The article "No Job? Get Lost!" by Andrew Higgins is about an area of Sweden called Svalbard, where unemployment and homelessness is illegal. People who suffer from either of these are deported. Svalbard is a quiet area, with about 100 cases per year that the police have to handle. Instead, polar bears are the big threat, and a rule was created saying that anyone going outside of the city limits of Longyearbyen (a city in Svalbard) must carry a weapon that they know how to use. I believe that the author of this article intended to show the world how different Svalbard was from the rest of the world.
In the article, the author uses imagery to describe Svalbard by saying it is an archipelago located 800 miles from the North Pole. He also says it is shrouded in near-total darkness for six months. The author wants you to imagine how isolated and dark it is in Svalbard compared to the rest of the world. He supports his opinion by not quoting any residents who might enjoy living in Svalbard. He includes the perspectives of people who say that it's very different from the rest of Norway, and also, the last line of the article quotes someone who says that if you wanted to live in Svalbard, you were slightly warped.
From the article, I realized that although Svalbard has such a different way of life compared to other parts of the world, the people there function in their own way. The people there have adapted to the way that they have to live because of their geographic location, and the way that they live is normal to them. In Svalbard, people can trust each other, so much so that people there leave their car keys in the ignition, and yet it's perfectly safe to do that. The region of Svalbard may be a harsher condition to live in, but because of that, the people there are more connected, and their way of life may seem foreign to us, but that's the way that they choose to live.
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