Tales of Iceland or "Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight"

we leave our homes, that we step through our doors to the world, that we travel our whole lives not because we want to collect exotic T-shirts, not because we want to consume foreign adventure the same Western way we consume plastic and Styrofoam and LCD TVs and iPads, but because it has the power to renew us—not the guarantee, not the promise, jus

We realized too late how much dust the car kicked up, even going no faster than about 40 mph, and soon the interior of the car became covered in a thin coat of dust that would later turn up in our nostrils as boogers thicker and more chitinous than H.R. Geiger’s Alien.

“C’mon, man, these aren’t bullshit fairy tale zombies that can walk on the sea floor or that can only be killed with a bullet to the head. This ain’t some bullshit Rapture story where the dead walk the earth. This is science, man. These zombies will have to, you know, obey the laws of physics and physiology, which means they’re just super-strong, s

Economists call it a tragedy of the commons: People insist on their freedom to denude their “private property” in any way they wish, to horde the wealth they pull from the land or sea, and while the party’s going strong, no one much cares what the repercussions may be.

The problem with driving around Iceland is that you’re basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It’s totally exhausting. This pass, however, really did bowl us all over. You come down the highway through the mountains and the road runs to the valley floor. By some awesome

I firmly believe this will happen all over the world eventually: Women will attain most of the economic and political power while men will be lazy welfare recipients perpetually rejoicing that it’s so easy to get laid.

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,

First of all, Iceland got a 6 billion euro rescue from the International Monetary Fund and some of its fellow Nordic countries. Rather than forcing austerity on its citizens while bailing out financial institutions, it let the banks go bust and reinforced its social safety net. There was pain, but not nearly as much as the countries that would atte

The most important component of Iceland’s literary tradition is a series of stories written by anonymous authors from roughly 1200 to 1400. Together they comprise the doorstop tome of The Iceland Sagas, and they serve as the mytho-historical foundation of a wind-driven, hardscrabble land not far removed from an unruly past teeming with ghosts and v