Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Must reads: merch, cops, stars, climate, Cambodia, con man

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Welcome back to our weekly round-up of the long reads on the web that are worth the investment. If you want to make sure you don’t miss future Global Comment content, don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter right at the bottom of this post.

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Now, the links you’re here for:

Anyone’s Son (Wudan Yan, Longreads)

The reason why five officers showed up to the scene with Cody with assault rifles was that Jean mentioned Cody was carrying a handgun, which means her well-intentioned welfare call turned into a gun call. And in Alaska, every state trooper is issued an AR-15 assault rifle. “We encourage our troopers to take rifles to gun calls because it is the most effective tool we have,” said Goeden. “How that tool makes other people feel is completely beyond our control.”

The stars at night (Rachel Monroe, Texas Highways)

Even so, appreciation for darkness has gained traction around the world, and in Texas in particular. Barentine says Texas is a leader in the dark sky movement, in part because the state is home to some of the last night skies that remain pristine—that is, largely unaffected by skyglow. From the remote desert landscapes of far West Texas to the grassy expanses of the Hill Country, Texans are working together to protect our famously starry skies.

How This Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row (Pamela Collof, New York Times)

That witness was Paul Skalnik, a familiar figure around the Pinellas County Courthouse. He had appeared before the court numerous times as a jailhouse informant and was skilled at providing the sort of incendiary details that brought a defendant’s guilt into sudden, terrible focus. Skalnik began working with Halliday in 1983, when the detective was investigating a triple homicide, and Skalnik helped send two men to death row, cementing his status as an invaluable resource. Because he was a known snitch, he was held in protective custody, in a single cell where he was shielded from inmates who might want to do him harm. Despite this considerable impediment, Skalnik claimed — just a few weeks before jury selection in Dailey’s trial began — to have procured Dailey’s confession.

The Thing with Feathers: On mountains, climate science and hope (Michelle Dowd, Alpinist)

On the large screen is a picture of a snowy mountain surrounded by dramatic purple wildflowers with the title, “When do flowers flower? Impacts of climate change on high mountain wildflowers.” Lambers describes the relationship between the timing of when the snow melts each year and the height of flowering. She explains how climate change influences flowering and seed dispersal, how the period of availability of certain plants as a food source for wildlife is altered, and how certain species interact with each other. She provides descriptions of neighborhood species that co-flower and questions whether these will shift in sync, or go extinct, as climate change progresses.

Where are the gay ladies of Cambodia? (Lindsey Danis, Longreads)

Over the last three weeks of travel through Thailand and Laos, we’ve grown used to insisting on a room with one bed. We never expected that we’d have to do that at a gay hotel, or that the gay-appearing, gay-acting desk clerk would give us the same confused runaround as everyone else in Southeast Asia.

The quiet protests of sassy mom merch (Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker)

Does “coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime” merchandise erase that context, or does it make that context more visible, by spotlighting the fact that conventional expectations of motherhood are untenable even for those who are most eager to embrace them? Rumbley, the mother and Etsy seller from Alabama, said she thought that such shirts, and the conversations that mothers have been having about the impossibility of perfection, are signs that women are “starting to feel obligated, especially in the current political climate, to stand up and say, ‘No more.’ ” I told her that I’d been wondering about that—about whether these shirts served as an acceptable form of protest against gendered expectations and a lack of structural support or they just took the sting out of these burdens so that moms could shrug and laugh and shoulder them for another day. My female friends with kids express the same frustrations, but in different forms, I said—we mostly end up talking about socialism and universal child care.

Image credit: Megan Coughlin