Wow, this article is absolutely unreadable. As an example,

> In this case, though, I’ll indulge just a little because, although a newcomer to the country, I am an old-comer to the culture: my mother-in-law, still with us at ninety-five, is as Icelandic as could be and, although Canadian Icelanders are not exactly the same as the homespun kind, they are still almost indistinguishable from the natives.

So many non-essential dependent clauses. Every other sentence is like this: fifty sentences and over one hundred commas. Who thinks this is good style?