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:
Can Anyone Trust The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling? (Nicholas Quah / Vulture)
That Rowling’s perspective so utterly dominates the podcast’s opening stages is incredibly frustrating. She may well be the main reason most would pick up the podcast in the first place, but that should be all the more incentive to get to the purported multi-perspective heart of the project as quickly as possible. Instead, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling displays little urgency in engaging with the perspectives of trans people or even complicating the authority of Rowling’s narrative at all — rich territory given the fact that the author has wielded disproportionate legal pressure against the speech of some critics. Worse still is how it’s not hard at all to get a whiff of a certain kind of “both sides” equivocation. With the recurring motif of “witch trials,” Phelps-Roper constructs a framework that equates the book burning among Christian fundamentalists with the fact that some former fans are angry about Rowling’s transgender views, treating them both as illegitimate responses of the same nature. Even if, in later episodes, the show does circle back to meaningfully engaging with the trans community’s anger at Rowling, it’s already stacked the deck in Rowling’s favor.
The unlikely (but welcome) return of Everything But The Girl (Mark Savage / BBC)
“There was definitely anxiety about how it was going to work,” Watt admits. “The period that we’d been solo was longer than the period we were in Everything But The Girl and I wondered if we might clash. But actually, the opposite happened. As soon as we started working, we fell back into a common language.
“And, actually, being able to share the decision-making was really liberating. We didn’t have to come up with everything ourselves. We would share half-written lyrics, fragments of music. It was very freeing.”
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