Golden Giraffe for Best Writing: July
Golden Giraffe Award For Article Of The Month
Each day The Browser recommends outstanding writing of lasting value. Each month we celebrate the best of the best, the pieces that delight the mind and dazzle the senses ...
Winner of the Golden Giraffe for August 2019:
Open Borders In The High Arctic
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | Nation | 29th July 2019
Report from Svalbard, an Arctic territory open to all. There are no border controls, no residency restrictions, nobody asking for your passport when you step off the plane. Svalbard was assigned to Norway in 1920 under an international treaty stipulating equal treatment for all nationals, Norwegians included. The current population of 2,300 includes immigrants from 53 countries. If this sounds almost utopian, here’s the catch: Winter means months of unbroken darkness and temperatures of minus forty (4,490 words)
also brilliant:
A Brief And Awful History Of Lobotomy
Andrew Scull | Literary Hub | 30th July 2019
Not for the squeamish. Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1970s doctors commonly treated mental illness by hacking crudely into patients’ brains to sever the tissues connecting the frontal lobes. This procedure, called “lobotomy”, was invented by a Portuguese neurologist called Egas Moniz. He received a Nobel Prize, though arguably he should have gone to jail. There is no evidence that lobotomies ever did anybody any good, and plenty of evidence that tens of thousands of victims suffered terribly (2,460 words)
also brilliant:
Servants Without Masters
Harold Lee | Write As | 10th June 2019
An American in Singapore is deeply uncomfortable being served by a family maid, then realises that at home they have “blithely accepted the service of servants” when “framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.” In fact, “what individualism has bought us is not the end of servitude, but merely the cloaking of masters” which is “a sort of inverse Confucianism – a system where authority can only be exercised by people who deliberately do not engage in one-on-one superior-inferior relationships” (1,174 words)
Congratulations to Atossa , Andrew and Harold! We hope you’ll enjoy their writing as much as we did.
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