The news at the moment is frantic, with fresh information flashed in front of us every few minutes. So much so that we can find ourselves missing the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need. This weekly update can provide that for you. We do this by distilling the best of the web and recommending just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads. Here are this week’s recommendations:
Noiseless Messengers (Rebecca Giggs / Emergence Magazine)
If the moths’ light-seeking caused disruption in the darkness, their urge to seek shelter when the dawn broke made them a more invidious presence yet. So many of their oily bodies were crushed on train tracks that slowdowns were mandated to stop locomotives slipping from the rails. They jammed the circuitry of elevators, spoiled gatherings. At a garden party at Government House in the inland capital of Canberra, every iced cake was seen to be decorated with moths. The moths entered people’s houses. They crept behind upright pianos, into radio sets, betwixt the slats of venetian blinds. They got between the mattress and bedsheets, and huddled in the pockets of dress suits. In kitchens, gutted fish were found to have bellyfuls of moths. If a light was switched off, hundreds of tiny arrow shapes might fan out from beneath paintings hung on the wall. One year, churchgoers counted eighty thousand moths on the windows of Saint Thomas’s prayerhouse in North Sydney. Services were canceled for seven days, the building sealed while the moths congregated under the eaves. People reached for words like visitation, marvel. The less-enraptured said: plague.
‘The deepest silences’: what lies behind the Arctic’s Indigenous suicide crisis (Hugh Brody / The Guardian)
Dejaeger and Horne are two of many such offenders – some charged and imprisoned, many long since dead or hiding in legal obscurity. In time we would learn the extent of sexual predation in the residential schools to which thousands of Indigenous children in Canada were sent. Authority at the colonial frontier is exaggerated by geography and politics: the sheer distance from administrative centres delivers to representatives of education and God, when they appear in remote, vulnerable Indigenous communities, an almost magical esteem and charisma. The places they work are isolated, and their lives are further hidden within the isolation. The preconditions for abuse are in place. The victims and their families are intimidated and driven into silence. Southerners, including anthropologists like myself, failed to spot either the abuse or the abusers.
Joni Mitchell “Both Sides Now” with Brandi Carlile Live at Newport Folk Festival, July 24, 2022 (Newport Folk Festival)
As Claire McGuire put it, “World-class musicians getting super emotional providing backup to their musical heroes is a genre of video I could watch all day.”
Image: Frankie Mish