Global Comment

Blasting “Wildflowers” in the grocery parking lot, I caught the attention of an older woman who waved to me. “Gosh, I love her!” she yelled. “I love her too!” Not “loved.” But “love.” Dolly Parton, the heart of Appalachia and of America herself, may have departed us, but our feelings are grounded in the present. Even in death, who could be more alive than Dolly?

Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place. It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting.

I was a very girly-girl when I was small. I grew up on fairy tales, usually read to me by my dad, and imagined myself as every princess I heard about. I adored those stories, and it was only as an adult that I saw just how dark and disturbing many of them are. These stories we tell children are full of messy tropes about gender roles, constant assumptions that girls’ only dream of marrying a prince, and more explicitly fucked-up messaging about consent, parenting, and love.

Kurt Russell’s eyes are wired. Those baby blues are ringed with red, the Disney child paranoid, sweating booze and armed to the teeth. Those jump cuts are making us anxious from the off. We’re back in the early 90s and that Rodney King beating doesn’t get any better with age.

Apurba Chatterjee, University of Reading In 1825, English artist George Chinnery left Calcutta for Macau, chased away by his disgruntled wife Marianne and his creditors. He’d been based in India for the past 23 years, having previously lived in Hyderabad and Dacca. Besides running a debt of around 30,000 rupees (£232 today), was, according to one Dictionary of National Biography, a “penniless fornicator” and “begetter of an uncertain number of illegitimate Chinnerys white, brown and yellow”.

The city of Cusco in Peru is an enduring showcase of architecture. Its historic center and surrounding areas draw travelers from around the world, captivated by the blend of colonial and Inca influences found in its churches, plazas, historic mansions, and narrow stone streets. Cusco is not a city to simply pass through on the way from Lima to Machu Picchu.

Every Monday on Global Comment, we share Something Special you don’t want to miss. To fit with the six core pillars of the magazine, these will alternate between the themes of watch / listen / read / see / taste / place. It will be something different every week, but it will always be about something worth seeing, hearing or watching, or a place worth visiting or a food worth tasting. This week, a long read by Rhitu Chatterjee for NPR that is incredibly concerning.

I love a trip to a gallery, but I know that the idea of going to a formal exhibition is off-putting to many people. Indeed, I avoided them for many years due to childhood associations with long, darkened rooms full of dull oil paintings of old and dead people. But since learning that they can instead be all about slug sex and butterfly gowns, and dark oil paintings can be avoided, they’re a lovely treat these days.

Hannah Sabapathy, University of Leeds Craft traditions are often imagined as practices rooted in the past: carefully preserved techniques passed from one generation to the next. But Unbound Forms at The Hepworth Wakefield reveals a more dynamic story.

This month over at Five Books For, I’m looking at books that explore the Holocaust from different angles. As living memory recedes, I’ve been thinking about the particular value of literature in preserving not only what happened, but our capacity to imagine it. My grandparents belonged to a generation who could tell me about the Second World War because they had lived through it, but my son will never have that experience.