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 ‘mini forest’ revolution is here – and coming to a town near you (Hannah Lewis / Positive News)
“A forest is much more than what you see,” explains Suzanne Simard, whose pioneering research shows how underground fungal networks connect trees to one another, allowing them to communicate and share nutrients. These webs of exchange enable a forest “to behave as though it’s a single organism,” with a kind of intelligence.
A natural forest is a community of coexisting, interacting organisms — trees, shrubs, moss, fungi, bacteria, insects, animals (including humans acting as equal members of the community) — that rely on one another for food, shelter, and other ingredients of life. Interspecies interactions fortify the ecosystem as a whole.
Every “chronically online” conversation is the same (Rebecca Jennings / Vox)
“The pathway from ‘bad tweet’ to ‘death threat’ is getting shorter and more well-trod,” the writer and prolific tweeter Brandy Jensen told me in 2020 when I wrote about the year in bad posts. We were already at the point in online culture where it felt like the water was getting uncomfortably hot, where a tweet about bodegas caused a days-long controversy and non-famous people were getting harassed for minor social misdemeanors. You can only scroll through so many angry replies to other people’s angry replies until you realize that nobody comes out looking good here.
If the water was hot two years ago, it’s boiling now. Last month, when a Twitter thread by a woman who sent her neighbors homemade chili went viral, the woman was accused of being a “white savior” and inconsiderate to autistic people (the woman who wrote the thread is autistic). It’s just one example of how high the stakes seem to be for interpersonal encounters that are objectively nobody’s business, and how so often our thirst for drama is really a thirst for punishment.
Google reveals most searched for terms of 2022 (BBC News)
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Image: Alex Vasey