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:
Heat’s hidden risk (Shannon Osaka, Erin Patrick O’Connor, John Muyskens / Washington Post)
During the record-breaking heat wave in British Columbia in Canada in 2021, for example, researchers found that an astonishing 8 percent of the people who died in the heat had been diagnosed with schizophrenia — rendering it more dangerous, when combined with heat, than any other condition studied. Michael Lee, an epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and one of the study’s authors, said people with chronic kidney disease were 36 percent more likely to die during the heat wave than in normal conditions. In people with schizophrenia, it was over 200 percent.
Merchant of Death (Luc Rinaldi / Toronto Life)
He provided suicide-related products to anyone who was willing to pay. He presented himself as an enlightened humanist, offering the option of a dignified death to those who had no other recourse. But he had less high-minded motives too. In an interview with the Globe and Mail this past spring, he said, “I need a source of income. I hope you can understand that. I need to feed myself.”
There’s a tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan (Saad Mohseni)
The world is too busy with conflicts in Gaza/West Bank, Ukraine and the South China Sea right now to notice this tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan. Almost 2m Afghan refugees are being forced back home (on a few weeks notice) https://t.co/eucFHKzVY4
— Saad Mohseni (@saadmohseni) November 2, 2023
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Image: Maria Orlova