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:
The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation (Michelle Cyca / Maclean’s)
In the early 20th century, a binge-drinking British man named Archibald Belaney began calling himself Grey Owl, dying his hair black and going around in moccasins. Since then, countless people have made similar transformations. Some might yearn for sympathy and attention—what Atlantic writer Helen Lewis called “social Munchausen syndrome”—while others are just looking for an interesting detail to ornament their mundane biographies. These Pretendians, as they’re now known, speculate about their “Indian blood” or pass down family stories about a distant Lakota ancestor. They haunt genealogy forums, looking for Indigenous ancestors, and sometimes they even find one. That the ancestor in question lived hundreds of years ago hardly matters; what matters to them is that, like Grey Owl, they feel themselves to be authentically Indigenous.
The power and potential of trade unions during a cost of living crisis (Ben Manovitch / Now Then magazine)
History is replete with examples of where organised labour, in different forms, has been at the forefront of political-social change: be it the strikes of 1917 in St Petersburg which precipitated the Russian Revolution or the worker control enacted in Catalonia by the CNT union during the Spanish Civil War. In the UK, the trade unions shaped the direction of the Labour Party in the 1930s and 40s which ultimately led to the social democratic reforms between 1945-51: the NHS, nationalisations and the welfare state.
The Church & Parents Feeding Kids Bleach (Not the good girl)
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Image: Irina Iacob