For the first 9 years of her life, Judith Schalansky grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in East Germany. "East Germans," she writes, "could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders." Nonetheless, after watching a documentary about the Galapagos Islands at the age of 8, she would spend hours with her head buried in an atlas, voyaging around the world in her imagination. A year later, her country disappeared from the map altogether, when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was re-unified.
Schalanksy's second book, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, was just published in English translation. In it, she illustrates and annotates 50 of the world's most remote islands, moving ocean by ocean from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Her introduction describes the attraction of these isolated places:
Many islands lie so far from their mother countries that they no longer fit on the maps of that country. [...] Every connection to the mainland has been lost. There is no mention of the rest of the world.
Of course, she notes, an island is not necessarily remote if it is your home. The people of Easter Island, which is more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, which translates as "the navel of the world."
But for explorers, naturalists, pirates, and dreamers, islands exert an irresistable fascination, as Schalansky's miniature histories demonstrate:
In the nineteenth century, seven clans lived in micro-communist harmony under the patriarchal rule of the Scot William Glass on the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Dr. Ritter, a Berlin dentist tired of civilization and the global economic crisis, set up a retreat on the island of Floreana in the Galapagos in 1929, where he aimed to renounce all that was superfluous, including clothing.
A remote island's very insignificance makes it all the more potent as myth. "The absurdity of reality is lost on the large land masses," writes Schalansky, but "an island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story."
When it first came out, in German, in 2009, The Atlas of Remote Islands won the German Arts Foundation Prize for the most beautiful book of the year. It is not hard to see why. Each island is shown at the same scale but on its own page, delicately etched onto a blue-gray sea. Next to it lies a short paragraph, which blurs the line between encyclopedic and poetic, recounting geographic fact, origin fables, and excerpts from sailors' diaries in the same breath.
Most of us will never visit these islands, Schalansky seems to be saying, and yet we also already have. The islands of our imagination are more powerful than their reality could ever be.
This slideshow excerpts a mere 10 of Schalansky's 50 islands—if you still need to buy a last-minute stocking stuffer for someone who loves maps, mysteries, and gorgeous design, I can't recommend the book too highly.
Gif of Bryan CRanston being angry via 
Hungry and ready.Photo credit 
The mac and cheese staple presentation.Photo credit 
Pizza ready from the oven.Photo credit 
Friends hover around the barbeque.Photo credit 
Seafood platter on the beach.Photo credit 
Scarecrow watches over a vegetable garden.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.