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 on the right over there >>
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Now, the links you’re here for:
Thoughts on Weight Watchers’ Rebrand from a Former Preteen Member (Your Fat Friend, Human Parts)
“I was an outlier — a chubby, pink-cheeked preteen in a room full of fortysomething women. I paid close attention as they spoke, listening not only for their successes and failures but for how adult women talked about their lives. This was a coming-of-age moment. I was being ushered into womanhood through one of its most enduring aspects: the unending, thankless quest to lose weight.”
How to Build a Life Without Kids (Lauren McKeon, The Walrus)
“In truth, I was on the fence. Children felt like both a way to jump-start my real life and a way to end it. I wasn’t afraid of being a mother, and I didn’t think I’d be a bad one. I just wanted to be other things so much more”
When Swimming As a Muslim Woman Becomes A Political Act (Rowaida Abdelaziz, HuffPost)
“Muslim women like Hussein have long been persecuted and intimidated for wearing a modest bathing suit. They have been kicked out of pools and beaches. They have been told that their bathing wear wasn’t suitable. Pool- and beachgoers have even told them to go back to their country. Some have called the police on them.”
The fake baby Instagram adoption scam (Naomi Pallas, BBC)
“Distressed, frantic, but already sensing that Ashley has been getting a thrill out of tormenting her, Sam posts a drawing of a broken heart on Instagram.
“They don’t ask for money, they don’t ask for material things like a lot of scams do. They want your time, emotional investment and quite frankly someone to talk to while promising you what you are desperate to find: your future child,” she writes in the caption.”
The cult of Columbine: how an obsession with school shooters led to a murder plot (Rachel Monroe, Guardian)
“Suddenly, she was spending all her time researching school shooters. She immersed herself in the school shooter/serial killer subculture that flourished on Tumblr. ‘It was all just academic at first,’ she later told an interviewer, ‘but I found myself identifying more and more with the shooters.’”
Photo credit: Stephen Gidley