My friend Lars has a poem in the next issue of Ice Floe. I had never heard of Ice Floe, so of course I clicked the link and found, to my surprise, a journal for poets living north of the 60th latitude. The most beautiful thing about it seems to be the diversity: the last issue has poems from Alaska, Iceland, the Shetlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and the ones not in English are all presented both in the original and with an English translation. Bergen is actually just north of 60?, though we don’t really think of ourselves as Northern here. We’re southerners, ignorant of true midnight sun, more likely to go to Rome than to Nordkapp. Rome is closer, actually.

One day I’ll go north.


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

6 thoughts on “Ice Floe

  1. Toril

    I can recommend the north, it is absolutely stunning. In fact I have
    seen a lot of the world, but nothing like Lofoten and its surroundings.

  2. Simon

    Perhaps you’ll be able to contribute to Nordland fylkes LÊrende nettverk project. That should warrant a trip up here. Let me know when you’re coming, and we’ll argue over dinner.

  3. steve

    Have you heard the music of John Luther Adams? His book Winter Music is about the process of composing in response to living in the Arctic. Definitely worth a read (and a listen).

  4. Blogger

    So, what about the blogg contest at dagbladet.no?

  5. Jill

    Wow. Thanks, Steve!

    Blogger: I think the jury’s nominations are being announced today 🙂

  6. Lars

    You’ll be most welcome when you do go north, Jill 🙂
    And thanks to Steve for the tip on John Luther Adams.
    Incidentally, I was inspired by this post to consider more closely what exactly “the north” is.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Screenshot of a paragraph from a New York Times article published May 12, 2026. Text reads: "The price of tomatoes -tart bursts of flavor in salads and sandwiches — surged nearly 40 percent in April from a year ago on a combination of bad weather, high tariffs and climbing transportation costs."
AI STORIES

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Genre glitches occur when a word in the generated text is heavily associated with a genre or context that is markedly […]

Top of a ransom note from Shinyhunters hacking group. Text reads: "SHINYHUNTERS rooting your systems since '19 ;) ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some "security patches"."
Networked Politics University politics

UiB self-hosts the open source version of Canvas, so wasn’t affected by the breach

On May 1st Canvas announced a security breach, and then yesterday the system was hacked. The login page was replaced by a ransom note: if universities don’t pay up by 12 May, student data will be released. Here’s what the login page looked like yesterday: Way back in 2015, when […]

AI and algorithmic culture Networked Politics

AI-generated images, fascist aesthetics: Dieselbrølet and Heimatstrom

My German is pretty dodgy, so when I first saw Heimatstrom on Bluesky, shared by Roland Meyer, a professor of visual culture at Universität Zürich’s Digital Society Initiative, I misinterpreted it and thought it was a far-right campaign. But no, Heimatstrom is a group of left-wing environmentalists using fascist AI […]

Photo of a billboard ad at Oslo S train station showing a smiliing conductor and the text "Du må ikke sove. Joda, bare sov du."
AI STORIES

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references)

There’s a new ad for the train between Stavanger and Oslo in Norway that uses a line from Arnulf Øverland’s famous anti-fascist poem Du må ikke sove (“You must not sleep”). Du må ikke sove, you must not sleep, the ad says. And then it flips it, jovially, joda, bare […]

Academics in Norway: Sign this petition asking for research-based discussions of how to use AI in universities

I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. ,  If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics).  This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]

screenshot of Grammarly - main text in the middle, names of experts on the left with reccomendations and on the right more info about the expert review feature
AI and algorithmic culture Teaching

Grammarly generated fake expert reviews “by” real scholars

Grammarly is a full on AI plagiarism machine now, generating text, citations (often irrelevant), “humanizing” the text to avoid AI checkers and so on. If you’re an author or scholar, they also have been impersonating and offering “feedback” in your name. Until yesterday, when they discontinued the Expert Review feature due to a class action lawsuit. Here are screenshots of how it worked.