Hello! Today: friendship love vs romantic love; friends who climb together; friends who get stuck in the Arctic together and die together; and, sorry, no book. Plus, data about the environmental impact of food production.

Article: You Might Actually Be in Love With Your Best Friend by Avery Trufelman and Allison Behringer, published by The Cut in February 2021
This article is actually a podcast which I listened to while doing some tedious data entry tasks. I'd been vaguely thinking, yet again, about the friends-to-lovers trope in fiction, and also about how I haven't seen most of my friends since autumn 2019, and about long-distance relationships of various kinds. Despite the flashy title, this is actually a low-key conversation about how one person felt when their best friend moved across the country, and about how our societies usually privilege traditional romantic relationships over platonic or asexual relationships.

Film: Free Solo directed by Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (2019); and The Dawn Wall, directed by Josh Lowell, Peter Mortimer (2018)
It is possible that I am the last person on earth, or at least in my peer group, to have watched Free Solo, and it is just as possible that everyone who is reading this has already seen it too. But to summarise it quickly, Free Solo is a documentary about a man who climbs El Capitan without ropes; The Dawn Wall is a documentary about two other men who climb another, extremely difficult part of El Capitan with ropes. I don't think I've ever sweated as much watching a film as I did during this extended double feature; there is something extremely cathartic about being swept up in an experience so separate from my reality.
But still, in the days after I couldn’t stop thinking about who’s climbing, who gets to enjoy the outdoors. Watching these men perform their feats, with their girlfriends and wives performing a kind of supportive, peppy, hyper-American form of mostly unquestioning support, raised a bunch of questions for me about work and passion, gender and race and access. In Free Solo, students ask Alex Honnold about work and he replies that the best thing you can do is make your passion your work, kicking off some pebbles in my brain about the intersection between business consultant speak, arts and culture speak, and athlete speak (“my work is my passion”). At the very end of The Dawn Wall, we watch Tommy’s small child climb a small rock while his wife Beth, holding the camera, encourages it to push itself, reach its limits, perform. Deeply disturbing, deeply American, deeply unrelatable, but once again: I simply love mountains.

Book: No book this week because right now attempting to read literary fiction makes my brain feel like Ryan O’Reilly after a year on the cursed Buffalo Sabres:I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me. If it isn't an unpublished hockey novel, I'm not able to focus on it. But if you read German, every year in spring I think about Prima Wetter by Erich Kästner. Kästner was a master of cheerful poems about not feeling cheerful at all, and this is a lovely little ode to spring defeating SAD. Die Sonne scheint, als hätt' es wieder Sinn.

Learning: Environmental impact of food production by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, published by World in Data in January 2020
The topic of our individual impact on the environment comes up fairly frequently in my sibling Signal group (yes, we're fun at parties). Most recently we chatted about data re: food production and the environment again - a staggering 26% of human-made emissions! There are lots of interesting things to look at here, and it'll help you with arguments should you have an omnivore relative who tells you that as a vegan you're destroying the environment because you eat tofu (wrong). A more concise version of the arguments presented by World in Data is available in German in the Wiener Zeitung here. Next time: stats about road transport! (jkjkjk - or am I??)

Other: The Terror (2018)
Lately I’ve been particularly drawn to narratives set in the unforgiving outdoors because it holds my attention entirely in a way that few other things can, and so I watched what was ultimately a pretty harrowing TV show about the Franklin expedition just to feel something. The first season of The Terror charts what might have happened to the crew of the two ships (the "Terror" and the "Erebus" – truly the worst names you can give ships on a pretty deadly mission, in my opinion) after they were stuck in pack ice while trying to find the North West Passage in the 1840s. The first five or six episodes are fascinating and grim and impressive (the acting! the sets! the plotting!). The last four are, quite frankly and literally, nightmare material, and the final 10 or so minutes of the last episode will *haunt me forever*.
The series is based on a novel that combines fantastical elements (a monster) with realism. For a while I was put off by the "horror" label that streaming services affixed to it. But I found this moving and emotional and weirdly poignant in a way that made me stick with it, enthusiastically, until the inevitable end. Turns out that the real horror was the colonial-commercial aspirations of the Navy that led to inevitable death! Who would have thought. If this description hasn't put you off entirely, I would recommend reading an article about the Franklin expedition for content warning purposes. 
If you're in the UK, The Terror is currently on iPlayer.

For something less grim, I recommend reading the synopsis of Beethoven's 2nd (you know, the film about a big dog called Beethoven), because it made me laugh so hard I cried.

That's it! Bye!