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:
Inside a TikTok Talent Factory for Misfit Stars (Brendan I Koerner / Wired)
We were on the patio of a middling Los Angeles taqueria when Ursus Magana tried to talk me out of writing this story. A hirsute fireplug of a man with a slew of anime tattoos, Magana wasn’t worried that I’d spill any awful secrets. In the months since I’d first messaged him on Instagram, he’d been endlessly candid about his life as a talent manager for emo rappers, goth TikTokkers, and OnlyFans creators. He just thought I was wasting my time on a project that seemed unlikely to excite the social media algorithms that mean everything in his world. “Do you know how hard it is for an article to go viral?” he warned. “I mean, articles never go viral.”
The Twisty Tale of the BBC Show Supposedly So Terrifying That It Was Destroyed (Pat Cassels / Atlas Obscura)
In 1970, two years after the series first ran and amid complaints from viewers and British morality advocates that the show was too scary, Late Night Horror was taken out of circulation. Just how scary were those six episodes? We may never know. Shortly after, all known copies were supposed to have been erased or discarded. Overnight, every episode of Late Night Horror seemingly disappeared.
It was, perhaps, the scariest thing about the series. In both art and life, what we don’t see is often far more terrifying and compelling than what we do, from the slasher lurking behind the shower curtain in Psycho to the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone in Scream, from the monster that just has to be under the bed to Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country.” Nothing excites an audience like not knowing. And this is what has transformed Late Night Horror’s six-episode run from a cheap thrill to a kind of modern Necronomicon: an occult tome that only existed as a myth.
The people of Gaza are a proud people. (Humza Yousaf)
The people of Gaza are a proud people.
Many don't want to leave, and shouldn't have to.
But for those displaced, who want to leave, there should be a worldwide refugee scheme.
Scotland is willing to be a place of sanctuary and be the first country to take those refugees. pic.twitter.com/5RbZpJsGHX
— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) October 18, 2023
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Image: Mo Eid