An article I found interesting on the BBC website,interested to know what you Americans think of it? A fair article?
Kevin Connolly's guide to American culture
After three years of eating steaks the size of elephants' ears, Kevin bids farewell
The BBC's America correspondent Kevin Connolly is packing his bags for a new post in the Middle East. During his three years in the US he has visited 46 out of 50 states and covered the country's election of its first black president.
Sometime around the spring of 1835, a young Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the United States on a mission guaranteed to make Americans bristle with irritation. He was going to understand them, and explain them.
De Tocqueville was smart, Gallic and aristocratic - a 19th Century version of the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" that 21st Century Americans find so vexing.
He left behind one or two books that are still worth reading, but his most important legacy was his simplest.
After De Tocqueville, just about every European sent to the United States has treated the posting as an invitation to help diagnose the country's faults and suggest ways in which they might be fixed.
Americans find this a little puzzling.
After all, they reason, theirs is a country founded and created by migrants who had left the old world behind them.
And it is generally the most energetic and resourceful people who flee old lives to build new worlds, leaving their less enterprising fellow-countrymen behind them.
So the arc of American development is going to make the place less and less like the old world, not more and more.
But there is, nevertheless, a deep-seated European instinct that says the United States might be all right if it would only tweak its attitude towards healthcare, or gun control or the death penalty.
But, of course, it would not exactly be all right - it would just be Britain with bigger portions and better weather.
Great American Songbook
My own introduction to the realities of the American century came at a rather less strategic level.
As a very young child, I had a stammer, and when I was growing up there was a theory that the rhythms and repetitions of popular songs could be useful tools for fixing this.
So the Great American Songbook was drummed into me with such merciless kindness in my mother's kitchen that I can still remember nearly all the lyrics, postcards to the dreary Europe of the early 1960s from what we dimly perceived to be a brighter place.
When age has finally shriven me of everything else I recollect across the ravaged wastes of memory, I know for certain that I will still recollect every word of the Eileen Barton classic If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked a Cake, a genuine contender to be considered the worst song ever written.
Among our favourites was a song called Delaware, which consists of a never-ending string of puns based on American place names.
"What did Della wear, boys? Why, she wore a brand new jersey of course... "
I am still struck today by the charmless ingenuity of its witless wordplay.
It does not tackle any of the really awkward ones like Vermont, or Utah but it does manage a verse about "Why did Callie phone ya?" (Cali-for-nia)
In case you had not guessed incidentally, Callie was calling to ask "How are ya?" (Ha-wa-ii).
The result of that early exposure to American culture, of course, is simple.
When you come to live in America you are shocked by the familiarity of the unfamiliar.
You will know a pretzel from a bagel and a Dodger from a Met.
You know what the uniformed concierges at apartment buildings do, and you know what you must tip them at Christmas.
The answers respectively being not much, and too much.
And there is something beguiling in that easy familiarity, but something misleading about it, too. It tends to blind Europeans, and the British in particular, to any sense of just how foreign a place America can be.
'Bureaucratic boondoggle'
This is, after all, a country born out of a tax-revolt during a rebellion against centralising authority, and then expanded by settlers who exchanged the comforts of the Eastern seaboard for the dangers and opportunities of the wild interior.
It is not surprising that a feisty scepticism towards government lingers in the politics here.
The Tea Party movement is successful because it taps into the deep American suspicion that all federal government apart from defence spending, is a kind of bureaucratic boondoggle, dreamed up by larcenous conspiracists in Washington to allow them to line their pockets by picking ours.
And America is, of course, an intensely religious place - something that is not difficult to trace to its foundation by a band of hardy religious zealots.
If anything, over time, it is getting more religious rather than less. The motto In God We Trust was not added to American banknotes until the 1950s, for example.
Americans tied themselves in knots two years ago agonising over whether a black man, or a white woman could yet be elected president.
But here is a safe prediction. It will be a very long time before an atheist or agnostic gets anywhere near the White House.
A stark contrast with Europe where the opposite is increasingly the case.
And our differences extend into this earthly realm too.
To Europeans, for example, a gun is a weapon, pure and simple.
To many, but not all Americans, it is a badge of independence, and self-reliance - the tool of the engaged citizen who does not think that either the criminal, or the forces of the state, should have a monopoly on deadly force.
Show us a gun, and we picture a muscular ne'er-do-well in a balaclava menacing an elderly sub-postmistress.
An American is more likely to visualise a plucky homesteader crouching between an overturned sofa in a burning ranch house, preparing to defend his family to the death.
Kevin Connolly's guide to American culture
After three years of eating steaks the size of elephants' ears, Kevin bids farewell
The BBC's America correspondent Kevin Connolly is packing his bags for a new post in the Middle East. During his three years in the US he has visited 46 out of 50 states and covered the country's election of its first black president.
Sometime around the spring of 1835, a young Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the United States on a mission guaranteed to make Americans bristle with irritation. He was going to understand them, and explain them.
De Tocqueville was smart, Gallic and aristocratic - a 19th Century version of the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" that 21st Century Americans find so vexing.
He left behind one or two books that are still worth reading, but his most important legacy was his simplest.
After De Tocqueville, just about every European sent to the United States has treated the posting as an invitation to help diagnose the country's faults and suggest ways in which they might be fixed.
Americans find this a little puzzling.
After all, they reason, theirs is a country founded and created by migrants who had left the old world behind them.
And it is generally the most energetic and resourceful people who flee old lives to build new worlds, leaving their less enterprising fellow-countrymen behind them.
So the arc of American development is going to make the place less and less like the old world, not more and more.
But there is, nevertheless, a deep-seated European instinct that says the United States might be all right if it would only tweak its attitude towards healthcare, or gun control or the death penalty.
But, of course, it would not exactly be all right - it would just be Britain with bigger portions and better weather.
Great American Songbook
My own introduction to the realities of the American century came at a rather less strategic level.
As a very young child, I had a stammer, and when I was growing up there was a theory that the rhythms and repetitions of popular songs could be useful tools for fixing this.
So the Great American Songbook was drummed into me with such merciless kindness in my mother's kitchen that I can still remember nearly all the lyrics, postcards to the dreary Europe of the early 1960s from what we dimly perceived to be a brighter place.
When age has finally shriven me of everything else I recollect across the ravaged wastes of memory, I know for certain that I will still recollect every word of the Eileen Barton classic If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked a Cake, a genuine contender to be considered the worst song ever written.
Among our favourites was a song called Delaware, which consists of a never-ending string of puns based on American place names.
"What did Della wear, boys? Why, she wore a brand new jersey of course... "
I am still struck today by the charmless ingenuity of its witless wordplay.
It does not tackle any of the really awkward ones like Vermont, or Utah but it does manage a verse about "Why did Callie phone ya?" (Cali-for-nia)
In case you had not guessed incidentally, Callie was calling to ask "How are ya?" (Ha-wa-ii).
The result of that early exposure to American culture, of course, is simple.
When you come to live in America you are shocked by the familiarity of the unfamiliar.
You will know a pretzel from a bagel and a Dodger from a Met.
You know what the uniformed concierges at apartment buildings do, and you know what you must tip them at Christmas.
The answers respectively being not much, and too much.
And there is something beguiling in that easy familiarity, but something misleading about it, too. It tends to blind Europeans, and the British in particular, to any sense of just how foreign a place America can be.
'Bureaucratic boondoggle'
This is, after all, a country born out of a tax-revolt during a rebellion against centralising authority, and then expanded by settlers who exchanged the comforts of the Eastern seaboard for the dangers and opportunities of the wild interior.
It is not surprising that a feisty scepticism towards government lingers in the politics here.
The Tea Party movement is successful because it taps into the deep American suspicion that all federal government apart from defence spending, is a kind of bureaucratic boondoggle, dreamed up by larcenous conspiracists in Washington to allow them to line their pockets by picking ours.
And America is, of course, an intensely religious place - something that is not difficult to trace to its foundation by a band of hardy religious zealots.
If anything, over time, it is getting more religious rather than less. The motto In God We Trust was not added to American banknotes until the 1950s, for example.
Americans tied themselves in knots two years ago agonising over whether a black man, or a white woman could yet be elected president.
But here is a safe prediction. It will be a very long time before an atheist or agnostic gets anywhere near the White House.
A stark contrast with Europe where the opposite is increasingly the case.
And our differences extend into this earthly realm too.
To Europeans, for example, a gun is a weapon, pure and simple.
To many, but not all Americans, it is a badge of independence, and self-reliance - the tool of the engaged citizen who does not think that either the criminal, or the forces of the state, should have a monopoly on deadly force.
Show us a gun, and we picture a muscular ne'er-do-well in a balaclava menacing an elderly sub-postmistress.
An American is more likely to visualise a plucky homesteader crouching between an overturned sofa in a burning ranch house, preparing to defend his family to the death.
