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Iceland: Week 51

Things have gotten very minimal. As I enter my last week living in Iceland, I’ve had success in selling all of my larger pieces of furniture, which is a relief, but that also leaves me with a very sparse setup: air mattress, desk chair, side table. It’s enough to get me through the week, the highlight of which is the eclipse and the festival that Björk is hosting on Wednesday. As of now, the weather forecast is cloudy with a chance of rain, so it’s unclear how much I’ll actually see. But I’ve heard that even if it’s cloudy, the feeling of totality is dramatic, so I’m excited to experience it for the first time.

During my second semester at the University of Iceland, I ended up orienting a lot of my studies around cybersecurity, a topic I’ve had a longstanding interest in and which I got to intersect with directly when I worked at the CFPB. Some courses, like Internet Governance, already included relevant readings, and for others, such as International Institutions and Security Studies, it was a way for me to align those courses with my personal interests. One of the things I researched was the potential for an international approach to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) in which countries do a better job disclosing partial information about zero-day vulnerabilities they are hoarding, with a defined path towards disclosure and patching those vulnerabilities over time — essentially an international agreement on phased cyber-weapon disarmament.

It was during that time that the Claude Mythos AI model and the related Project Glasswing were announced, which signaled a massive leap forward in AI cybersecurity capabilities. Since then, it’s become clear that we have entered into an entirely new world. Advanced AI models are now routinely finding new zero-day vulnerabilities (i.e. previously unknown critical software flaws) with ease. These were previously so scarce that they were part of a thriving black market, but are now being uncovered at a pace that creates a huge backlog for software vendors to fix. They can also now be found with such ease that less sophisticated bad actors can exploit them.

Theoretically, in an optimistic scenario, all of this could reach a point in the future where these new AI cybersecurity capabilities make software significantly safer, maybe even negating the need for the kind of VEP I was researching because all the holes in our critical software systems have been found and fixed. But that future isn’t here yet, and even if it arrives, we’re in for a wild ride in the period between now and then in which bad actors and defenders are racing to see who can find the flaws first, and the defenders are always at a disadvantage because they have to not only find the vulnerability but fix it and get the patch installed everywhere it’s deployed.

It is in this context that the last week of news has seemed like a tipping point, as we learn of the possibility that Iranian hackers may have infiltrated water systems in Minnesota. We’re also getting a lot more details about the AI agents at OpenAI that autonomously orchestrated a hack on Hugging Face, a dataset and AI model provider.

At the Black Hat security conference last week, OpenAI shared more detail about that hack, and a video of the talk is on YouTube. It’s slightly technical, but if you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend it and you will get the gist even if some of the acronyms go over your head. In short: this is the first documented case of a team of different AI agents autonomously collaborating to break out of the constraints placed on them and stage a hack. They first had to figure out how to hack out of OpenAI, and then how to hack into Hugging Face. They were not directed to do this, but decided to, as a consequence of trying to achieve a task they were given. They had to uncover multiple zero-day vulnerabilities along the way to achieve their goal. It’s honestly mind-blowing, and very concerning.

For more on this, I highly recommend this week’s Foreign Affairs podcast: Cyberwarfare in the AI Age: A Conversation With Jen Easterly. She was the Director of CISA in the Biden administration, which is the government agency that should be leading the charge in helping us deal with these radical changes in the cybersecurity landscape. But of course, Trump has massively defunded it because he doesn’t like that its assessment of the 2020 election as secure cuts against his big lie that it was stolen from him.

I suppose that diving deeper into cybersecurity topics wasn’t exactly what I expected to do with my last couple of weeks in Iceland, but the weather has been poor and the tourism crunch for the eclipse has made it impractical for me to take more trips outside of Reykjavík.

It is interesting that the two areas in which I ended up focusing during my International Relations program were the Arctic and cybersecurity, both of which ended up being extremely relevant to current events and international tensions. Because of Trump’s aggression towards Greenland, the Arctic has gotten more geopolitical attention in the last year than any time since the Cold War, and the speed of AI advancements has brought urgent attention to cyber threats.

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Iceland: Week 50

I’m down to my last fortnight in Iceland and it has a symmetry of undoing, mirroring the steps I took last July as I figure out how to cancel accounts, sell my things, and say goodbye to my adopted country of the last year. I haven’t made it to every one of the places I wanted to see, but I’ve done a lot with my extended stay through the summer and it’s good to leave something for the future.

The main thing I completed this week was my essay about visiting Stóra Dímun that I started writing in the Faroe Islands. I wanted to capture what it was like to be there, the natural environment and landscape, but also share more about the lives of the couple who live there full-time. I decided to post it on Looking North instead of here, as it seemed more at home there, but I hope that you’ll click through to read it.

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Faroe Islands: Week 2

After an unusually sunny first week in the Faroe Islands, my remaining time exhibited the more typical Faroese pattern of unpredictable rain, fog, and wind. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it seems though, since the weather is rarely the same everywhere and the country is small enough to drive across (and back) in a single day. I had a rental car starting Monday, so I could adapt my plans and chase the sun by checking webcams distributed around the country.

Being able to drive also meant I could check out Eysturoyartunnilin, the last subsea tunnel I hadn’t seen, with the world’s only subsea roundabout. The Faroese are incredibly prolific at building tunnels, and not only the subsea variety. When I was there in 2018, the tunnels in the Northern Isles were single-lane and unlit. But in 2024, they replaced them with modern two-lane tunnels that allow larger vehicles to pass. They even opened a new tunnel while I was visiting! On Sandoy — coincidentally on the same day that I visited, but on the other side of the island — the tunnel connecting Dalur and Húsavík was opened, letting residents avoid the narrow cliff-side route that has a history of landslides.

Múlafossur waterfall in Gásadalur.

On Monday, my initial plan was to hike the old postman route between Bøur and Gásadalur on the island of Vágar. Gásadalur is most well known for the Múlafossur waterfall, whose water falls from the cliff edge into the ocean. But I’ve long been interested in the history of the village itself, which was very isolated before the tunnel was built twenty years ago. There is a fascinating documentary called 1700 Meters from the Future, which I’ve written about (and you can watch) on my Looking North blog, that was filmed in the time period just before the tunnel. It shows what life was like there, and touches upon the hopes and fears that the impending tunnel raised for the 17 residents at the time.

The mountain path I wanted to hike is the one the village’s postman would historically walk every day, and continued to walk three times a week even after helicopter service started in 1983. The film features the second-generation mail carrier, whose father before him walked the route for 56 years. It’s stories like these that fascinate me about remote places like Gásadalur, and I was excited to experience for myself what that route was like. Unfortunately, on Monday morning, the top of the mountain sat in a cloud of fog. Buoyed by my experience on Stóra Dímun the previous week, where the fog ended up clearing just in time, I began the route undeterred. But after a mile and a half of very vertical walking, the fog was thick enough to soak my hair, and the wet grass underneath my feet was slippery. I was alone, the views of Tindhólmur and Drangarnir were lost to the fog, and I concluded that I should turn around.

I had planned for other hikes on Vágar, but the fog seemed intent on hovering, so I decided to visit the village of Tjørnuvík on Streymoy, which had clearer skies. The road to Tjørnuvík reminded me of traveling in the Westfjords, or the north of Iceland. The end of the road gets progressively narrower, eventually dropping to a single lane serving two directions of traffic. This isn’t necessarily unusual in the Faroe Islands; cars simply negotiate their turn, using pullouts placed at regular intervals. But the final stretch, where the road descends along the cliff edge into the village, is gated by a traffic light that alternates for each direction at five-minute intervals. There are many signs along that way, forbidding cars from stopping, which is understandable because the view as you round the corner of the mountain is incredibly photo-worthy.

The village of Tjørnuvík.

Tjørnuvík is home to the best surfing beach in the Faroe Islands, the best view of the sea stacks known as “the Giant and the Witch,” and, relevant to my unique interests, is also the landing site for the CANTAT-3 subsea fiber-optic cable. That cable is pretty old and slow now, largely used as a backup connection, but it marked the first time the Faroes were directly connected to North America when it went live in 1994. Not surprisingly, this was not an attraction for anyone else, but the cable connection box is right there on the beach itself, ready for a prominent plaque to mark this milestone of telecommunication history, if someone were so inclined.

I believe that this is the cable connection point for the CANTAT-3 subsea fiber-optic cable. I couldn’t find any other evidence, and I know that it is located in Tjørnuvík.

Tuesday, I drove to the Northern Isles, one of the most dramatic areas in the Faroes, to catch a morning ferry to Kalsoy. This island is long and skinny, earning it the nickname of “the flute” for the combination of its shape and the series of tunnels that make up the single road along the east side of the island. These are old-school mountain tunnels, the kind that have been mostly upgraded on the other islands, just barely big enough for the bus to fit through.

I was headed to the northern tip of the island to hike to the Kallur Lighthouse. That hike has gotten more popular recently, since it was used as a filming location in the James Bond film No Time to Die. On this day, the island exhibited the kind of micro-climates that the dramatic topography of the Northern Isles is particularly known for. Most of the fog was moving fast, hiding and showing views of Kunoy, which runs parallel to the island, in the span of a minute or less.

Kalsoy as viewed from the ferry.
The village of Mikladalur on Kalsoy.
There was no view from the lighthouse, and the wind picked up enough that people were sheltering in the sheep dugouts.

Wednesday, I was back in the Northern Isles, for a day of somewhat extreme logistical complexity with the goal of traveling to the island of Fugloy and taking a helicopter ride. The helicopters operate as public transit, serving outlying islands. Non-residents can use them, but at an increased cost, and you can only book a one-way ticket. My day involved driving to Klaksvík, then taking a bus to Hvannasund to catch the ferry to Hattarvík on Fugloy. From there, I walked over the mountain road to Kirkja, the other village, where I took a helicopter back to Klaksvík. I could have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited for the helicopter to refuel and flew to Tórshavn, where I walked to the terminal and caught a bus back to Klaksvík, then drove back to Tórshavn. Yes, it was worth it.

Fugloy is a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time. Back in 2019, I wrote about a documentary made about Hattarvík in 2001 that talks about life there at that time. It questions what will become of the village, but also points towards the potential for mobile phones and the Internet to revive the remote community. Hattarvík, the easternmost settlement in the country, still has a very small population. Yet because of the Internet, I actually know someone who lives there. She contacted me because of that blog post, to tell me that she was marrying one of the men in the film and moving to Fugloy to live with him. She posts about her life there now as @FugloyFarm on Instagram, and while she wasn’t there when I visited, she was kind enough to take a phone call when I was planning my trip and encouraged me to take the helicopter.

Hattarvík from the ferry.
The ferry, docked at Hattarvík.
Kirkja, on Fugloy.

Similar to my other hikes during the week, the walk between villages was through the fog, so I missed out on views of Svínoy, Borðoy, and Viðoy from the top. But as I descended to Kirkja, I was happy to see that the fog was clear enough at that level for the helicopter to fly in, and I would soon be seeing those islands from above.

As the helicopter arrived, it seemed to draw the entire population of the village to the landing pad, both passengers and onlookers. The loading process was very informal, typical for the Faroe Islands, and while nearly every seat was filled, I was lucky to get a window seat for each flight. In the air, the reaction of the locals was muted, treating it like the public transport it was, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. It was stunning to see a swath of the country from the air, particularly the Northern Isles. You can watch videos from the flight on Instagram.

Helicopter during refueling in Klaksvík
All the Atlantic Airways planes and helicopters are named after artists. This helicopter is named Ruth Smith after the painter.

My love for the Faroe Islands is fully reaffirmed after this trip. Studying it the way I have over the last eight years has made me appreciate it even more on this second trip, and I’m certain there will be additional visits at some point. There are 18 islands in the archipelago, one of which is uninhabited. I have now been to 14 of them, including six new islands on this trip: Stóra Dímun, Nólsoy, Sandoy, Skúvoy, Kalsoy, and Fugloy. It seems reasonable to think I could make it to the remaining four someday.

There will be more for me to unpack, from both the explorations on the islands and the time spent working at Williamshús. But it was an excellent trip, with some moments of both luck and inspiration, that feels like it was the right way to wrap up my year in the North Atlantic.

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Faroe Islands: Week 1

I’ve been in Tórshavn for a week, long enough to settle into a routine of sorts. I’ve been writing at Williamshús in the morning, then out exploring the city and nearby islands by bus and boat in the afternoon. I’ve made progress thinking through some upcoming projects, but have also been drawn to capture what I’m experiencing. Travel and nature writing are already intertwined interests, and the Faroe Islands continue to be a source of inspiration.

Being based in the capital has given me a chance to get to know it better, beyond the tiny turf-roofed houses of the old city and the charming government buildings of Tinganes. I’ve seen art from a cross-section of Faroese painters at Listasavn Føroya, visited The Nordic House, a sibling of the one in Reykjavík, and stopped by Oy Brewing, which is as cavernous as Mikkeller is cozy. My flexible schedule allowed me to meet up with Joel Cole, a Minnesota-born artist who has lived in the Faroe Islands for decades. We corresponded briefly back in 2020, after I wrote about his work being featured on Faroese stamps, and he was kind enough to give me a tour of his studio. It’s located in an old NATO base, high in the mountains, and is improbably shared with the prison.

But I’ve also gotten off of Streymoy, most notably to spend the whole day on Stóra Dímun, the smallest of the inhabited islands and a place that has loomed large in my imagination. Only two people live there, and it’s difficult to visit, with no harbor to dock a boat and requiring a climb up the cliffs to reach the single farmhouse. It encapsulates many of my fascinations: remoteness, dramatic topography, extreme weather. I feel fortunate that I found a way to visit. I’m working on two different pieces about Stóra Dímun that I’ll share soon — one about my experience there, and a review for an upcoming book about the island.

The shortest cliffs on Stóra Dímun.
Walking down the cliff edge, the only way to arrive or depart Stóra Dímun by sea.

Yesterday, I spent a bright sunny day on Skúvoy. Located just northwest of Stóra Dímun, this larger island forms a trio with Lítla Dímun that together resemble decreasing ripples of a giant skipping stone thrown across the North Atlantic. Until recently, getting there was a complicated multi-step affair: first a ferry from Streymoy to Sandoy, and then a drive across to catch another ferry to Skúvoy. That changed in 2023 when the Sandoy subsea tunnel opened, a 6.7-mile fixed link that brings the island into commuting distance from Tórshavn. Coordinating the ferry and bus schedules gave me nearly five hours on Skúvoy, enough to walk to the bird cliffs on the northwest tip, an idyllic area with views as far as Mykines, given the cloudless sky.

Skúvoy in the foreground, Stóra Dímun and Lítla Dímun in the distance.
The village of Skúvoy.

I also travelled to Nólsoy, the easiest of the islands to visit, just across the water from the harbor in Tórshavn and a visible presence through my window as I write this. It’s only a twenty-minute ferry ride, although timing of the return trip for the length of stay you want can be tricky. Being there, in the quiet that even a short ferry ride can provide, you can understand how people think of Tórshavn as the “big city,” despite its status as the smallest of European capitals.

The village of Nólsoy.

It is that smallness that has always impressed me about the Faroe Islands. In many places, a small town can stay on the periphery, leaving governance and culture to the bigger populations in the center. But here, the whole country’s population is only ¾ the size of Kalamazoo, Michigan — and yet, within that group of people, every role needs to be filled: from prime minister to football star, ambassador to Michelin chef. I’ve heard before, and my conversation with Joel Cole confirmed, that to pull that off, people wear many hats here. Another thing he shared, which I’ve noticed myself in even the limited interactions I’ve had, is that the Faroese people are very straightforward and practical. It makes sense when you consider human adaptation, both nature and nurture, in an environment where survival has been historically very difficult and far from guaranteed.

From tomorrow morning, I’ll have a rental car for the rest of my time here, which will let me explore more broadly. I have some hikes I’m looking forward to, and at least one more island I haven’t been to before. The remarkable weather we’ve been having here may not last, but I can’t complain. The wind and fog more typical of the Faroe Islands have led them to be known as the Land of Maybe, and back in Reykjavík it’s the wettest July on record.

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Williamshús

This morning, I woke up at 5am to the sound of crows and kittiwakes, the July sun already fully risen but still bathing Tórshavn in a pink haze that flattened the outline of Nólsoy, visible from my kitchen window. The shape of the island in shadow is like a cartoon snake that has swallowed something many times its size. A tiny village acts as the head, sitting in a flat, low spot on the northern end. The mountainous belly of the snake rises rapidly to the south, betraying its too-large prey inside, before tapering off to the southern tip, where a lighthouse marks the tail like a rattle.

The view of Nólsoy from my kitchen window

I’m in the Faroe Islands, staying at Williamshús, the former home and studio of William Heinesen, one of the country’s most celebrated writers. My quarters are on the second floor, with the first floor and basement preserved as a museum. From up on a hill, the view contains not just Nólsoy but most of the old town center, including the turf-covered roofs of Tinganes, one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

When I arrived yesterday, I was delighted to discover that I was surrounded by trees, in a country that is famous for lacking them. The city park next door is a lush oasis, filled with ducks and shaded walking paths, covered in pine needles and moss. A river wends its way through the greenery, and the National Gallery sits on its northern edge. Way-finding signs throughout the park point towards Williamshús, and given that the museum is only open for two hours each Sunday, these felt like a personalized set of directions, just for me.

I’m here for a writing residency, but not to complete a work in progress or to chip away at an existing project. Instead, I find myself at the start of something, or, more accurately, the pregnant pause before the start of something, when the intention and goals are still a snarl of feelings, before the painstaking process of untying all the knots and straightening out the strings.

I am not a morning person, but when I wrestle myself awake before I’m naturally inclined, I find that it offers something I can’t get elsewhere. Years ago, when I was writing my book about core principles of design, I would program my coffee pot to brew at an hour when I was incapable of working it myself. I would sit in my office, fully shrouded under a wool blanket, half asleep and non-verbal, writing for an hour or two before my morning commute. This wasn’t only a technique to steal time from an otherwise overbooked calendar; the silence of those hours is where the words lived.

I can’t commit to becoming a perpetually early riser, but on a day like today I can be convinced that I should.

This afternoon, I visited the National Gallery, which included paintings from dozens of Faroese artists including Sámal Joensen-Mikines, Ruth Smith, Tróndur Patursson, and Sigrun Gunnarsdóttir. It also had a special exhibition dedicated to Zacharias Heinesen, whose abstracted landscapes include not just paintings but also collages of wooden blocks. These works, hung in the cafe space, were part of a recent event celebrating his 90th birthday. An unanswered thought went through my mind when I heard that: I wonder if he’s still painting?

The fjord of Nólsoy by Zacharias Heinesen

Later today, I got an unexpected sort of answer. After walking around Tórshavn, I returned to Williamshús for the evening and found a man on a ladder, putting a fresh coat of red paint on the shed next to the main property. He introduced himself — Zacharias Heinesen. I knew that he was the son of William Heinesen, and had donated the house to the foundation that owns it, but I didn’t expect to meet him, and certainly not like this.

We didn’t talk long. When I started to tell him that I’d seen his paintings earlier today, he claimed he didn’t speak English very well, and it was unclear to me if this was a kind of modesty. Still, I can now say that I’ve seen Zacharias Heinesen completing a painting, even if it was only the siding.

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Iceland: Week 49

Tomorrow I fly to the Faroe Islands for my residency at Williamshús, the former home of William Heinesen, a Faroese writer and composer. I’ll be living in an apartment on the second floor, while the first floor and basement act as a museum, preserved as they were when he lived and worked there.

I’ve only been to the Faroes once before, but that week-long trip in 2018 left an impression and a connection far beyond a typical tourist visit. I started reading as much English-language history of the country as I could find, devoured all the episodes of the Faroe Islands Podcast, and started my Looking North blog to document and share what I was learning. It’s hard to explain why that place sank its claws so deeply into my psyche, but it’s easy to trace how that experience inspired subsequent research into northern cultures, which ultimately led to discovering the Arctic studies program and my move to Iceland.

If it resonated with me so strongly, why have I been reluctant to return? By a certain logic, I should have gone back to the Faroe Islands much sooner. But perhaps paradoxically, I felt an aversion to going unless I had a deeper reason to be there. I didn’t want to be just a tourist; I wanted at least slightly more grounding and purpose as to why I was there. I felt similarly about Iceland, also because of my love of the place, and of course my graduate certificate program became the deeper purpose for coming here. The writing residency at Williamshús was just enough of a nudge to overcome this hurdle for the Faroe Islands.

I suppose that this distinction is something like the tension between being a tourist and a traveler, of wanting a way to see a place a level deeper — if not as a local does, then at least at a level of engagement beyond the superficial. I’m not concerned with being on the far end of the tourist spectrum, like the cruise ship passengers in Reykjavík who swarm in for pre-packed experiences with shopping lists to check off. But the question of what “authentic travel” means is thorny. I think it really comes down to the trip’s intention, for which the English language lacks a single word.

Some people associate the word “vacation” with relaxation, although I tend to overload that term to include trips with a lot of physical activity too. Further complicating that is the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 fun, the latter of which pushes further away from the typical vacation definition. Unsurprisingly, German has a clearer distinction, where the word Bildungsreise translates to “educational trip,” whereas Urlaub means simply “vacation.” I guess I’m hoping that this trip to the Faroe Islands will prove closer to a Bildungsreise, with writing and thinking, hiking and exploring — sitting a little deeper in the culture and present of a place that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the last eight years.

Noted & Done

  • I went to Björk’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland.
  • I finally switched from Spotify to Apple Music. If you’re thinking about making this move, let me reassure you that it is easy and seamless. Apple provides a tool to import everything and the design of their app is better in every way. I wish I had done it sooner.
  • Instagram has a new feature that will use your Instagram photos in AI images unless you opt out. Follow the instructions here.
  • I highly recommend the TV show Star City, the spinoff of For All Mankind that continues the premise of the Soviet Union winning the space race, but from the Soviet perspective. It’s really fantastic and doesn’t require that you’ve seen any episodes of For All Mankind, which FWIW I think has gone downhill since season three. Hopefully Star City will be a limited series and not the first of a multi-season run; it feels complete.

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Iceland: Week 48

The numbering of these weekly blog posts doesn’t include the three weeks I spent in the US around the new year, so while typing “48” into the header, it caught me off-guard to realize that this coming week will cap the one-year mark of my arrival in the country. It has been dawning on me in other ways, though, as annual events I’ve attended begin advertising their next iteration and the temperature and tourist levels begin to resemble heights I remember from last July. I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to experience a full cycle of the seasons, to feel the gradual shifting of nature and life throughout the year. In some ways, I think experiencing that slow circular shift in its entirety is a minimum requirement to really know a place.

My friends Jason and Val are here right now, and it’s been fun to hang out with them. Yesterday, Val and I hiked to the top of the Glymur waterfall, on what turned out to be an even nicer day than when I did it three weeks ago. One of the things I love about hiking is that repeat walks on the same trail always feel different. For example, since I was there last, the volume of water has noticeably increased, requiring a full-on wade through the first river crossing instead of the mostly-dry stepping-stone path last time. It also led to considerably more mist floating up through the canyon, creating rainbows for the Northern Fulmars to glide through.

I think this hike is the best trail within roughly an hour of Reykjavík, or maybe it’s a tie with the Reykjadalur Hot Spring Thermal River. It’s easily accessible, but has the kind of elevation that feels more like the highlands. It’s strenuous enough to make you feel accomplished — including unique features like a double river crossing — but not terribly difficult or long. It fits easily into a larger itinerary and doesn’t take the whole day; we didn’t leave until 1pm and were back in time for dinner.

I’ve been writing about Icelandic whale hunting in the last couple of posts, and last week I predicted that the attention from Captain Paul Watson might actually backfire, spurring notoriously independent Icelanders to double down in the face of outside pressure. One sign of that is a news story from this week about the Icelandic national anthem being played as a slain fin whale was dragged into the processing plant. Worse still, in response to media presence on the scene, a worker grabbed the whale’s penis and made lewd gestures towards the cameraman. Taken together, it was a shameful mix of misplaced nationalism and disrespect for the animal, only amplifying the point of the activists. The news article about this is in Icelandic, but the embedded video tells the story clearly without translation.

Like with most things, my viewpoint tends away from the extremes, and I personally have a nuanced view of whale hunting. I’m generally opposed to it, but open to limited and sustainable hunting practices within communities for whom it holds a traditional significance in their culture. This includes various forms of indigenous whaling, including Inuit hunts and the Faroese grindadráp. But while there is evidence of whaling in Iceland’s past, it is not deeply ingrained in their culture or history. The modern whaling they’re doing now is a purely commercial activity, by one company that exports nearly all the meat to Japan.

It feels like an irreconcilable contradiction to have tourists packing whale-watching boats all around the country, while in the same waters whalers use multiple exploding harpoons to kill whales in a process that can leave them in agony for up to two hours before they die. It is not distant or hidden: the fjord that Val and I drove along to reach the Glymur hike yesterday is Hvalfjörður, the “whale fjord,” which is where the whaling station is situated. In some ways, it is good that this tension between two industries is so clear, but it’s unclear how it will be reconciled. It reminds me of the film I saw back in Week 39 about how open net salmon farming is hurting not only the environment but also Icelandic fishing tourism. It may come down less to environmental protection, animal welfare, or international norms than to a crass economic calculation of which industry has greater impact on the economy.

Noted & Done

  • I went to a concert by Lávre, a Sámi joiker, in the greenhouse at Nordic House.
  • Inspired by the Faroe Islands, authorities in Shetland have approved initial plans to build subsea tunnels to connect some of their islands.
  • I launched a new feature on Moped Army to let people hide their email, part of an ongoing effort to help people avoid scammers when using the Buy + Sell Forum. I’ve learned that most scammers send emails instead of using the built-in Personal Messages system, which bypasses the reputational signals that PMs provide. This feature pairs well with my recent PM upgrades.

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Iceland: Week 47

Back in Week 4, I hiked the Laugavegur trail, a 55 km path from Landmannalaugar to Þórsmörk in the Icelandic highlands. The starting point, a series of rhyolite mountains surrounding a massive lava field, was a magical spot that I knew I wanted to go back to before I left Iceland. This week, just three days after the F208 access road opened for the season, I took a long day trip to Landmannalaugar and hiked a different part of the mountains than I did last August.

As it was early in the season, the snow was still present, both on the mountains and covering parts of the trail. But the weather was nearly perfect, warm enough at times to take my coat off and not a drop of rain until I was out of the hot spring and packing up to leave. My general rule-of-thumb for day trips is that hiking time should be at least as long as driving time, but I was willing to accept 9 hours of driving for 5 hours of hiking because I wasn’t the one behind the wheel. I took the bus with Arctic Adventures, which saved me from renting a 4×4 for the F-road and let me doze on the ride from Reykjavík and back. Driving would have been stressful — I saw multiple rental cars that weren’t up to the task abandoned in the middle of a river.

Car at Landmannalaugar that failed to cross the river.

While I was in Landmannalaugar, my brother and his family were in the Westman Islands, midway through their Iceland trip, which concluded with three days in Reykjavík. It was great to spend time with them here, wandering around the city together. One spot we visited was Whales of Iceland, which houses 23 different life-sized models of whales in a single room. That layout provides a pretty unique way to compare different species of whales directly. It was not only informative, but also topical, as the controversy about the recently restarted Icelandic fin whale hunt is ramping up.

Last week, I posted about the anti-whaling protests, but this week the tensions seem to be rising. This is primarily due to Paul Watson, the radical anti-whaling activist who uses direct action to stop whaling campaigns around the world. He’s launched what he calls Operation 86 to stop the fin whale hunt in Iceland, named in reference to actions he took in 1986 that resulted in the sinking of two whaling ships from the same fleet. His ship, the Bandero, was spotted by the Icelandic Coast Guard entering Iceland’s Exclusive Economic Zone without its automatic identification systems (AIS) turned on. The whaling boats have also turned off their AIS, so there is no public tracking of their location either.

Paul Watson is an extremist, and having watched a few seasons of his TV show Whale Wars, I don’t view him in a positive light. He justifies his use of harassment and even violence through the virtue of his cause, but in other countries (like the Faroe Islands) his brash approach has ended up crystallizing the local population against him, even if they are on the fence about whaling. If there’s anything universal about Icelanders, it’s that they don’t like outsiders telling them what to do. Watson’s campaign has the potential to make this less about the whales, and more about a clash between two men, given his focus on Kristján Loftsson, the Icelandic businessman who owns the whaling company. Don’t get me wrong, Kristján deserves to have a light shone on him, given that his political influence is likely what allows whaling to remain legal in Iceland. But I would guess that Watson will end up creating an us-versus-them narrative that leaves Icelanders siding with their countryman instead of looking at the real concerns of political influence and power. That could end up hurting the anti-whaling cause more than it helps.

In a discussion about the whaling controversy, in a private Facebook group for foreigners, someone posted this 2013 documentary on Vimeo that gives a good overview even if it’s a bit dated.

The other big Icelandic controversy this week is that parliament passed a law requiring universities to charge tuition fees for non-EEA students, taking effect for the 2027-28 academic year. Iceland was the only remaining Nordic country that didn’t charge tuition to students outside of the EEA, after Norway changed its law in 2023. The University of Iceland hasn’t set the cost yet, saying that they’re still calculating and it may vary depending on the program. Up until now, non-EEA students have only had to pay a registration fee, and prove they have sufficient funds to cover the cost of living.

This change had long been rumored, even before I applied to my graduate program. The case against it is that Iceland will lose talented students who will opt to study elsewhere, and that the high cost of living in Iceland will contribute to an unmanageable total cost for foreign students. Already, the university saw a decline in non-EEA applications last year as the possibility of the tuition law loomed. Some people believe that this is part of a growing anti-immigrant attitude, or has racist overtones, similar to the restrictions on student residence permits that were instituted for non-EEA students last year after an increase in students from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Ghana.

I guess the meta-theme in this week’s post is that Iceland is a complicated place like any other. As much as we might imagine that perspectives and values get bundled together into a few “packages” that we can put political labels on, reality is messier. Iceland can lead in trans rights, but enact laws that seem to be driven by racism; it can be a leader in renewable energy but allow commercial whaling.

Noted & Done

  • I really enjoyed the exhibition Big Little City – Reykjavík in View at the Kjarvalsstaðir location of the Reykjavík Art Museum. Having gotten to know the city so well, it’s fun for me to see depictions of it over time.
  • I highly recommend the free weekly newsletter Perfect Sentences by Ingrid Burrington. As it says on the tin, it’s just some very good sentences.
  • This week, on the bus to the highlands, I used the Vehicle Motion Cues feature on iPhone. It’s supposed to help reduce motion sickness when using your phone in a vehicle by resolving the sensory conflict between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels. This is a reminder that iOS is packed with interesting features hiding in the settings, most of which you can bring to the Control Center so they are just a tap away.
  • I launched another big update to the Manuals feature on Moped Army. Manuals now have their own pages, full OCR text in the HTML page, and a widget for the wiki.

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Iceland: Week 46

There are lots of parades in Iceland. This week’s parade was in honor of Icelandic National Day, when the country officially broke ties with Denmark to form an independent republic on June 17, 1944. Not to be confused with Sovereignty Day, when Denmark first recognized Iceland’s autonomy on December 1, 1918. Of course it’s a bit strange that at the time of independence Iceland was still under Allied occupation, but the celebrations this week didn’t dwell on that.

Parade for Icelandic National Day in Reykjavík

There are also lots of protests. Today’s protest was against whaling, a topic that flared up this week since Icelandic whaling ships returned to the sea for the first time after a two-year hiatus. This led environmental activist Hólmsteinn Harðarson to board one of the vessels, which then illegally registered him as a passenger and travelled with him against his will for three hours. Hólmsteinn was at the protest today, which concluded peacefully, but did involve an old man and his wife driving slowly past the crowd and flipping off the organizers. More photos on Instagram.

Anti-whaling protest in Reykjavík.
Hólmsteinn Harðarson, who boarded a whaling boat in protest this week.

On Wednesday, I attended a conference on National Security Dialogue: Democracy in an Era of Information Disorder at the University of Iceland, which focused on how disinformation continues to impact democratic institutions. This is an increasing concern in Iceland. As a small and isolated country, it has natural protection from many physical threats. But disinformation campaigns aren’t contained by oceans, and Iceland is a very digitally connected country. Moreover, I’ve seen firsthand how Icelanders use Facebook for everything, so they are susceptible to the peculiarities of a platform that has abandoned content moderation in the wake of Zuckerberg’s authoritarian contact high under the Trump administration.

The conference did not leave me hopeful. I thought the Icelanders who spoke failed to meaningfully address the challenges and that too many speakers leaned on ideas of education, media literacy, and traditional media funding as solutions. There’s nothing “wrong” with those ideas, but they’re woefully inadequate to address the scale and sophistication of foreign influence operations from actors like Russia, using technology like agentic AI. It reminds me of when I was at the CFPB, and the anti-regulation crowd wanted to focus on financial education instead of supervision and enforcement. Helping people identify fraud is fine, but stopping people who are defrauding them before it happens is better.

The one speaker who I was impressed with was Janis Sarts, Director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Latvia. He was on top of the current technical capabilities and challenges, including data poisoning of foundation models and AI agents simulating human behavior on social media to avoid detection. He also touched upon relationship bots, and how most AI girlfriend/boyfriend apps are from Chinese companies, speculating about the potential for a long-game AI honey trap.

Janis Sarts presenting at the National Security Dialogue: Democracy in an Era of Information Disorder conference in Reykjavík.

In his view, AI will soon be the main force shaping people’s information reality, and it will be much worse than social media because at least there we could see and track the spread of disinformation, whereas the conversations happening on LLMs are hidden from view. On the topic of education, he pointed out how we all want to believe that critical thinking can have an impact, but his studies show that it rarely does. His group has successfully targeted their own soldiers to disobey orders and reveal GPS coordinates, even though those people had been trained in InfoSec two weeks before. The NATO center he runs seems to publish interesting reports. The one I bookmarked, and what he was surely drawing from in his talk, was Beyond Spam Bots: The Rise of AI-Powered Disinformation Machines and the Imperative for Strategic Response.

The conference was also the first time I’d seen Kristrún Frostadóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland, speak. I honestly don’t know enough about Icelandic politics to say whether or not I agree with her stance on various topics, but as an American, the contrast to my own country is stark. Our country is run by an 80-year-old authoritarian grifter whose ignorance and corruption are a massive source of disinformation, a narcissist who shifts the blame for the fallout of all his idiotic actions. In contrast, Iceland has a 37-year-old woman leading the Social Democratic Alliance who used her 15 minutes at the conference to speak not only about the threat of disinformation due to technical advancements, but also about how politicians have to take responsibility for the fact that citizens who feel marginalized, or in need, are more susceptible to the influence of bad actors. It’s just nice to be around politicians who don’t make me feel like I’m losing my mind.

Kristrún Frostadóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland, at the National Security Dialogue: Democracy in an Era of Information Disorder conference in Reykjavík.

In other news, my brother’s family arrived in Iceland yesterday. They are vacationing on their own for a handful of days before spending a few nights in Reykjavík. It’ll be great to hang out with them here. When Isaiah visited last December, it was almost as dark as it gets, and yesterday was summer solstice, so he’s getting to experience the extremes of daylight.

Noted & Done

  • I picked up my official Masters-level Certificate in International Affairs this week, which usefully came with an English-translated copy. I managed to achieve a level of First Class with Distinction!
  • I caught a set from Lúpína’s release concert marathon, where she performed her new EP six times over the course of the day. I think she’s one of the best new Icelandic pop musicians. She opened Iceland Airwaves last year, but still plays tiny free shows at Kaffibarinn. Listen on all the streaming services or her YouTube.
  • In Icelandic celebrity sighting news, I’ve now seen actor Björn Hlynur Haraldsson walking around town twice in the last two weeks.
  • I launched a major overhaul of the Personal Messaging system on Moped Army. The main new feature is the ability to attach photos, but in order to feel comfortable doing that, I had to build a whole new flagging and moderation system that will make it harder to abuse.
  • Bíó Paradís is showing World Cup matches next door to me, but I haven’t watched any yet. For those of you who are following closely, what’s a good matchup to catch?
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Iceland: Week 45

This week brought the kind of summer sun that garners local headlines about an “epic heatwave,” which in Reykjavík means 68° Fahrenheit. On Friday, I took a long walk around the city and the mood was ebullient, with Nauthólsvík beach full of sunbathers midday and most people opting to soak in the sea instead of the geothermal pool. I decided to take advantage of the favorable forecast and rented a car for the weekend, aiming to explore some relatively nearby places that I haven’t been to yet. I didn’t want to book a hotel, so I split the travel into two long day trips: heading north to Vesturland on Saturday and then driving around the “golden circle” area on Sunday.

Nauthólsvík beach

My first stop was a hike to see Glymur, the second tallest waterfall in Iceland, which is tucked into a narrow canyon at the head of Hvalfjörður. The trail is over a thousand feet of elevation gain, and rises steeply enough to be glad for rope supports along the way. You also have to cross the river twice, once by balancing on a log that is only placed seasonally, and then back again when you reach the top. The second crossing is a very cold wade through a wide stretch of river, still calm before it cascades over the edge. I’m hoping to do this hike again in a couple of weeks with a friend who will be visiting, so it was good to learn about the river crossings ahead of time. I’ll bring a towel and some extra socks next time.

A partial view of Glymur. There is no viewpoint on the trail from which you can see it in its entirety.

I also went to see the Grábrók Crater, which I’ve driven by numerous times but never with the right circumstances to stop. It provides an incredible view of the surrounding lava fields from the top.

From the top of Grábrók Crater

In comparison to the road trip with my parents two weeks ago, when the lupine were just beginning to sprout, they are now everywhere! These purple vertical flowers line the sides of nearly every country road, and fill whole valleys along the sea. I know that they’re an invasive species in Iceland, but they’re beautiful.

The bridge across Hvítá River in Borgarfjörður.
Lupine just south of the bridge that connects to Borgarnes.

On Sunday, I headed east, looking to avoid the ring road in favor of smaller routes through areas I hadn’t seen before. Route 435 to 360 took me along the southern edge of Þingvallavatn, the massive lake that is home to Þingvellir National Park. This is a major energy-generating area, and I enjoyed seeing the steam plumes of the Nesjavellir power plant and visiting the exhibition at the Ljósafossstöð hydroelectric plant. One of the displays in the exhibition was a simple chart of energy usage in Iceland versus the rest of the world. Iceland uses 100% renewable energy, with hydropower accounting for nearly 3/4 of the pie and geothermal making up the difference, save a tiny sliver of wind power.

One thing I learned was the difference between hydropower plants like Ljósafossstöð, which can operate fairly consistently based on freshwater lakes and rivers, versus plants that capture power from the highland rivers, which have variable output depending on seasonal snow and glacial melt. Apparently that’s one area where wind power has been useful, letting them maintain higher reservoir heights in those locations if there is wind power to fill in the gaps.

Steam from the Nesjavellir power plant
Turbines at the Ljósafossstöð hydroelectric plant

Afterwards I visited Kerið Crater, which is interesting but unfortunately on the bus tour route and thus busier than I’d like. I also find their fee structure annoying. Most everywhere in Iceland there is a parking fee, since most of the sites are privately owned and the landowners need to recoup their cost of providing infrastructure for visitors. Kerið likes to advertise itself as having free parking, but that’s only because they charge an entrance fee. For me, a solo traveler, those are one and the same. But for a family that means the 700 kroner that is typical for parking is now multiplied by the number of people, which starts to feel excessive.

Perhaps the best thing about visiting Kerið was spotting something even more eye catching in the distance, a bright red spot on a mountain to the northeast. Leaving the crater, I drove towards that splash of color, winding up a dirt road towards what I could see upon closer inspection was a rock quarry. The exposed layers of earth were fantastically colorful: bright reds, yellows, and tans. A sole worker in the pit was filling a truck with volcanic debris, his yellow loader dwarfed by the size of the quarry walls.

While driving up to the quarry I saw some people in high-visibility vests in the hills, and assumed they were just walking their dogs. But when I reached the top there were numerous search and rescue vehicles, and I realized that this was a training exercise for rescue dogs. I talked with one of the trainers for a while, who told me about the different classifications the dogs can achieve, such as avalanche or water rescue certifications. They were taking advantage of the unusually warm weather to see how the dogs performed in those conditions. It was basically hide-and-seek, where the trainers would run off to lay in a valley on the other side of the hill and the dogs were given items of theirs to smell and go track them down.

The rest of the day was meandering. I stopped by the Friðheimar greenhouses to try their famous tomato soup. I’ll never pass up a chance to see Gullfoss, and was surprised to see that the top viewing area now extends further than I remember. I also went to Brúarfoss, which I had never seen before, and was blown away by the uncanny bright blue water. On the way back I stopped to see Þórufoss, which is one of those waterfalls that reminds you how incredible Iceland is because if it were anywhere else, it would be the main attraction, but here it’s a lesser-known spot with barely a sign to indicate its presence (although it was a Game of Thrones filming location).

Friðheimar greenhouses
Always amazed that Gullfoss can have this amount of water flowing over it in perpetuity.
Brúarfoss
Þórufoss