Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Must reads: Scams, witches, scientific racism, women drivers, funeral crimes

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‘None of this happened the way you think it did’ (Elena Saavedra Buckley for High Country News)

The agents began asking her questions about Sunset Mesa: Did she originally contact them? No, hospice did. At what time did she visit the business? Around 1:30 p.m., the day after Johnson’s death. What arrangements were made?

Driven (Gabriella Gage for Medium)

Alice had always enjoyed her freedom. As a teen, she earned the headline “Fifteen year old Girl Fights Hackensack School Board” when she launched a house-to-house canvassing campaign to protest the shortening of summer vacation in her hometown. As a young mother, she was nearly thrown from a cart when the horse pulling it was spooked by the unfamiliar sound of a passing auto. Her husband, John Rathbone Ramsey, better known as “Bone,” decided she would not be taking out any more horses. To keep his wife safely occupied, he instead went car shopping, picking the 1908 Maxwell since it was $25 cheaper than the Model T.

The working witches of Los Angeles just want you to be your best self (Deborah Netburn for the Los Angeles Times)

Today’s working witches, whose prominence is growing thanks to social media, primarily see themselves as healers. They help clients who are struggling to cope with life’s hurdles — heartache, aging, misogyny, work stress — and who find that more culturally accepted remedies, such as therapy and meditation, aren’t enough.

Why are so many music festivals total disasters? (Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Goods)

Fyre Festival is a singularly absurd story, with each detail more surreal than the one before. But it’s far from the first proposed festival to end in disaster, and it’s not the first to collapse under the weight of a scam artist’s false promises either.

The disturbing return of scientific racism (Angela Saini for Wired)

Racists ate it up and asked for second helpings. After all, here was hard scientific evidence that seemed to corroborate what they had always claimed: that some races were intellectually inferior to others. Their failure to prosper economically was rooted not in history, but in nature. “There will be plenty more results where these came from,” predicted the right-wing commentator John Derbyshire in the American conservative magazine National Review.

Photo: Robert Claypool