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:
7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp (Isabelle Qian / New York Times)
As Mr. Lu quickly realized, there was, in fact, no translation job. No e-commerce company, either. It had all been part of a ruse, starting with a posting on a Chinese job forum, perfected by human traffickers to get people like him to travel to Thailand.
The traffickers had led Mr. Lu across the Moei River, a muddy waterway on Thailand’s porous border, and smuggled him, without his knowledge, into a remote corner of Myanmar. There, they handed him over to a Chinese gang that had paid for him.
Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted (Adam Goodheart / The Atlantic)
About 10,000 people on Earth still live as members of what some anthropologists call “uncontacted tribes”: groups of hunter-gatherers in almost total seclusion from the outside world, many of them deep in the Amazon Basin. But no human community is more isolated than the inhabitants of tiny North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, far off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal. The Sentinelese, as they are known to outsiders—no one has gotten close enough to learn what they call themselves, or even what language they speak—still hunt with bows, arrows, and spears. They also use these weapons to kill anyone who ventures onto their shore, including a persistent 26-year-old American Christian missionary, John Chau, in 2018.
If I Must Die (Brian Cox / Palestinian Festival of Literature)
Brian Cox reads If I Must Die, by beloved Palestinian poet, teacher and martyr Refaat Alareer.
Refaat was killed on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike.
This was the last poem he published. pic.twitter.com/sMVocn3nGA
— Palestine Festival of Literature (@PalFest) December 12, 2023
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Image: Quang Nguyen Vinh