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Iceland: Week 33

In a week that included the first day of spring, the weather in Iceland was still very much winter. As usual, it’s the wind that makes things harsh, reaching over 45 MPH and causing yellow travel warnings across much of the country. In less than two weeks I have a trip to Akureyri planned during Easter break, so I’m crossing my fingers that things improve.

Luckily there were some indoor activities to check out. The Stockfish Film Festival kicked off, and is conveniently held across the street from my apartment at Bíó Paradís. Yesterday, I went to two sessions, both focused on Icelandic shorts: five documentaries and six narrative shorts, each including a Q&A with the filmmakers. At least half of the films were directed by film students studying at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. I don’t know how it works at other film schools, but it was impressive to hear about the level of financial and expert support they receive. It sounds like there are people on staff to support lighting, sound — even intimacy coordination — during 10–12 hour shooting days, sometimes in remote locations. Film is one of the creative industries where Iceland punches above its weight, and this was a glimpse into the educational foundation that makes that possible.

It’s not just film students who are well supported. Earlier in the week I attended a lecture by Jens Schildt, a Swedish graphic designer who did extensive archival research into the Swedish business equipment company FACIT. His work is fascinating, and involved recreating some of the company’s typefaces and publishing a book. Because his collaborator was living in the Netherlands they were able to tap into generous Dutch funding for this kind of design project.

His lecture (also at Bíó Paradís) was organized by Iceland University of the Arts and the Association of Icelandic Graphic Designers. While talking to one of the design instructors, he mentioned receiving Erasmus funding to take his entire class of graphic design students on a trip to Belgium. Europe has always had more funding for the arts, but the contrast with America (especially under Trump) is so stark. Imagine living in a society that supports and rewards creative activities that don’t have an obvious commercial profit motive?

Jens Schildt presenting his archival research on FACIT at Bíó Paradís

March 18 marked the 100-year anniversary of Iceland’s first radio broadcast, and I attended the opening of an exhibition celebrating that milestone in the building where it happened. Loftskeytastöðin, which translates simply to “the radio station,” is a small building on the University of Iceland campus that I walk by multiple times a week. The main floor has a permanent exhibition dedicated to Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first woman president of Iceland, but the basement has rotating exhibitions.

There was a collection of some of the first radio receivers in Iceland, often with a unique story of how they came to the country. For example, one of the old shortwave radios belonged to a farmer who had taught himself German and wanted to listen to broadcasts from abroad to improve his language skills. Overall, the exhibition is small but interesting. I would have liked more information on the history of the building and broadcasting, but it focuses more on tangible artifacts from the history of radio.

Architectural detail on Loftskeytastöðin, the old radio station building.
I do, of course, love the design of old radios, particularly shortwave models with city selectors.

Finally, I attended the opening performance for Harmonic Tremor by Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris at The Living Art Museum. The installation is set up as a series of upward-facing speaker cones, filled with lava collected from eruption sites on the Reykjanes peninsula. As the speakers vibrate, the lava shifts and bounces, slowly escaping the cone to create a pile of dust surrounding the speaker stand on the gallery floor. These eight speakers were augmented by many others throughout the space.

The performance was composed from field recordings made at the eruption site, including sound recorded from contact microphones placed directly on cooling lava. It felt like you were inside the eruption itself: ethereal, immense, at times startling. I’ve followed both of these artists for years, but never seen them perform, so I feel lucky to have been able to attend such an immersive joint performance. It felt like a very Icelandic experience to walk back home, in 40+ MPH wind and snow, after attending a sound performance based on nearby volcanic eruptions.

Harmonic Tremor installation by Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris at The Living Art Museum.

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Small Flock: everyday micro-stories

I’ve resurrected Small Flock, an old project of mine from 15 years ago. In the first half of 2011, I wrote micro-stories on Twitter, as a exercise to see how much storytelling I could fit into 140 characters. That usually meant two sentences at most, and the challenge was to create a sense of place, emotion, or imagination in that tiny space — a fleeting glimpse of a situation, or someone’s thoughts, that might evoke a larger scene in the reader’s mind. After posting 100 stories, over as many days, I packaged them into a website that would display them randomly, one at a time.

The Small Flock website is the ideal place to read these micro-stories, not the endless scroll of social media. But Twitter was a useful platform to establish the character count constraint, and I liked the idea of them floating by in the chaos of social media — maybe it would slow people down for a second — while also living much more calmly on their own website.

I’ve retooled the project to live on Bluesky, so you can follow @smallflock.com, where I’ll be posting new micro-stories. The Bluesky API made it surprisingly easy for me to import all the previous stories, and even supports dates set in the past. As you can see below, old posts have an “archived from” flag indicating their original Twitter posting date. The biggest change is that now I have 300 characters to work with. Testing it out this week, that’s often more than I need.

I’ve updated the code at smallflock.com, removing some cruft, syncing with Bluesky, making it work with the longer character count, and polishing responsive design issues. I also improved how it works as a home screen app on iOS. I won’t be posting every day like I did in 2011, but even just doing it a few this week I’ve found that it’s still a fun exercise in brevity and editing.

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Iceland: Week 32

In Iceland they only recognize two seasons: winter and summer. The first day of summer this year is April 23rd, and it came up in one of my classes this week because our final exam is scheduled on that day. “But that’s the first day of summer!” warned one of the Icelandic students. Apparently in Iceland it’s a public holiday, with parades and the day off work. Although often the temperatures that day are still below freezing.

I’m pretending that spring exists, and that it’s here, even if it only shows up for a handful of hours at a time, and only when skies are clear enough for the sun warm a tiny bit of exposed skin. During this “spring” I’m trying to explore the edges of the capital region more, places where the bus can take me to the outskirts of Reykjavík, closer to the mountains or along new shorelines. It’s great living downtown, but I’m curious what else I can see beyond walking distance — but without needing to rent a car. I hear there’s a good Polish restaurant in the suburbs.

Yesterday, I went to Gufunes, and the Geldinganes Headland, which wrap around Faxaflói Bay with a backside view of Viðey Island. I primarily went to see Hallsteinsgarður, a sculpture park with large aluminum sculptures by Hallsteinn Sigurðsson. They are situated along the shoreline, framing the water and mountains with a beautiful contrast between the stark geometric forms and organic landscape.

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Iceland: Week 31

It took me a while to get used to the fact that in Iceland, ice cream is not a seasonal food. The ice cream shops are just as packed in February as July, and people walk down the street licking cones held in mittened hands. While I don’t find myself craving a winter scoop, I now have a similarly unseasonable thought: when the snow starts falling, it makes me want to go to the outdoor pool. In fact, at this point, I think of pools as primarily a cold-weather activity.

After trying all the pools in central Reykjavík, I’ve decided that my favorite is Vesturbæjarlaug. The saunas were recently rebuilt, the locker room is spacious, and the open layout of the hot tubs makes for good sky-watching while you soak. A drone photo of that pool is in the collage above, part of a series by Bragi Þór Jósefsson that celebrates Icelandic pool culture and shows off the diversity of pool layouts throughout the country.

I arrived at the pool today in the middle of a snow squall, which promptly turned into blue skies, and then ten minutes later started snowing again. There’s something extra special about soaking in 44°C water in winter. The contrast in temperature between water and air means you’re enveloped in a cloud of steam, and snowflakes linger long enough to give everyone a dusting of white in their hair. As I sat at the edge of the pool, near the glass perimeter wall that overlooks a hill, a dichotomous scene played out around me. To my left, kids in bathing suits jockeyed for position to go down a waterslide into the geothermal water; to my right, kids bundled up in snowsuits threw snowballs and sledded face first down the hill. It made me think that Iceland would be a fun place to be a kid.

Remember Flickr? I mean, it’s still around, but remember before Instagram when everyone used Flickr and you could see each other’s photos without having them mixed in with wierd scammy ads, AI-generated slop, and unwanted “suggested content”? You could tag them with informative labels that helped people find them, and associate them with a Creative Commons license that proactively let people know it was okay to use in non-commercial projects. Something tells me the AI foundation model scrapers didn’t stop to look at the license I chose as they hoovered it all up without consent. But I digress.

I think that time period when Flickr was at its peak was my favorite era of the Internet. I get reminded of it every once in a while when someone contacts me about one of my old Flickr photos. About a year and a half ago, I heard from Giovanni Marmont, who wanted to use one of my photos in a book he was writing, which has now been published.

Various robots from the Technological Dreams Series by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, on display in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA in 2008.

The photo features various robots designed by Dunne and Raby, as featured in the 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA. Along with Flickr, it can now also be found on page 125 of A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons, available to purchase in print or online for free.

Noted & Done

  • To those of you in the U.S., I’m now one hour closer in time, since Iceland doesn’t observe daylights savings time.
  • I am officially old enough that “kids these days” use words I don’t necessarily understand. Well, check out this story in which every few paragraphs the author switches to write in English as it was spoken 100 years earlier, starting with 2000 and ending with the truly unintelligible 1000. I started struggling around 1500.
  • Every once in a while I see project that makes me say “why didn’t I think of that!?” because it’s so simple, and perfect, and up my alley. This week, that project was Payphone Go, a game in which you collect points by calling from any of California’s 2,203 remaining payphones.
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Iceland: Week 30

It’s an unusually mild winter in Reykjavík, or so I’m told. This week brought the first snow of the new year that actually stuck around, blanketing Mt. Esja and whipping in the wind. Mostly, that’s meant more inside time, more busing instead of walking, and some February cabin fever. But today was the kind of bright winter day that I like — blue sky, calm breeze, snow but not ice, and temperatures just below freezing.

I took the opportunity to visit the Ásmundarsafn location of the The Reykjavík Art Museum, which has three venues, with this being the one I hadn’t visited yet. It’s dedicated to the sculpture of Ásmundur Sveinsson, who designed and built the building, which served as his home and studio. His sculpture is installed in various spots around town, but it was interesting to see in its full variety, and the space itself is quite unique. More photos on Instagram.

The outside of the Ásmundarsafn museum in Reykjvík.

Since early January, the artist Finnur Arnar Arnarson has been living in a tent inside the museum, while he paints the inside of building’s dome. His tent sits incongruously in an sunlit atrium, on a platform of rough pallets, with the growing detritus of his stay collecting around it. Visitors are able to ascend into the dome where he’s painting, although there’s barely room to move around his scaffolding and supplies. It all comes together as a kind of work-in-progress performance piece. It’s not clear to me if his painting will be permanent, or if the dome acts as a canvas for other artists over time.

The tent where Finnur Arnar Arnarson is staying inside of the Ásmundarsafn museum.

I want to recommend a book I recently finished called Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell  and Abraham Newman. It’s about how America wields power over countries through non-military means, primarily focused on dollar dominance and Internet infrastructure. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, four years ago, I was fascinated by some of the unprecedented moves to sanction the country, such as banning them from SWIFT, the international financial transaction processing system. At the time, I wanted to learn more about the history of sanctions and picked up The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, but its historical focus on the interwar period was too far removed for me.

In contrast, Underground Empire is much more up-to-date, and looks at not only sanctions but other less official ways the US has used financial and technological chokepoints to coerce actors to go their way. For example: the successful push to get other countries to stop doing business with the Chinese technology company Huawei. The book brings together multiple interest areas of mine — international relations, financial networks, the Internet — and weaves a cohesive story across all presidential administrations in the post-9/11 era.

Some of the stories and history the authors draw upon were familiar to me, but it’s one of those rare books that succeeds in filling my knowledge gaps. I came away with a better understanding of OFAC, as well as clarity on how the Eurodollar works and why it would be hard for another country to unseat the US dollar as the global reserve currency. I also have a fuller picture of the extent to which US digital infrastructure dominance should scare other countries, and why nations around the world should be moving to establish digital sovereignty.

The book came out in 2023, so the authors didn’t know there would be a second Trump presidency. Even if they had contemplated it, it’s unlikely they would have guessed that by March 2026 he would have so thoroughly damaged the global world order. In many ways, the book is a cautionary tale of how America got addicted to abusing its power of economic and technical coercion. Trump, of course, has no restraint and will maximally leverage these advantages through any means possible. For the last 25 years the world has been on a leash that the US could yank whenever it wanted, but wriggling out of that collar seemed too hard and too costly. Today, with Trump holding it taut to their neck, I think the calculus is shifting.

Noted & Done

  • Nerdy thing 1: old Nokia ring tones were actually morse code for “S-M-S“.
  • Nerdy thing 2: the HTTP status code for a request that can not be completed for legal reasons, such as government censorship, is HTTP 451. Named after Fahrenheit 451.
  • I finally got around to reading Sam Levine and Stephanie Nguyen’s report about the exploitative surveillance practices of loyalty programs. Really smart analysis.
  • If you, like me, refuse to upgrade to Mac OS Tahoe, then you might be interested in this device management profile to turn off upgrade reminders.
  • Also — if you, like me, need to regularly split or combine PDF files and don’t pay for Acrobat, you should know about the free version of PDFsam.

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Iceland: Week 28

I don’t know about you, but I keep a list of remote islands and islets that I find fascinating and would like to visit some day. I’ve written about some of them at Looking North (Sula Sgeir, St. Kilda, Fugloy) and my Google Map is cluttered with “Want To Go” pins on many others: Jan Mayen, Stora Dimun, Tindhólmur, St. Helena, Foula, any of the Aleutian islands. While reading about the Olympics this week I added another to my list — Ailsa Craig, an island off the west coast of Scotland where all the granite for curling stones comes from.

Ailsa Criag — photo by August Schwerdfeger (source)

According to this article in CNN Science, the granite on Ailsa Craig has an unusual chemistry, and is “extremely low in aluminum.” It’s apparently so perfect for curling that the Olympics has never used any other granite source in formal competition since the first winter games in 1924. I love stories like this. The world is freaking out about geopolitical chokepoints for rare earth minerals, but nobody seems concerned about single sourcing for curling stones?

The NYTimes has a great piece on Ailsa Criag and curling stones, but it’s in their Athletic section, which my subscription doesn’t include because I’m generally uninterested in sports stories. Fortunately, a mirror is available on archive.today so check it out there. The embedded video showing stones being made doesn’t work in that archive version, but it’s available on Facebook.

The big news in Iceland this week was the dramatic changes at Reynisfjara black sand beach on the south coast near Vík. It’s a popular tourist site, which I especially love for it’s massive basalt columns. The site has been in the news recently due to numerous deaths caused by its massive sneaker waves, but now the beach has mostly disappeared. Persistent easterly winds and high waves all winter have washed the sand away, filling the previously accessible basalt cave with water.

Photo by Syn/Visir.is Screenshot (source)

I was there in early December with my brother, and while I’m surprised to hear how quickly this erosion occurred I can believe it, given the conditions we experienced there. The waves were incredibly powerful, and the wind was so strong it knocked me to my knees twice. From what I’ve read it may become more accessible again if the winds reverse direction, but nobody knows how long that will take. In Iceland, the landscape is always changing.

Reynisfjara in December, 2025.

I met up this week with a small group of other Americans in Iceland to begin planning some kind of event here for the upcoming No Kings day on March 28. It’s hard to know what the right kind of event is in a remote foreign outpost, but it feels important to have some kind of representation. Go sign up to learn about what is happening near you and hold that Saturday on your calendar.

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Iceland: Week 27

We’re one week into February, the only month that can fluctuate in length, but even with that quirk it’s always the shortest. I would believe it if you told me that’s why it was chosen for Black History Month, although the real purpose was to include the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, both happening this week. Meanwhile, Trump is using the occasion to post racist memes that he refuses to apologize for.

Lately I’m finding some psychological reprieve in the total and complete acceptance of who he is. When you already know the depths of his depravity and immorality, when you know that he will never change, when you know that the cruelty and corruption is the point, then you can, at the very least, stop the spike of adrenaline that is caused by each of his chaotic and hateful actions. There is no tipping point he hasn’t already crossed, no further transgression that will finally warrant accountability, no revealing document that whisks him out of our lives. This acceptance is not a form of endorsement, but a tactic to avoid having our emotions hijacked, so we can think more clearly.

We don’t need to find another smoking gun; they’ve been fired over and over again. What matters now is the breadth of the American populous that is fed up, the number of people who care more about rejecting fascism than party affiliation, the scale of citizens who are ready to use both their voting and economic power to stand up for humanity and democracy.

I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m here in the middle of the North Atlantic, trying to make sense of my own life while the world keeps spiraling off-axis. All I have for this week is the firmer realization that the tipping point will never be something he does, it’s something we do. The question I keep asking myself this week — how can we shift from hope to cope?

hope (verb): want something to happen or be the case
cope (verb): deal effectively with something difficult

I went to a talk this week at the Nordic House by Katti Frederiksen, a linguist and writer from Greenland. It drew a large crowd, which I think was influenced by the increased attention and interest that Greenland has attracted geopolitically.

Some interesting things I learned from her talk:

  • In recent years, Inuit in Greenland have built stronger relationships with Inuit communities in Canada and Alaska. The youth in particular are more interested in strengthening bonds with indigenous communities worldwide, including Hawaii and Australia, than in connecting with Danish or even West Nordic countries (i.e. Iceland, Faroe Islands).
  • Connecting in-person with trans-Arctic Inuit is difficult because there are no direct flights. For example, to visit an Inuit community in Alaska she had to make four hops: Nuuk to Reykjavík to Seattle to Anchorage to the final destination in northern Alaska.
  • She also talked about the importance of Inuit influencers, and how Canadian Inuit have influenced Greenlanders through social media. There are some popular Greenlandic influencers, like Q’s Greenland.
  • In Greenland, the traditional Inuit language has been well preserved but many aspects of their culture (dress, music, food) have been eroded. She said that in Canada the opposite has happened, where the language is often lost but other cultural traditions remain strong. In this way, Greenlanders are re-learning about traditional practices from Inuit in Canada.
  • In terms of language, all education, government, and private sector work tends to be conducted in Danish. English is pervasive because of the Internet.
  • Greenlandic has distinct dialects by region: western, eastern, and northern. Traditionally, these communities did not mix much because it’s so difficult to travel. However, a big divergence with east Greenlandic is not just because of distance, but because Christian missionaries did not arrive there until much later. In the shamanic religious traditions, which remained prevalent for longer in the east, certain words were not allowed to be spoken in reference to the dead. This required communities there to invent many new words, which caused the eastern dialectic to diverge.

Speaking of Greenland, one of my photographs from the protest at the Greenlandic embassy from a couple of weeks ago was published in the print edition of the Reykjavík Grapevine this week (the one on the left).

This week was the Winter Lights Festival in Reykjavík, which involves projected light shows throughout the downtown area as well as concerts and other events. On Friday was Museum Night, where 36 museums were free and open from 6-11pm. I took advantage to visit some museums I hadn’t been to yet, including Whales of Iceland and the Reykjavík Maritime Museum. The latter is particularly well done and highly recommended.

Along with lighting up Hallgrímskirkja, there were a series of concerts inside dubbed HyperOrgel in which musicians utilized the MIDI interface on the church’s massive organ to create computer-controlled organ performances. This means that they could create their own interfaces for interacting with the organ, including shadow play in front of a projection and waving a wand. It also allowed for using other instruments to control the organ, or example a recorder and a theremin. I kept thinking that it was the musical equivalent of miraculin, the taste modifier in miracle fruit that subverts your expectations by causing sour foods to taste sweet.

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Iceland: Week 26

Yesterday I went on a long walk through Reykjavík, from one side of the peninsula to the other, through the wooded area of Öskjuhlíð and along the thin walking path between the ocean and the airport. I needed sunshine, air, and movement. It was the last day, of the first month, of a new year that has been marked by turbulence and uncertainty. Full moon tonight, so at least the celestial bodies are still reliable and trustworthy. At rock bottom, we can count on that.

I went to two separate talks about Greenland this week, one of them hosted by the Institute of International Affairs and the other by the Political Science Association. The latter included Karsten Peter Jensen, Head of Representation for Greenland in Reykjavík, whom I saw speak last week at the protest. I learned that his title can not be “ambassador” since Denmark retains control of foreign policy for Greenland.

Each of the talks was interesting, highlighting the absurdity of Tump’s threats, the lack of Chinese presence or investment in Greenland, and the interests and desires of the Greenlandic people. But they also both lacked any additional information about the true intentions of the American administration or the elements that might be part of a “framework of a deal” that supposedly emerged at Davos. We are still at a stage of speculation.

The first talk did engage in motivational theories, drawing a connection between Trump’s aggression and the long-standing interest by Elon Musk of having a SpaceX presence in Greenland. I don’t know. I hate Elon more than most, and have been tracking the massive corruption throughout Trump’s second term closely, but I’m not convinced that Trump’s actions towards Greenland can be explained so rationally. Increasingly, I think we have to move beyond logic in analyzing him — fewer foreign policy experts, more psychologists and therapists trained in narcissistic and abusive relationships. There are things he does for corruption, and there are things he does purely for ego, power, and punishment.

While reading an incredible detailed blog post about techniques for improving an image-to-ASCII renderer I stumbled upon an equally in-depth project by the same author about Icelandic declension, where noun forms change to communicate a syntactic function. The author of both, Alex Harri Jónsson, created a software package that would make it easier to properly represent the four different grammatical cases of Icelandic nouns. I had never considered the complexity of this before, but when an Icelandic person lists their personal details in a website or database, they provide only the normative version of their name. So if a website or app inserts their name into a sentence, it’s often the wrong variant, since the sentence structure determines the proper variant.

His post is a fascinating explainer for how this works grammatically, but also how he built an incredibly efficient JavaScript library to help programmers properly handle Icelandic names. This was partially possible because of Iceland’s Personal Names Register, which I’ve mentioned here before, that includes a record of all approved Icelandic names. One of the criteria that factors into approval is whether or not it can accommodate this grammatical declension.

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Iceland: Week 25

I’m struggling with being in Iceland, while watching the state terror that is happening in Minneapolis and across the USA. It doesn’t make me feel safe to be so far away, it makes me feel helpless. Yesterday’s murder of Alex Pretti followed the same playbook as that of Renee Good: immediate lies from Kristi Noem and other administration officials demanding that we not believe our own eyes.

This lying is vile, but it is also weak. When your power is based only upon coercion, when you believe that you can force people (or countries) into submission, you project your fragility for all to see. Your power relies on compliance, fear, and isolation; on a calculation that the other party lacks resources or alternatives. You are betting it all, and thus stand to lose it all.

On Tuesday, Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, gave a moment-defining speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in which he called on other nations to reject the aggressive logic of great power rivalry (full transcript). It’s strange for me, having spent the Fall diving deep into theories of international relations, to see so many quotations of Thucydides: “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

In his speech, Carney rejects that Realist logic by noting that “there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. It won’t.” The first couple minutes of Carney’s speech were in French, and the final line of that portion translates to: “The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.“

I think his speech was incredibly impactful because it speaks not just to international relations or global trade agreements. His advice to the leaders of middle-power countries is equally valid for citizens of the United States facing the dissolution of our constitutional rights through force and lies. Compliance won’t buy safety. Power begins with honesty.

If you voted for Trump, there are hundreds of other lines crossed that could have prompted a deep reflection, but this should be the last. Look into your heart and ask yourself if these acts of violence align with your values. It’s okay to admit you were wrong, that you were lied to. But this week was a breaking point that forces a decision — whether as the leader of another country or a citizen of the USA. You can stand with your neighbors against tyranny, exposing the weakness of a bully when measured against a unified opposition, or you can take the side of dishonesty, corruption, and state violence. Silence in this moment is support for tyranny. Compliance won’t buy safety.

On Tuesday I participated in a candlelight vigil for victims of ICE, which was held in downtown Reykjavík by Indivisible Iceland. The event included a reading of victim’s names who have been directly murdered by ICE or died in detention. It was a small group of mostly Americans, but the vigil was covered by RÚV, the national broadcaster, as well as Vísir. Those links are in Icelandic, but include some video of the event, including me sharing a reflection. If nothing else it was good to meet other Americans in Iceland who are struggling with what ICE is doing and looking to express solidarity however they can.

On Saturday I attended a “Stand with Greenland!” rally outside of the Greenlandic embassy in Reykjavík, which was convened to disavow American bullying tactics and aggression towards the country. Although Trump has backed down from his threats to use military force to “take” Greenland there are still no clear details on his “framework of a deal” with NATO allies and he continues to disrespect Greenlander’s sovereignty in his rhetoric. I have more photos of the event in an Instagram set.

It was bizarre to watch Trump’s speech in Davos this week as he continued to belligerently say that American deserves to “own” Greenland, and yet multiple times mistakenly refer to it as Iceland. Of course, in line with the administration’s broader inability to ever admit a mistake, they denied that he said Iceland — even though we can all watch the video. There’s a reason this George Orwell quote from 1984 is making the rounds this week: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Iceland has a very centralized government information system at island.is where after you log in with your kennitala (like a social security number) you can view and manage everything from your home address, marriage status, vehicle registration, health insurance, petitions, and much more. As a temporary resident I don’t have a ton of reasons to use it, but this week I logged in to verify that I’ve reached my 6-month threshold and now have Icelandic Health Insurance.

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Iceland: Week 24

I guess it’s only been a week since I returned to Iceland after my trip to the US for the holidays, but so far, every day of 2026 feels like at least a week on its own. I started my new semester at the University of Iceland on Monday, so I’ve been wrapping my head around five new classes alongside keeping up with the chaos of ICE raids in Minnesota and Trump getting aggressive about his nonsensical desire to “take” Greenland. It’s been a lot.

When I first started exploring the possibility of studying in Iceland, I was interested in the Arctic Studies micro-credential, a one-semester (30 ECTS) program. But when I went to apply I learned that micro-credentials are no longer offered to international students. My alternative was to apply for the one-year International Affairs Master’s level certificate (60 ECTS), which allowed me to structure the first semester to match exactly the Arctic Studies program. It also allowed me to stay in Iceland longer, so it seemed like a good option.

Now that I’ve completed the Arctic Studies portion of the degree, my classes this semester are less specialized. I’m optimistic that I’ll still find them interesting, but to be honest, my motivation is nowhere near as high as last semester. This overall experience has always been driven by a mix of interest in the academic program a desire to live in Iceland—the weight is now shifting to the latter. My courses this semester are: Negotiations, The Role and Policymaking of International Institutions, Governance of the Internet, Practical Statistics, and Introduction to Security Studies.

During the holiday break I found time to publish the Arctic-related papers I wrote last semester on my Looking North blog, where I’ve been writing since 2019 about landscapes and cultures of northern places. I hadn’t published anything there in a couple of years, and these latest essays are much more in-depth than what came before. I’m not sure if I’ll pick up the pace of publishing on Looking North or not, but between this blog and there it seemed like the more appropriate venue. The two essays are:

  1. Arctic Fiber Frontiers — How are subsea cable networks reshaping sovereignty and geopolitical power in the Arctic?
  2. America’s Arctic Imaginaries — What does the controversy over drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reveal about competing American visions of the Arctic?

Both are topics I was excited to dig into and learn more about, and I’m happy with the outcome. While written in an academic context I think they’re very accessible, so if you’re interested at all I hope you’ll check them out.

During Christmastime, Icelandic graveyards are full of candles. This is the post-holiday candleholder discard pile.
From a wrapper on some scaffolding downtown Reykjavík that highlights the history of what used to exist at that location. This is the first evidence I’ve ever seen that Iceland had a pneumatic postal service.
This was the strongest aurora I’ve seen yet, and the way it swirled around Mt. Esja was otherworldly.

Back to the chaos of Trump’s threats to the international rules-based order—I would say that people in Iceland are starting to wake up. Iceland and the US have had a co-dependent and beneficial relationship since WWII, but these belligerent statements about taking over Greenland have people worried that the same logic could be applied to Iceland. It doesn’t help that Billy Long, Trump’s nominee to be the US ambassador to Iceland, joked this week that Iceland will be the 52nd state and he’ll be governor. This led to a petition, which I signed, for the Prime Minister of Iceland to reject his ambassadorship. Long has since apologized, but only in the classic non-apologetic move of saying he was sorry, “if anyone took offense.”

Meanwhile, the stories and videos of ICE acting as an unaccountable, hateful, dehumanizing paramilitary force continue to stream out of the Twin Cities. Just as we saw in Chicago and Portland, I’m proud of the Minnesota resistance I see from afar, of people standing up for their neighbors, documenting these illegal actions, and even bringing whimsey and joy in the face of terror. Yesterday, a January 6th insurrectionist Nazi tried to inflame tensions in Minneapolis with a hateful rally downtown and protestors ran him out of the city. I find it hopeful to see that people are not backing down in the face of fascism, but I’m incredibly worried about how Trump will continue to escalate. He wants chaos; he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. The latest I’m reading today is that they’re planning to deploy 1,500 paratroopers to Minneapolis. This is insane.

Here in Reykjavík, a group that I joined late last year called Indivisible Iceland is planning a vigil for Renee Good and all victims of ICE on Tuesday, January 20th.

Noted & Done

  • I finally had an Icelandic celebrity sighting at the pool. Ingvar Sigurdsson was leaving just as I was arriving.
  • The post-solstice daylight situation is improving rapidly. Today the sun sets at 4:29PM, only 19 minutes earlier than Chicago. I’m tired of the dark, but I’ve also been really appreciating the sunsets lately, knowing that at some point I won’t see them anymore.
  • This article in the Guardian about losing our connection the future due to the ongoing polycrisis is something I’ll be thinking about for a while. In particular, the idea that we “don’t really think about our future — we remember it…when we daydream or envision ourselves at a later point, we essentially create a memory. We then use these memories to construct our ideas about the future.”
  • Marcin Wichary compiled a fantastic list of his favorite tech museums around the world. I’ve only been to one of these (The Connections Museum in Seattle) so I’ll be referencing this list on future trips.
  • I used an eSIM from Airalo when I was in the US and it was a great experience. iPhones can support multiple active eSIMs, so it got me thinking about other use cases. For example, even if you already have an active plan, you could get an eSIM that operates on a different carrier network to act as a backup in areas of spotty coverage. I think I’ll do this the next time I’m on a long US-based roadtrip through areas with poor coverage.
  • If you use Gmail, you should know that Google has by default given its Gemini AI access to your inbox to enable “smart” features. Here are the instructions for how to turn it off.