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:
Whether you’re trans or not, the gender police are coming for you too (Arwa Mahdawi / The Guardian)
It was supposed to be a fun school sports event for young kids. Instead it turned into an altercation that went viral and made international news. A nine-year-old girl was getting ready to take her turn at a shot put event in British Columbia, Canada, when a belligerent 67-year-old man called Josef Tesar intervened and allegedly accused the girl of being a boy or transgender. The girl had short hair, you see, and apparently didn’t fit Tesar’s precise specifications of femininity. Since she didn’t immediately pass the Tesar test, he wanted proof that the girl was born female before she was allowed to continue. The competition was disrupted and the girl ended the day in tears
Why are so many Black men shot to death in certain American neighborhoods? (Nicholas Dawidoff / The Atlantic)
Although much of the country experienced sharp declines in gun violence after the early 1990s, isolated, impoverished neighborhoods like Newhallville remained relatively dangerous. In recent years, they’ve gotten more so. Last month, JAMA Network Open published a study evaluating the well over 1 million gun-violence fatalities in the United States since 1990, which found that from 2004 to 2021, deaths by firearms increased by 45.5 percent. This is a catastrophic amount of mayhem. Black men are the disproportionate victims, dying of firearm homicide at a rate 22.5 times higher than other Americans. (Older white men use guns to commit suicide much more commonly than anybody else.) During the first year of the pandemic, American homicides increased by 30 percent.
Musharaf Finds His Voice (Educating Yorkshire)
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Image: Matheus Natan