Our favourites this week

What happens when your life makes your brain sick? "Trauma and mental illness braid intricately, neatly, and beautifully together to form a noose around my neck." The literary and analytical brilliance of this essay has stayed with me since I first read it over a year ago. Narratives of mental illness can take many shapes, but I was particularly struck both by the searing intimacy of this essay and the clarity with which the author connects her troubled mind to her troubled life. I particularly enjoyed how it echoed the essence of one of my favourite music albums, Janelle Monae’s ‘Dirty Computer’. The connections between mental illness and structural trauma are not often drawn as directly or as hauntingly as in this piece, so I’m really glad Rivers Solomon gave us the gift of her perspective and her story. (OluTimehin Adegbeye, Othering correspondent) Guernica: Black girl going mad (reading time: 15 minutes)
Incarceration rates for indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and Canada " Three statistics have been swirling around in my head this week. 1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people make up 28% of the people who are in prisons in Australia, and make up only 2% of the population. 2. 51% of the some 9,000 people in prisons in New Zealand are Maori - and make up 15% of the population.  3. Aboriginal Canadians make up 26% of the people in prisons, but only 4% of the population in Canada. These are dizzying numbers, made all the more approachable or comprehensible because they are laid out next to each other in a podcast called Cider & Sensitivity. This week I recommend episode 8 of season 1 to see what the journalists and researchers are trying to do with their platform. By intentionally pooling cases of systemic oppression around the world, they want to highlight how common the barriers that different people face are. And if there is a commonality to an experience in an oppressed system, there can be fixes for it. The episode is hard-hitting, but covers important ideas." (Nabeelah Shabbir, conversation editor) Cider and Sensitivity, Season 1, Episode 8 (listening time: 75 minutes)
Meet Flower boy "An hour-long conversation between Tyler, the Creator and comedian Jerrod Carmichael about his 2017 Grammy-nominated album Flower Boy. The artist breaks down the album in depth, sharing details on each song, what inspired the album and the lyrics. This interview shines a light on the backend processes of putting an album together. Tyler breaks with masculine hip-hop clichés with flowers and feelings." (Sabrina Argoub, editorial assistant) Flower Boy: a conversation (watching/listening time 58 minutes)

The best of The Correspondent

Illustration of a woman sitting in front of her computerscreen, frowning at the advertisements of glasses she’s suddenly confronted with since she decided to buy a new pair. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising In 2018 $273bn was spent on digital ads globally. We delve into the world of clicks, banners and keywords to find out if any of it is real. What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising? Read Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn’s article here. We need to let go of our misguided devotion to personal agency Corporations and billionaires get tax cuts while convincing individuals that our consumer choices make the world a better place. Managing editor Eliza Anyangwe makes one thing clear: we must let go of our misguided devotion to personal agency and take action alongside other people if we want to bring these systems down. Read Eliza Anyangwe’s article here. View from the inside of an artifical reef. The so called productive structure is already covered with coral and surrounded by little fish. The great paradox of our time: everything is both better and worse than ever before In the past two centuries, fossil capitalism has made us wealthier, healthier, safer and more informed than ever. Now, however, this driver of progress has begun to cause our demise, making us feel cynical, or powerless. Yet there is always room for hope – that is the nature of humankind. Read Rob Wijnberg’s article here.