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:
Kenneth Smith: Alabama prisoner ‘struggled for his life’ in nitrogen gas execution (Sky News)
“We didn’t see somebody go unconscious in 30 seconds. What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life,” he said.
“Heaving back and forth, we saw spit, we saw all sorts of stuff develop from the mask. The mask was tied to the gurney, ripping his head back and forth over and over again.”
‘No one should have more than €10m’: the author of Limitarianism on why the super-rich need to level down radically (Tim Adams / The Guardian)
“I may be unduly optimistic about this,” she says, “but I think sometimes these people have this moment in their life which triggers those thoughts.” Her book offers some case studies of fabulously wealthy individuals who have understood the effects of their fortunes not only on the economy and the planet, but also on their own wellbeing. Some, such as the Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney, who made his money from a monopoly of duty-free shops at airports, have enjoyed nothing so much as giving all their money away. Mackenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has been shedding billions of her divorce settlement a year, on the basis that “she is giving it back to [society] where it came from”. Others, such as the entertainment heiress Abigail Disney, or the British-based group “Patriotic Millionaires”, are sympathetic to the fundamentals of Robeyns’s ideas, recognising that “policies that favour the richest are unsustainable”. At Davos, 250 millionaires and billionaires sympathetic to those groups signed a letter to world leaders demanding a wealth tax: “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”
Evacuating (Motaz Azaiza)
If you have any suggestions for future words to feature, contact us on our socials or at editor@globalcomment.com
Image: Mo Eid