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Global Comment Showcasing international journalists talking about events, society and history through an arts and culture lens. Tell us your stories.

28/08/2026

In her beautiful new tribute for Global Comment, Natalia Antonova remembers Dolly Parton — the voice, the humility, the songwriting, and the artistry that showed up at every hard moment for so many of us. 💛

From "Two Doors Down" to "Faith," from Steel Magnolias to her cover of "I Can't Get No (Satisfaction)" with Pink and Brandi Carlile — Natalia traces how Dolly's music quietly held her through heartbreak, grief, and everything in between. 🎤

As Natalia writes: "A voice like a bird perched on your window, cocking its head at the mess that you are."

And: "It's not an exaggeration to say that generations of Americans feel orphaned right now."

Dolly and her husband Carl Dean — who passed in March 2025 — were married for nearly sixty years. Perhaps, as Natalia writes, Carl simply needed her back. 🌷

📌 Read the full tribute by Natalia Antonova 👇
https://globalcomment.com/even-in-death-who-could-be-more-alive-than-dolly/

📸 Images: Peabody Awards, RCA Records, Kris Harris King (via Wikimedia Commons)

In her latest book review for Global Comment, Philippa Willitts revisits the fairy tales she grew up on — and turns to p...
27/08/2026

In her latest book review for Global Comment, Philippa Willitts revisits the fairy tales she grew up on — and turns to poet Nikita Gill for a feminist re-imagining that dismantles centuries of passive damsel tropes. 📖

Fierce Fairytales: & Other Stories to Stir Your Soul blends poetry, prose, and minimalist line art to:

🌹 Strip women of their reliance on being rescued
👑 Decouple female worth from marriage or male validation
🌈 Incorporate q***r romance, self-love, and platonic solidarity
👵 Humanise the villains — wicked witches, evil stepmothers, gingerbread-house grandmothers — as complex figures shaped by trauma and injustice

As Philippa puts it: "Men are rewarded with kingdoms. Women are rewarded with men." Gill dismantles that framing beautifully.

📌 Read the full review by Philippa Willitts 👇
https://globalcomment.com/what-if-sleeping-beauty-could-rescue-herself-fierce-fairytales-review/

26/08/2026

This week's Something Special pick from the Global Comment editors is a joyful little minute of comedy gold from British comedian Daniel Foxx — the story of his grandma's very unexpected Pride weekend. 🌈

A perfect Monday reset after a heavy week of news, and a natural loop back to Philippa Willitts's recent piece "6 Comedians You Really Really Should Be Following on Instagram" — where Daniel earned his rightful spot. 💛

📌 Watch this week's pick 👇
https://globalcomment.com/watch-something-special-102-daniel-foxxs-grandma-went-to-pride/

In his latest retrospective for Global Comment, Senior Film Writer Mark Farnsworth revisits Dark Blue (2002) — Ron Shelt...
25/08/2026

In his latest retrospective for Global Comment, Senior Film Writer Mark Farnsworth revisits Dark Blue (2002) — Ron Shelton's blistering LAPD crime drama, written by David Ayer from a James Ellroy story, and anchored by an unforgettable Kurt Russell as corrupt Sgt Eldon Perry. 🎬

Set in the days leading up to the Rodney King verdict, Dark Blue follows Perry and his rookie partner Bobby Keough as they're weaponised in an internal LAPD civil war — Ving Rhames as the Black Assistant Chief refusing to be steamrolled, Brendan Gleeson as the puppet-master Commander. Plus a killer 90s soundtrack: NWA, Eazy-E, The D.O.C., M.C. Ren, Tone Loc, and P***o for Pyros featuring Kurupt. 🎧🔥

Mark's most powerful move? Reading the film through 2026 — the hangings in Mississippi, the suspicious death of Nolan Wells, the long-awaited Tupac Shakur murder trial, and the Rampart LAPD corruption scandal that lingers in the background.

As Mark puts it: "Nobody on the force is squeaky clean. Dark Blue's moral high ground only presents its audience with varying shades of corruption."

And his sharpest line: "The Eldon Perry's of today under Trump's regime seem irredeemable."

📌 Read the full retrospective by Mark Farnsworth 👇
https://globalcomment.com/frantic-claustrophobic-tone-dark-blue-2002-review/

23/08/2026

In a sharp new essay for Global Comment (originally for The Conversation), Apurba Chatterjee — Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading — traces how a wave of 18th-century British artists (George Chinnery, Thomas Daniell, Charles Ramus Forrest, Robert Home) travelled through India from the 1760s and, in the process, "presented India not as it was, but remade it into an exotic land ripe for colonial rule." 🇮🇳

Their weapon of choice: the picturesque — a European aesthetic of asymmetry, chiaroscuro, ruins, and rustic scenes that made colonial land grabs look natural, inevitable, and beautiful. 🖌️

Some of the case studies Chatterjee unpacks:

🏛️ Charles Ramus Forrest's 1824 Taj Mahal — stripped of its Mughal Charbagh garden symbolism, Timurid architectural inheritance, and Islamic spiritual meaning.

🏰 Thomas Daniell's 1795 Delhi ruins — turning Mughal decline into a visual case for British "intervention."

🌿 Robert Home's 1794 Bangalore gardens — painting wartime destruction as romantic picturesque scenery.

As Chatterjee writes: "In our age of travel, we must question these ways of seeing."

📌 Read the full essay by Apurba Chatterjee 👇
https://globalcomment.com/the-18th-century-british-artists-who-turned-india-into-a-picturesque-fantasy/

In her latest travel feature for Global Comment, Edgary Rodríguez R. takes us into Cusco, the former capital of the Inca...
22/08/2026

In her latest travel feature for Global Comment, Edgary Rodríguez R. takes us into Cusco, the former capital of the Inca Empire and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1983. 🏛️

At more than 10,800 feet above sea level, the city carries an identity inseparable from its past — Inca walls beneath colonial buildings, ancient temples under Christian churches, and centuries of Andean traditions still lived every day. 🌄

📍 A few highlights from the piece:

⛰️ Coricancha — the Inca Temple of the Sun, over which the Santo Domingo Convent was built
🪨 The Twelve-Angled Stone on Hatun Rumiyoc Street — a masterclass of Inca stonework precision
🏛️ Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, The Inka Museum, and The Regional Historical Museum — all housed in historic mansions built on Inca foundations
🎨 The Cusco School of painting — 17th and 18th century masters like Diego Quispe Tito, blending European technique with Andean landscape and tradition
🖌️ San Blas neighbourhood — Cusco's artistic heart, with active workshops for ceramics, wood carving, and traditional crafts

As Edgary puts it: "Cusco does not preserve its history like a motionless artifact behind glass."

📸 Images: Diego Delso & Chalisimo5 (via Wikimedia Commons), Edgary Rodríguez R.

📌 Read the full feature by Edgary Rodríguez R. 👇
https://globalcomment.com/cusco-and-its-cultural-treasures-a-journey-through-centuries-of-art-and-history/

21/08/2026

In her latest piece for Global Comment, Philippa Willitts makes a warm, joyful case for public art — from murals and sculptures to yarn bombs, official commissions, and (in her home city of Sheffield) a peregrine falcon made entirely out of IKEA allen keys. 🦅🔧

Her three-part argument:

🏘️ For the community — free, accessible, mood-lifting; a source of local pride, economic uplift, and belonging.

🖌️ For the artists — thousands of passersby, bigger budgets, unusual constraints that push creativity.

🎭 For all of us — because we pay more attention to prettier surroundings, and find new details every time we pass.

As Philippa puts it: "Investment in commissioning artists to enhance our local areas might feel like frippery in times of economic uncertainty, but this is also precisely when we need to take extra pride in the places we live."

📸 Photos: Philippa Willitts's own snaps of Sheffield public art

📌 Read the full essay by Philippa Willitts 👇
https://globalcomment.com/why-we-need-as-much-public-art-as-possible/

This week's Something Special pick from the Global Comment editors is an important NPR long read by Rhitu Chatterjee — a...
20/08/2026

This week's Something Special pick from the Global Comment editors is an important NPR long read by Rhitu Chatterjee — a difficult but necessary story about the risks of AI companionship for people struggling with their mental health, and the questions our society has not yet reckoned with.

The reporting raises urgent, wide-ranging questions about how AI tools respond in moments of crisis, what safeguards actually exist, and what it means when a chatbot becomes someone's only listener.

📌 Read this week's pick 👇
https://globalcomment.com/read-something-special-101-chatgpt-and-suicide/

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In a beautifully layered new feature for Global Comment (originally for The Conversation), Hannah Sabapathy takes us ins...
17/08/2026

In a beautifully layered new feature for Global Comment (originally for The Conversation), Hannah Sabapathy takes us inside Unbound Forms at The Hepworth Wakefield — a landmark exhibition of five pioneering women artists from India and Bangladesh who transformed textiles, metal, ceramics, and wood into radical contemporary sculpture. 🇮🇳🇧🇩

📌 The five artists:

🪢 Mrinalini Mukherjee — knotted h**p sculptures where textiles become deities
🪵 Leela Mukherjee — Mrinalini's mother, carved cultural animals of South Asia
🌙 Novera Ahmed — abstracted celestial personifications and naga serpents
🪡 Meera Mukherjee — bronze that appears woven, not cast
⚙️ Pilloo Pochkhanawala — industrial metal scraps into ruins of a post-industrial landscape

A meditation on partition, independence, gender, mythology, and the fold as "the cusp of unfurling." As Sabapathy puts it: "The works represent the fluidity of female voices as shape-shifters." 🌿

On show at The Hepworth Wakefield until 1 November 2026.

📌 Read the full feature by Hannah Sabapathy 👇
https://globalcomment.com/unbound-forms-at-the-hepworth-how-indian-and-bangladeshi-artists-turned-craft-traditions-into-contemporary-sculpture/

Looking for a classic movie to watch? 🎬🍿Not sure where to start with the greatest films you've never seen?Every month, G...
17/08/2026

Looking for a classic movie to watch? 🎬🍿

Not sure where to start with the greatest films you've never seen?

Every month, Global Comment's Kate Lillie watches three iconic classics with fresh eyes — from Italian Neorealism to Technicolor, teen rebellion to Golden Age star power — and shares the ones actually worth your time. ✨

📌 Discover Late to the Movies on GlobalComment.com 🔗 link in bio

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