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Features

Sparsity Blues

“A brutal ballet of flesh and bone” It’s Saturday night – and it’s feckin’ freezing. Seven below. Even inside the Egilshöll stadium, my fingers feel

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Haraldur Þorleifsson
Culture

Man of the Year

This is Haraldur Þorleifsson. In 2021 he sold his company, Ueno, to Twitter. During the sale process, he was advised how to legally avoid paying taxes on

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Culture

Born and Bread

On visits to my grandfather’s farm, I would often follow him around, helping him with the farmyard tasks. In the early afternoon, perhaps after mending

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Features

Floating Through Oblivion

OASISThe word oasis refers to a fertile area in the desert. The essential component of the concept is water, for the area is made fertile because of it. The popular image is a half-dozen palm trees, huddled religiously around a small pond, surrounded by an expanse of sand. Although there are no smouldering deserts in […]

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Culture

RIDING THE WAVE

It started in an airplane hangar at the turn of the century but quickly became synonymous with the Icelandic music scene. It grew, it downsized, and grew in scope again. It saw some big names before turning its back on them to focus on fostering up-and-coming artists. It’s seen a banking collapse and a pandemic […]

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Culture

Cream of the Crop

 Row after row of steep but flat-topped mountains, interspersed with deep fjords. There’s barely enough land in between to make up a coastline, let alone farmland. But on the green patches between the cliffs and the waves, there are still more than a handful of farms dotting the landscape. The Westfjords have always been isolated, […]

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paganism iceland
Culture

Pagan Poetry

Ásatrú Society, how may I help you?” This was neither the voice of a gruff metalhead nor the voice of a wizened mystic, interrupted in

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Culture

Mad World

“Exceptionally rudimentary software” On Friday, November 11, I attended an appointment with a psychologist in Reykjavík. For weeks leading up to the appointment, my wife had encouraged me to “see someone,” for my moods were vacillating, my fuse was growing increasingly shorter, and I was prone to habitual crashes. I didn’t, she observed, seem “all that […]

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Culture

Staying Power

Elsa Pálsdóttir was doing what she loved most: Deadlifting. As she rested between sets, she chit-chatted with a man of Polish extraction, who was likewise availing himself of the equipment in the snug Massi gym in Njarðvík. When their conversation came to a close, Elsa’s interlocutor turned to another gym patron, an older Icelander, and observed, “that […]

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Culture

Disaster on Dark Seas

U-300On the morning of November 20, 1944, a single U-boat cruised silently at periscope depth beneath the rough waves of the North Atlantic, lurking just a few kilometres off the Northwest coast of Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula. The lone periscope was virtually invisible in the turbulent grey ocean waters. The German submarine, type VIIC/41, designated U-300, […]

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