'Under The Tree': When A Bough Breaks The Social Contract
A dispute over a tree brings two neighboring households into grimly escalating conflict in this Icelandic comedy so pitch-black that "the laughs are strictly of the stuck-in-the-throat variety."
"In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." That's Sayre's law, credited to the late Wallace Stanley Sayre, a political scientist and professor at Columbia University. In a perfect irony, the precise origins of Sayre's law are under dispute, but it's often applied to the halls of academia, where petty disagreements can fester into explosive personal vendettas, with little
