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:
Harry’s allegations are not just about a royal fistfight – but the very real dangers of hereditary power (Gaby Hinsliff / The Guardian)
William doesn’t come out of all this looking good, and since childhood Harry’s function in brutal dynastic terms has been to absorb criticism that might otherwise fall on his older brother. The goal of monarchy is its own survival, which means its instinct is generally to protect the heir at all costs, while the spare – the younger brother – inevitably becomes more disposable. Harry was born the understudy, the plan B, and even then only until his brother had children. Unlike in centuries past, pushing back against this quasi-feudal order of things isn’t going to get him locked up in the Tower, but this is nonetheless a sibling relationship forged with the confines of a family that still considers it reasonable to curtsey to each other. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from all this misery, beyond the bleeding obvious one that there’s something deeply unhealthy about hereditary power, it’s arguably one for parents. For sadly, it’s not only children born into immense privilege who can be left feeling like spares.
How do you pick the perfect concert piano? Inside the Royal Conservatory’s $300,000 bet (Ian Brown / The Globe and Mail)
Hardly anyone understood how daunting it was to choose a new concert grand. Most people thought all grand pianos were alike, but it wasn’t true: there were good pianos, and there were great pianos, and then there were a tiny handful of truly exceptional pianos. When you were spending a few hundred thousand dollars of a donor’s money on an instrument that was going to be played by the best and most demanding pianists in the world in front of thousands of paying customers, you wanted to make sure you found a piano no one else had.
Hence Anagnoson’s freaky new anxiety dream. In the fresh nightmare, as the new piano was being unveiled onstage on opening night, musicians got up in his face and screamed, “I can’t stand the treble on this piano!” The treble, no less, the upper register that in Anagnoson’s view most clearly defined a piano’s worth. “Who chose this thing?” they bellowed.
The burden of racism has to be borne by somebody (Emlyn Pearce)
@thesocialworkrace #duet with @Emlyn Pearce #blacklivesmatter ♬ original sound – Emlyn Pearce
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Image: Alex Wong