Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Must reads: Courtney Stodden, premature birth, YouTube families, Farscape, Bigfoot

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Courtney Stodden Knows Exactly What Happened (Scaachi Koul for Buzzfeed)

The couple eventually appeared on ABC News to tell the world their love was real, or, as Stodden put it in her Valley Girl accent, “rill.” As real as the love between any 16-year-old girl and her middle-aged husband seemingly skirting California’s statutory rape laws could be. (Hutchison, through his management, declined to be interviewed for this story without “an offer for substantial compensation.”)

A History of Premature Births, Including My Own (Alex Brown for Catapult)

I chose to move through the exhibit alone, the corpses like gruesome mannequins around me. The blood vessels of one human were laid out like strands of rubies. There was a brain sliced thinly and placed between slides of glass.

How A Family YouTube Channel Unraveled A Medical Nightmare (Makena Kelly for the Verge)

Victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy are usually smaller children, with caregivers who thrive off the attention they receive from caring for a sick child. In most cases, the attention comes from relatives and the local community. But YouTube commenters theorize that Susan got attention from the platform itself. At its height, Susan’s YouTube channel featured nearly 200 videos, broadcasting the children’s lives to nearly 30,000 subscribers.

A Look Back at Farscape: Aliens, Puppets, and Criminals on the Run (leanor Tremeer for Gizmodo)

And wild Farscape was. The premise was simple, yet effective: Thanks to a wormhole experiment gone wrong, Earth scientist John Crichton turns up on the other side of the universe, accidentally kills the brother of a military commander, falls in with escaped convicts on a living spaceship, and meets Aeryn Sun, enemy soldier and the soon-to-be love of his life —all in the premiere episode’s first 20 minutes.

Even if Bigfoot isn’t real, we still need him (Laura Krantz for High Country News)

From the dawn of human history, we’ve shared stories about creatures outside the bounds of civilization, avatars of the wild: Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s wild companion in the Mesopotamian epic; Grendel, that greedy, loping shadow-stalker of the Danish fens; the Australian yowie; the Himalayan yeti. Bigfoot first appeared under its Salish name, Saskehavas, Sasquatch, in modern literature in 1929. Maclean’s, the Canadian news magazine, described the Sasquatch as “strange people, of whom there are but few now — rarely seen and seldom met … ‘the hairy mountain men.’ ”

Photo: David Blaikie