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Editorial: Following A Game Without Understanding The Rules
And knowing when the game is over The locals here had another amazing athletic run this month, this time at the EHF European Men’s Handball Championships, making the semi-finals. Usually, I would not describe this nation as sports-crazed. There aren’t massive crowds…
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Editorial: We Didn’t Put Páll Óskar On The Cover Again
Celebrating our previous cover person We simply don’t have a person-of-the-year category. Our colleagues at RÚV English generously hosted the Grapevine and asked us about our editing process for Best of Reykjavik, the sister publication to the Reykjavík Grapevine. The interview was…
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Editorial: The Glory Of Christmas Without Amazon
Life in a country unscathed by Jeff Bezos feels more and more miraculous My favourite goggles went on sale this Cyber Monday. I announced to the office that it pained me not to buy them. They were half off. Nobody understood my…
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Editorial: We Celebrated The Passionate Amateur For A Long Time
We’re ready to move toward venerating the dedicated professional While Björk has been on the cover of The Grapevine eight times, it never happened while I was editing. I was somehow the only holdout. On the occasion of a significant birthday for…
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Editorial: In A Land Without Kings, Inspiration And Dignity
Celebrating the truly exceptional people who caused change, and acknowledging the grace of accepting it This is the age when indecent men declare themselves kings, and in far too many places a weary public accepts the decree. Mercifully, Iceland has no kings.…
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Editorial: A Model of Democracy, Aware Of The Threats
How an interview for an English-language paper is cause for celebration Iceland has just been voted, again, the most peaceful nation in the world. Unemployment is low. While the cost of living is difficult, there are plenty of reasons to come to…
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Editorial: On Talking To The Neighbours
Walking the streets of Reykjavík can be humbling. The street signs contain more syllables than seem possible — I pass Bræðraborgarstígur on my way into work, and it’s not the most complicated street name I pass on my 10-minute walk. This weekend,…
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Editorial: The Grapevine Orbit
Returning to a paper of substance For more than 20 years I’ve been working with the Grapevine. This is how this magazine works — you get trapped in an orbit, and you never quite leave. For me, I began writing here in…
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Editorial: 100+ Places Of Solitude
Icelandic weekly Heimildin used the phrase “tourism fatigue” in a recent article focusing on the small town of Vík, where fewer than 700 inhabitants receive more than 5,000 tourists each day during summer, overloading the town’s sewer system, buying up all the…
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Editorial: The Ring Road, Forging A Nation
July 14, 1974 saw the opening of the then-biggest and most expensive man-made structure in the history of Iceland until that time: a 904-metre-long bridge across Skeiðará, a glacial river just east of Skaftafell in southeast Iceland. A river that had,…
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Editorial: Hello, And Welcome To My Podcast
In order to advance themselves, and their causes, politicians in democracies have always had to appeal to voters by all means possible. Over a century ago, this meant political pamphlets, newspaper interviews and, not least, a massive set of lungs to make…
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Editorial: Squeezing Summer For All It’s Got
Even though the weather in the first week of June has tried its best to make us forget it, summer is finally here. For another three weeks, the days will continue to get longer until it will eventually feel like the sun…
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Editorial: Homemade Icelandic Neocolonialism
The issue’s main feature chronicles the story of Samherji, one of Iceland’s biggest fisheries, and its conduct in Namibia, where, instead of buying fishing quotas at market price, they bribed officials to get a lower price. Admittedly, this is not an uncommon practice…
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Editorial: Can We Separate Art From Politics?
We reached out to VÆB, who this year will represent Iceland at Eurovision, held in Basel, Switzerland between May 13-17th. We wanted to interview them and to have their feel-good young and fun faces on our cover. Asked by their press agent,…
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Editorial: Everything Everywhere All Of The Time
Making this issue of your Reykjavík Grapevine was a whirlwind. As we were calling across the time zones to chase down the INNI guys for our cover feature, news broke of another suspected murder in Iceland, and we could hear the chants…
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Editorial: The Limits Of Trust
Trust is an important part of how any society runs. Every time we stand at a pedestrian crossing waiting for the lights to change, we’re trusting the person next to us not to push us in front of a bus. When we…
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Editorial: Video Games Are Growing Up
There’s a certain stigma attached to being a gamer. And I mean… I get it. For a lot of Gen Xers and elder millennials, video games are something experienced through kids and cousins, whether they’re hustling cash for Robux, sweating over a…
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Editorial: Don’t Hold Your Breath For The Housing Market
Everything is too damned expensive in this country. It’s a fact that is reportedly dissuading some would-be tourists from flying over to our little corner of the North Atlantic, according to recent reports from the all-knowing tourism overlords. I’d like to let…
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Editorial: A Thank You Letter
This is perhaps an odd editorial. Writers like to write about themselves, but journalists hate it. I’ll admit, I’m a fusion of both. I’m leaving as the editor-in-chief of the Reykjavík Grapevine, as is news editor Andie Sophia Fontaine. Don’t worry, you’re…
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A Memorial: The Prins That Understood Us
When we at The Reykjavík Grapevine heard the news that Svavar Pétur Eysteinsson, best known as Prins Póló, had died, we didn’t really know what to say. As always when a loved one dies, it felt unreal—a harsh reminder of how fragile…
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Outdated Comment Sections
When I began working as an editor-in-chief at The Reykjavík Grapevine in 2017, my news editor asked me a simple question: What’s my opinion of news article comment sections? My answer was not simple. But the most simple answer I could give…
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Queering The Chaos! Hannah Jane And Andie Sophia’s Editorial
Pride Month may be in June for some parts of the world, but in Iceland—as in much of Scandinavia—it’s in August. Being Americans by birth, and both being queer living in Iceland, this month carries special meaning for us, especially as we…
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Editorial: The Coronavirus Is Not War
For an Icelander, with almost no historic ties to war, to analogize the fight against COVID-19 to a war seems not only absurd, but flat out wrong. It’s an analogy most often used by male leaders, and perhaps first employed to better…