This is the last of the web’s top three series but fear not! Next week, you’ll find Something Special in its place. Watch this space, and try to contain your inevitable excitement in the meantime.
Every Monday on Global Comment, we share words and ideas that make a great point, strike us deeply, take us by surprise, or are simply beautiful. The stories that are 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 pieces of content.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
How doctors are pressuring sickle cell patients into unwanted sterilizations (Eric Boodman / STAT)
It made her husband, Claude, think about eugenics. Would they be pushing sterilization this way if he and Whitney were white? Then again, what the obstetrician was saying made sense. Whitney has sickle cell disease. She’d inherited a mutation that made her hemoglobin sticky, prone to clumping, distorting the shape of her red blood cells, obstructing her circulation. It could cause unbearable pain, like a hammer and chisel to the bone. It could damage organs. It could exacerbate all the risks of pregnancy — and already, for a Black woman in the United States, the risks were unnerving
The Yelp Effect: Twenty years after its debut, Yelp has changed how we think about reviewing everything and anything (Jaya Saxena / EATER)
The point of Yelp was of course not just to air grievances, but provide recommendations and feedback in general, a group answer to the ultimate question: Is this restaurant worth it? Previously, diners relied on personal recommendations or newspaper reviews, both of which hinge on trusting the opinion, however expert, of a single person. Unlike other existing websites like Citysearch and Chowhound, Yelp seemed to split the difference between straightforward directory and nerdy, niche internet forum, where anyone had the power to bestow stars upon a business. It felt like nothing short of a sea change.
Kari Lake didn’t like having her views interrogated by Emily Maitlis (The News Agents)
@thenewsagents Kari Lake is in the running to become the Senator for Arizona but she didn’t like having her views interrogated by Emily… #maga #trump #rnc #usa #politics #biden #arizona ♬ original sound – The News Agents
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Image: Xander John Dacyon