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:
A funeral for fish and chips: why are Britain’s chippies disappearing? (Tom Lamont / The Guardian)
One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.
Welcome to Generic Town, USA: How every American city became exactly the same (David A. Banks / Insider)
Most people don’t think of the 1988 Tim Burton film “Beetlejuice” as a tale about urban development. But the Deetzes, a family who moves into a newly-haunted house, are a classic 1980s striver couple — a real-estate agent and a self-described artist — who can’t help but transform everything in their sleepy Connecticut town into some sort of consumable experience for city folk just like them. While perhaps a bit overdone, the Deetzes are the perfect pop-culture example of the type of people cities have been trying to attract for the past 40 years.
Flu remedies (Historical clips)
@allthingshistoricalclips #HistoryVideos #whickersworld #publicinterview #fluremedies #fyp #viral #illness #voiceofthepeople ♬ Aesthetic – Tollan Kim
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Image: Ben Cheung