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Updated Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007, at 3:29 PM ET

January 2nd, 2008

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In Dispatches, Nathan Heller visits Iceland, where a financial collapse has spawned deep-set unrest in the nation of 313,000. "Iceland is, for many of us, the waist of the hourglass: the narrowest point in the flow of culture and commerce that buoys modern life, a place where the First World is winnowed and exposed," Heller writes in the first entry. During a rally in the capital, Reykjavík, a "vandal in a cheap Santa suit and gremlin mask" dumps a sack of potatoes on the steps of the parliament house—a sign that the nation is now so poor that this is the main staple of your average Icelander's diet. In the second entry, Heller encounters a group of people throwing raw meat and cheese wedges at the prime minister's office. "This, I learn, is 'rat food,' left for Geir Haarde, the prime minister. (It is also unsettlingly like my hotel breakfast.)"

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In The Good Word, Chris Wilson examines why Microsoft Word's spell-check dictionary is so outdated while Google's can recognize virtually any name or word, even if it has only recently been coined. "A search engine's lexicon is typically put together using words gathered from Web pages or old search queries—a huge corpus of real-world data," Wilson writes. "Word-processing lexicons are more heavily chaperoned, and the pace at which new terms enter the dictionary is much slower." Obscure terms might confuse Word but register easily with search engines even if they've been used only a small number of times. "Take a very obscure academic term like theothanatology—the study of the death of God," he notes. "Not only does Google recognize the word, it gets you there from a close misspelling like theotanatalegy." While a word processor that built its dictionary according to real-world data would have more errors, he notes, it would also be more comprehensive.

In Politics, Edward McClelland dissects Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's reasons for appointing Roland Burris—an African-American former state attorney general—to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, in spite of the governor's legal troubles: "This was a ballsy move by a governor who wants to show he's still running the state and wants to use racial politics to confound his enemies." That's not to say Burris doesn't have his merits as a potential senator. "Besides his 16 years in office, he grew up downstate, in Centralia, Ill. He understands, more than most contenders for the seat, that there is an Illinois outside Chicago," McClelland notes. (Read McClelland's Washingtonpost.com chat on the subject here.) Unfortunately for Burris, his odds of becoming a senator are imperiled; as Akhil Reed Amar and Josh Chafetz note in Jurisprudence, the Senate can rightfully reject a nominee it deems illegitimate.

In Foreigners, Shmuel Rosner redefines how success should be measured in regard to Israel's latest military engagement in the Gaza Strip. According to Rosner, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to have learned valuable lessons from his country's failures in the 2006 conflict against Hezbollah in Lebanon and has drastically scaled back the public aim of Israel's latest mission. "The fact that Hamas is likely to 'still control Gaza' after the operation ends is irrelevant to its goals. If Olmert wants to leave office in March with some measure of success, he has to make sure Israelis—and the rest of the world—understand that," Rosner contends. In Explainer, Juliet Lapidos details how the United Nations determines which causalities of war are civilians and which are militants.

Also in Slate: In Green Room, Brendan Borrell argues that eBay's ban on ivory products will do little for the environment. In Culturebox, Tom Vanderbilt examines why celebrities are so incompetent behind the wheel. In Fighting Words, Christopher Hitchens expands on his litany of reasons why he thinks the Rev. Rick Warren should not be given a role in the presidential inauguration. In Foreigners, Anne Applebaum recalls the great eloquence of the Founding Fathers. In Politics, Abby Callard offers pointers on how future politicians should manage their Facebook accounts. And Magnum Photos rings in the New Year.