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.
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.
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.
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.
