Ruth Sadelle Alderson

Someone threw an egg that hit a wall and splashed a drop or two onto the policewoman's shoulder. Two bananas landed at her feet. Iceland's protests had a consistently culinary theme: skyr, Iceland's yogurt-like specialty, was often involved; that day, milk and cheese had been thrown onto the lawn in front of the Prime Minister's office; and at an earlier protest I had seen a bag of potatoes spilled onto the sidewalk by the Parliament building - potatoes being the gift brought by Iceland's Santa Claus to children who are out of favor.

Iceland certainly had resources - fish stocks, geothermal power, a highly educated workforce, beguiling pop stars - but it was hard to understand how this had been leveraged into "luxury and vulgarity," as Magnason put it.

When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Iceland began to make its way toward independence from Denmark, the experience was more one of self-discovery than of revolt. "The rhetoric of Icelandic politics is steeped in the nationalist fiction of the 'struggle for independence,'" Hálfdánarson said. "I don't think the Danes were particularly sad to let us go."

Margaret Thatcher is one of his great heroes - after a glass of wine, he imitated her voice precisely - and another is the libertarian philosopher Friedrich Hayek, the subject of his Oxford doctorate.

When the krona did fall, some detected underhandedness. It was reported, for example, that foreign hedge-fund managers had flown to Iceland and had bragged in the bar of the 101 Hotel about their plans to bet against the krona. But as one senior and unsentimental Icelandic financier put it to me, "If you're so vulnerable that five idiots from the East Coast, drunk in a bar, can destabilize the currency, then it's not a proper currency."

(In a similar spirit of ironic self-laceration, a Web site called New Iceland, owing something to The Onion, had launched with such headlines as, "'It's Tempting, Very': Prime Minister Haarde on Selling National Treasure Björk to a Bulgarian Circus.")

At the Icelandic Red Cross, Katla Thorrsteinsdóttir said that the number of calls to a help line for people feeling down, or suicidal, had risen by fifty per cent. Her own dismay was evident. "The only thing that I know is that I will be here tomorrow," she said.

And, when two thousand people met on January 20th, it was with the idea not of making speeches but of filling the area with noise that would be heard inside Parliament. Beneath posters referring to events occurring in Washington on the same day - "Yes we can!" - they beat on pots and pans. This was the start of a noisy week: an open-ended, roaming protest that the local press came to call the Kitchenware Revolution. "Or you could call it the Night of the Long Spoons," Magnason said. That first day, the police were pelted with foodstuffs (including "occasional trays of pasta," as The Reykjavík Grapevine, an English-language magazine, put it) and in return used pepper spray.

On February 1st, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, a widely trusted, left-wing, and gay member of Parliament, became Prime Minister of Iceland, heading a new coalition led by the Social Democrats.

An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts. In extreme cases, when the wait becomes actually long, instead of merely perceptibly long, things fall apart. The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

One woman wrote to say she was so unhappy because the cats in her neighborhood killed birds. We were going to write back and suggest that she collect the murderous felines and read the Audubon circular to them; but we restrained ourselves and advised her to feed the cats. (Elliott Coues, quoted on page 143)

The introduction to every volume carried the same put-up-or-shut-up message:

The reader is reminded again that this is a cooperative work; if he fails to find in these volumes anything that he knows about the birds, he can blame himself for not having sent the information to

--The Author

(Cleveland Bent, quoted on page 182)

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Tearing the pages out of books and rubbing out words that might worry their little one - it was just what Katharine White had been complaining about all along. In Stuart Little, her husband backed her up. And, in her next children's-books column, she, in turn, vindicated him, lamenting the pitiful state of a literature "careful never to approach the child except in a childlike manner. Let us not overstimulate his mind, or scare him, or leave him in doubt, these authors and their books seem to be saying; let us affirm."