined by their relationship to right-wing populism, with only a few tenths of a percentage point separating two very different futures.

Indulging in Eggs Royale at the Hilton Atrium in Prague, I started the day with a longer rowing session at the hotel gym, trying to digest all the news from the night. I had been fading in and out of sleep, falling asleep to exit polls showing a clear lead for the Left, only to wake up to see the margin narrow to a single seat at one point. It is now back at 176–173, but the final result will not be available until Wednesday. In any case, government formation is likely to be an arduous task, perhaps even arduous enough to raise the prospect of another election later in the autumn.

Canapés

From champagne under the wrought-iron pillars of St Pancras to bookstore browsing in Prague, Sofi’s and my adventures continue. Revisiting the Museum of Communism and the Výtopna model railway restaurant, both discoveries I made when I was here with the kids in 2024, we have had a charming first day in the rain, although we have both been a bit tired after the short night at Arlanda.

Staying at the Hilton Atrium next to the Vltava (which fortunately seems to have fairly normal water levels despite the dry summer), it otherwise feels a bit like being thrown back to China in 2011, when delayed immigration paperwork led to a few months in hotels, with complimentary lounge canapés becoming my primary source of nutrition. And just like at the DoubleTree in Beijing, the hotel has a slightly too-cold pool, but luckily also a Finnish spa section that more than made up for all those steps in the rain.

Norwegian

For the first time since 2019, when I flew down to Marrakech in the midst of winter, I am back aboard Norwegian. With return tickets going for just 600 SEK, there was an obvious deal to be had and, since last time, Norwegian has started giving out 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi and upped its coffee game by introducing Starbucks coffee. Looking down over Öland and Hanöbukten, Sofi and I have already been up for three hours, having enjoyed an excellent complimentary breakfast at La Girafe (as there were some floor repairs going on at Pontus) and spotted an Italian Brainrot colouring book featuring “Orangutini Ananasini”.

Once on the ground in Prague, I hope to catch up on some of the art museums I missed when I was there with the kids in 2024, and perhaps go for a city jog between the rain showers. I am flying back to Copenhagen already on Tuesday morning, as I have lots of statistics to teach this week, while Sofi will be travelling on to Pardubice, a town famous for its gingerbread, the Cold War-era plastic explosive Semtex, and being the epicentre of Lyra Ekström Lindbäck’s novel Moral.

Once in Pardubice, Sofi will visit a maximum-security prison that runs the same kind of monastery programme she used to run at Kumla, before the Swedish Prison and Probation Service doubled down on repression.

Molom

Taking the first X2000 service of the day from Halmstad, I got to hang out with Sofi and Birgitta in Örebro, walking around a town brimming with election frenzy, each poster seemingly worse than the last. Being the hometown of Örebropartiet, there were plenty of posters with Markus Allard (Sweden’s own Sahra Wagenknecht) pushing for deportation, but at least there was some comic relief from the fictitious party “Kumlademokraterna”.

Before taking the train to Arlanda for our flight to Prague tomorrow morning, we drove out to the 12th-century church in Knista for a joint concert by Sofi’s choir and another choir from Stockholm. Together, they sang songs by Alf Hambe, who was born on the Steninge coast in Halland (forever made famous for its role in my attempts to run Halland Ultra Beach). Now on the train, I am listening to Lars Winnerbäck’s “Vad gör det om hundra år”, praying that Sweden will make the right choice tomorrow.

Tylö

With the waves rolling in, I followed the wooden bridge onto the sand, just as my watch again warned me of its critically low battery level. After three years of exemplary service everywhere from the mountains of California to the streets of Tallinn, my Suunto 9 Peak had refused all attempts to charge it so, before heading out, I had ordered a new (or rather refurbished) Suunto 9 Peak Pro from the factory in Finland. Luckily, the battery held up long enough for me to complete my half-marathon loop.

Once back home, I booked tickets to Umeå in mid-October for an environmental ethics conference that has apparently had a change of heart after previously rejecting my submission. That alone was intriguing enough to warrant my attendance, and by combining night trains and flights, I will be able to attend while still doing my planned teaching in Halmstad. Paying 500 SEK extra out of my own pocket for biofuels (as that is not covered by the university travel policy), I realize that I really need to say something about that, not least in relation to yet another post on LinkedIn about those who say that what we do in Sweden does not matter for the climate.

While it is technically true that Sweden is responsible for only 0.1–0.2 percent of global emissions (roughly equivalent to its share of the world’s population), the way we go about reducing those emissions may matter much more than our small share alone would suggest. If we were to pioneer technologies or lifestyles that are globally scalable and attractive to others (ranging from advanced reactors that can recycle our nuclear waste to bicycle-friendly city planning), then we could have a disproportionate effect on global emissions. On the other hand, doing what feels good for the climate may not always be good for the climate. If we expend scarce political capital on non-scalable or environmentally harmful solutions (such as wind energy sprawl in sensitive mountain areas), then we may perhaps look good in our own eyes but do little to rein in global emissions.

So, how about that flight to Umeå? Biofuels are clearly neither scalable nor environmentally sensible as a general solution to aviation. So why pay extra for them? Because, by buying biofuels, one is sending a signal to the airline that someone actually cares, that people are willing to pay to reduce their climate impact, and that signal may ultimately help the airline explore other forms of sustainable aviation fuel. So, between doing nothing and sending that signal, I have decided that signalling is better. 

Finally, even the underlying choice between flying and taking the train to Umeå is not quite as straightforward as it may seem from a climate standpoint. For long-distance travel, the climate arithmetic becomes more complicated once infrastructure and opportunity costs are included: scarce railway capacity may be better used for shifting heavy freight from road to rail, while new high-speed lines require enormous quantities of concrete and steel and may take decades to repay their initial carbon debt. Meanwhile, aviation requires remarkably little infrastructure between its points of departure and arrival.

Yoko

This being Rawls & Me, I cannot end the day with such a dark and ominous post. If only to dream, I need to pretend for a bit longer that it is the 1920s aboard the Orient Express, and that new international adventures lie ahead.

As such, I met up with Linnéa in the rain last night for the September instalment of the American Express dining benefit. Blending Japanese and Nordic cuisine, Yoko at the waterfront in Helsingborg served a five-course omakase. Kicking things off with a “Bruce Lee 2.0” champagne drink and a “Mr Miyagi” cherry G&T, highlights included sashimi, arancini with prosciutto, and an absolutely lovely ice cream dessert.

After a night at Mollbergs, which was one of the first real hotels in Sweden when it opened two hundred years ago, we stayed true to the Helsingborg ethos by taking a morning swim. With the water at 16.8 degrees, summer may technically be over, but luckily there are still trains or planes to catch.

Balad al-fawḍā

After four years with the Tidö government, I was hoping that Sweden would somehow have turned the page, that there would be a strong popular rebuke of all the attempts to sow distrust, and that a new government (however imperfect) would start the long journey back to solidarity and a greater vision that would speak to the highest, rather than the lowest, in each of us.

Yet, seeing the blatantly racist poster above, and getting a push notification saying that the distance between the two blocks is now within the margin of error, I am beginning to fear that the land of chaos (balad al-fawḍā) that the poster warns of may indeed soon be upon us. As with Trump’s America, it is tempting to give in to misanthropy or cynicism, to think that we have indeed become prisoners of the past, and that the Star Trek idealism that Obama expressed in his 2009 speech at Cairo University cannot overcome the rising fascism of our time:

“For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes -- and, yes, religions -- subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.”