Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
Louis Armstrong’s Last Word (Ethan Iverson / The Nation)
Riccardi took a breath. “OK. You can name a thousand great instrumentalists or you can name a thousand great vocalists, but he’s the only person you could find who changed the way people played their instruments and the way people sang. Louis does that in a four-year period in the 1920s; by 1930, if you aren’t playing or singing like him, you’re out of work.
The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews (Will McCarthy / Longreads)
Some reviews read like poetry: “The bell has rung but not late for school. Am i in the right class,” David Prescott wrote of a Taco Bell in New Jersey. Some lines read like odes to Hemingway’s famous six-word story: “Unknowingly purchased sick Nigerian dwarf goats,” Joseph Hardwick wrote of the Hilltop Acres Goat & Sheep Auction in Romance, Arkansas. Sometimes it feels like the reviews are reaching toward some great metaphor. In remote Bowman, North Dakota, Ron Kramer stared at a scarecrow cowboy riding a red, white, and blue USA missile. “The missile warhead fell off,” he wrote.
It might take some imagination, but I think Google Reviews reveals the pure breadth of people out there, and the many ways we can interact with a place and come away with completely different experiences. Take the reviews for Sego Canyon rock art in east Utah — a truly beautiful, undeniably spiritual place with ancient Indigenous petroglyphs dotting the canyon walls. To some, it’s an awe-inspiring display of perspective and timescale. To others, it’s junk.
Gorau pleser ar nos galan (Rhodri McDonagh)
@rhodmcd The famous Christmas carol #deckthehalls is actually Welsh! #Cymru #Cymraeg #december1st #celtic #historytok #christmascarol #folksong #wales #nadolig #welshtok #marilwyd #christmas #Welsh #christmasiscoming #celticmusic #welshhistory #christmasmusic ♬ original sound – Rhodri McDonagh
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Image: Johannes Plenio