[tfm]

Fairly warned be thee, this is a Jonathan Franzen essay, so it's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you like lengthy light prose peppered with his usual shout-outs to degenerative diseases you're in luck.

Franzen went on a luxury cruise around the Falklands, South Georgia Island and the pointy bits of the Antarctic Peninsula. He is a keen bird-watcher. He has eyes of glass and the heart of a tape recorder. He found Antarctica beautiful and finds the notion of global warming slightly upsetting, but life goes on. The cruise was a bit over three weeks long, but he has known his family for much longer than that so they feature proportionally.

There are no photographs of Antarctica because he resolved ahead of time not to take any photographs. He did not make it to the end of the world, nor does he substantially discuss the end of said end.

[nwatson]

Global warming preachiness turned me off in this context ... so how many years of a typical American consumer's carbon footprint did the cruise emit?

It's like traveling to watch the polar bears we're trying to save from global warming, watching then from tundra-tractors. Researchers should go, everyone else should stay home.

[hudibras]

Not everything needs a tl;dr.

[sjclemmy]

I concur. The facts don't matter.

I'm a fussy reader, I stayed the distance, this was beautiful.

[amelius]

This needed one. I'm on mobile and didn't want to open the article. I thought this was about an apocalypse.

[sjclemmy]

At the risk of being snarky (and this IS meant in good humour just to make my point) can you provide me a 100 word precis of Romeo and Juliet so I don't have to bother reading it or going to see it?

[PeCaN]

At risk of being extra snarky, that's called a synopsis and they're frequently used to determine if you want to read something....