We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken. —Michael Lewis, “Wall Street on the Tundra,” Vanity Fair, April 2009 In 2009 the US journalist Michael Lewis wrote a now famous—and famously unflattering—article on Iceland for Vanity Fair, detailing everything from its deluded debt orgy to the rudeness of its men and, rather ungallantly, the plainness of its women. Iceland was, Lewis concluded, a macho, patriarchal,
...more
