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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also keep a record of my daily reading and listening on the ‘Notes’ section of this site.

Five things to look at

Pavlos Roufos traced Chilean president José Antonio Kast’s political lineage, in this article for The Brooklyn Rail, through his father Michael’s journey from Nazi émigré to Chilean businessman and active supporter of Augusto Pinochet’s regime, and elder brother Miguel’s embodiment of the Chilean far right’s embrace of neoliberalism.

For the Illiberalism Studies Program blog, Richard Hayton explored Britain’s Conservative and Reform parties’ roots in a conservative populism epitomised by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, and how interparty competition drives them in increasingly extreme directions, amid the atrophying of the wider centre right.

In this post for Just Security, Luca Trenta and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi contextualised the targeted killing of Ali Khamenei within the history of the taboo established in 1970s US politics against assassinating foreign leaders, ensuing executive resistance to fully embracing this norm, and its abandonment by Donald Trump’s administration.

Cathy Otten reflected in Aeon Magazine on humanitarian journalism’s exploitation of trauma for ostensibly progressive ends, its roots in imperialism and resulting problematic registers of either pity or idealisation, and a possible alternative approach that eschews sentimentality for pre-emptively speaking out against injustice.

Abdullahi Halakhe wrote for his The Horn and the Gulf newsletter about how Tanzania’s 1972 invasion of Uganda and resulting International Monetary Fund bailout arose from President Julius Nyere’s same project of Ujamaa that they doomed, and the lessons from this that defined Yoweri Museveni’s subsequent rule in Uganda.

Five things to listen to

Miranda Melcher interviewed Kristina Jonutytė for the New Books Network about her book Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia, and Buryat Buddhists’ fraught position between the state’s authoritarian Russification, and their own transnational religious and ethnic ties.

David Runciman was joined by David Klemperer on the Past Present Future podcast to discuss American and British former Trotskyists’ journeys rightward, including ardent support for the Iraq War and Brexit, rooted in an embrace of confrontation for its own sake, and a class politics that swaps out material for cultural analysis.

On the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz considered HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis within a longer cultural tradition of representing American suburbs as sites not of idyllic prosperity, but of psychological repression, patriarchy, property fetishism, and interpersonal conflict.

Alan Boswell spoke to guest Hafsa Halawa on the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast about the the US-Israeli war against Iran’s economic and security implications for the Horn of Africa, amid Gulf states’ growing involvement in the region, its resulting integration with the Middle East, and its own local flashpoints.

On Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi examined economic contributors to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese state’s economic policy response to the unrest, and the conflict between human rights advocacy and business interests that drove the US’s inconsistent approach to China.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past month. I also keep an ongoing record of what I’m reading and listening to on the Notes section of this site.

The Global War on Terror

Presented by Helena Merriman, Series 1 of BBC Radio 4’s The History Bureau programme revisited the September 1999 Russian apartment bombings – then officially attributed to Chechen militants, amid allegations of FSB involvement – and their role in consolidating then new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s hold on power.

Gregk Foley welcomed Spencer Ackerman onto the Blood Work podcast to explore the long legacy of the Global War on Terror in enabling US citizens to be stripped of their rights and renditioned to sites outside of American territory and conventional legal jurisdiction, and the complicity of the media in facilitating this state of affairs.

On parts 1 and 2 of this episode of the This Day podcast, Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson revisited George W. Bush’s 2002 naming of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an ‘Axis of Evil’, the neoconservative basis of this idea, and why the ‘Global War on Terror’ supplanted it as US foreign policy’s dominant framing.

Martin D. Brown wrote for his On This and That, and the Other newsletter about the suspension of morals and vast loss of life that the Global War on Terror comprised, and how its receding from public memory is illustrated by its omission from explanations of the rise of Donald Trump and the pathway to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Camilo Montoya-Galvez joined Tristan Redmond and Asma Khalid on the BBC World Service’s The Global Story to discuss US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, its establishment as part of post-9/11 security policy, and the drastic expansion of its detention and expulsion programme since Trump’s second inauguration.

Donald Trump and the international order

Costas Douzinas argued in Critical Legal Theory that the US’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, like Israel’s assault on Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, illustrates the limitations of international law given its lack of binding force, and the ability of powerful states to either disregard or weaponize it.

David Adler and Matt Kirkegaard joined Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on the Know Your Enemy podcast to situate the Trump administration’s hemispheric adventurism in its historical context, and consider the competing forces of insular nativism and interventionist neoconservatism that drive its incoherencies.

Writing for his Mainly Macro blog, Simon Wren-Lewis reflected upon Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January speech at Davos, and what it heralded about how liberal democratic ‘middle powers’ might collaborate on a more ad hoc basis in response to a more antagonistic US’s worsening reliability as an ally.

On CBC’s Front Burner programme, Jayme Poisson and guests Jason Markusoff and Patrick Lennox discussed the Albertan separatist movement’s links with the Trump administration, in relation to the latter’s ambitions for hemispheric dominance, and the possibility of disinformation bolstering support in the province for independence.

Vincent Bevins wrote for the North-South Notes newsletter about how the US’s deposal of Maduro fit into a longer history of it instigating coups against unfavoured Latin American governments, but also into the Trump administration’s wider efforts to dismantle the very global international system that has buttressed US hegemony.

The remaking of the right

On the BBC World Service’s The Global Story programme, Jake Kwon joined Tristan Redmond and Asma Khalid to explain the right-wing movement that has mobilised in South Korea behind impeached ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol, directly influenced by the late US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point organisation.

Disha Karnad Jarni interviewed Quinn Slobodian on the Journal of Historical Ideas’ In Theory podcast about his book, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right, and the ways in which neoliberalism’s shift from antihegemonic to hegemonic ideology in the late twentieth century saw it take far more explicitly reactionary forms.

In this article for the New Statesman, John Merrick explored British billionaire James Goldsmith’s trajectory from notorious international asset stripper and antisocialist to staunch opponent of global free trade and mass migration after the end of the Cold War, culminating in his formation of the anti-EU Referendum Party in the mid-1990s.

Chris Dillow wrote for his newsletter about the hollowing out of an increasingly illiberal British centre-right, in a context where liberal capitalism is no longer delivering the economic growth necessary for the Conservatives to reproduce their electoral base, but reviving it means challenging vested interests in their coalition.

On the BBC World Service’s The Documentary programme, Nick Thorpe profiled Péter Magyar and his trajectory from member of Hungary’s governing right-wing Fidesz party to rallying opposition to the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán behind his own Tisza Party, ahead of Hungary’s forthcoming national elections.

Football governance

On parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this miniseries for the It Was What It Was podcast, Rob Draper and Jonathan Wilson examined the rise of the North American Soccer League from the 1960s, its attraction of high-profile franchise owners and veteran star players, and the failure to build solid foundations that led to its collapse in the 1980s.

Francesco Belcastro and Guy Burton welcomed Rafaelle Nicholson onto the FootPol podcast to reflect on the Football Association’s takeover of English women’s football during the 1990s, the resulting marginalisation of women from administrative roles, and parallels with other sports merged under male-dominated governing bodies.

Following Liam Rosenior’s departure from Racing Club Strasbourg to coach ‘sister club’ Chelsea, James Horncastle, Miguel Delaney, and Rory Smith discussed their parent company BlueCo, on this episode of the Libero podcast, the varying models and motives for multi-club ownership, and the ethical and sporting challenges they raise.

Keith Rathbone interviewed Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui on the New Books Network podcast about his book The Making of a Global FIFA: Cold War Politics and the Rise of João Havelange to the FIFA Presidency, 1950-1974, and how Havelange’s repeated claims to have had a transformative tenure masked major continuities from his predecessors.

For his Sports Politika newsletter, Karim Zidan situated threats to boycott the forthcoming 2026 World Cup within the longer history of often failed boycotts of sporting megaevents, arguing that such initiatives are likely to prove ineffective or even counterproductive without accompanying economic and diplomatic sanctions.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past month.

The Horn of Africa

On International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, Murithi Mutiga joined host Alan Boswell to discuss the inauguration of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the tensions the project has provoked with Egypt, and the question of whether the dam can really bolster the country’s economic prospects.

Zecharias Zelalem wrote for The Continent about a Djiboutian air strike in January of this year against what the country’s government alleged were Afar rebels within its borders but turned out to be against civilians on the Ethiopian side of the border, and the reasons for the complicity of silence around this attack.

Irina Costache wrote for New Lines Magazine about the band of Armenian orphans brought to Addis Ababa by Haile Selassie in 1924, their place in the history of the city’s longstanding but now much dwindled Armenian diasporic community, and their important continuing legacy for Ethiopian music and culture.

For his Socialist Somalia newsletter, Faisal Ali reflected on how rival authoritarian regimes across Northeast Africa helped bring about each other’s demise between 1989 and 1991 through supporting rebel ethnic and religious movements across each others’ borders, contributing to ongoing state weakness in the region.

Isaac Samuel examined the history of the Geledi sultanate in southern Somalia, in this post for his African History Extra newsletter, from its emergence as an alliance between local tribes in the 18^th century, through its consolidation as a powerful state in the 19^th, to its eventual colonial subjugation by Italy in the early 20^th.

Eastern Orthodoxy

On the The Greek Current podcast, Thanos Davelis spoke to Elizabeth Prodromou and Aristotle Papanikolaou about Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew’s September visit to the US, within the context of his role in advocating for religious minorities and interfaith dialogue as a basis for peace.

Roberto Mazza interviewed Georgios Tsourous on The New Books Network podcast about his book Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem’s Old City, and how relationships within the multi-ethnic Rum Orthodox community are negotiated in the space of the Holy Sepulchre Church.

On the BBC World Service’s Heart and Soul programme, Nikos Papanikolaou encountered the monks of the Esphigmenou monastery, whose fundamentalist interpretation of the faith – encapsulated by the slogan ‘Orthodoxy or Death’ – led to their excommunication, and now to efforts to evict them from Mount Athos.

Eli Karetny welcomed Marlene Laruelle onto the International Horizons podcast to discuss Russia’s illiberal turn since the 1990s, Vladmir Putin’s effective blend of nationalism, Eurasianism, and conservatism, and the growing political role of Russian Orthodoxy, including eschatological discourse around the war in Ukraine.

Jenna Pitman spoke to Aram G. Sarkisian on The New Books Network podcast about his book Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era, and the Russian Orthodox Church’s transnational role in the lives of Eastern European migrants to the US before 1917.

The Balkans

On the New Books Network podcast, Papas Papamichos Chronakis joined Roberto Mazza to talk about his book The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, and how the city’s merchants negotiated ethnic and class tensions amid the political transitions of the early 20^th century.

On the The Eurasian Knot podcast, Sean Guillory spoke to Elana Resnick, author of Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe, about how Romani women’s role as waste workers in Bulgaria contributes to their racialisation, and enables ethnic Bulgarians to claim the mantle of whiteness.

Host Thomas Ntinas and recipe book author and guest Irina Janakievska explored the Balkans’ historical foodways and local variations on common dishes, shaped by differing culinary preferences and climate conditions across the peninsula, on parts one and two of this episode of the The Delicious Legacy podcast.

On the East of Ethnia podcast, Eric Gordy analysed the US government’s decision to lift sanctions against former Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik, and the roles of Republika Srpska’s lobbying in the US and of Islamophobia in the Trump administration in driving this deviation from its previous Bosnian policy.

Vladislav Lilic interviewed George Giannakopoulos about his book The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870-1930 on the The New Books Network podcast, and the role of British intellectuals in shaping international understandings of nationalist movements within the region.

Football, ideology, and politics

On the Libero podcast, Jack Pitt-Brooke, John Brewin, and Rory Smith reflected on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy for football, and the way the Premier League’s commercialisation and apolitical consumerism bears out the dominant logics of Thatcherism for a sport and fanbase whom she infamously considered anathema.

Miguel Delaney wrote for The Independent about the eclipse of Pep Guardiola’s possession-based football philosophy by an increasingly wide and pragmatic range of approaches pioneered by younger coaches, and the parallels with the eclipse of liberal democracy’s post-Cold War global hegemony from the late 2000s.

Leslie Mabon joined Guy Burton on the The FootPol Podcast to explore the historical role of local heavy industries in supporting football clubs from Scotland to Germany to Japan, and how the relationship between fan identities and this heritage is shifting amid the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

On the It Was What It Was podcast, Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper welcomed Rory Smith onto the show to discuss how the evolution of data collection and analytics has transformed English football since the 1990s, and the tensions between its advocates and traditionalists that accompanied its ascent.

Eoghan Gilmartin spoke to Alejandro Quiroga on The Sobremesa Podcast about the installation of regime-approved administrations at Real Madrid and Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, and their respective instrumentations by Francisco Franco’s regime to promote acceptable forms of regional and national identity.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Five things to look at:

• In New Lines Magazine, Jake Pitre traced the history of anti-Americanism as a frequently bland, often peripheral, but regularly recurring feature of Canadian politics, rendered salient by occasional threats of annexation, as well as fears of cultural imperialism, economic domination, and foreign policy adventurism.

• Robin Douglas reflected in his Religion off the Beaten Track newsletter on the 1870 fall of the Papal States, whose fusion of clerical and secular governance had resulted in increasing political and religious repression and economic stagnation, facilitating the recently unified Kingdom of Italy’s successful capture of Rome.

• Leila Sansour wrote for the LRB Blog about the decision of several Western states to recognise Palestinian statehood as an acknowledgement of the Palestinian people’s presence and political agency, and a route to supplanting the reigning politics of fear and chaos with a rules-based order and collective security.

• Peter Geoghegan, May Bulman, and Lucas Amin examined Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s bankrolling of the Tony Blair Institute, in this post for Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale newsletter, the TBI’s resulting embrace of uncritical tech boosterism, and the influence of this in turn on the UK’s Labour government.

• For the Journal of Historical Ideas Blog, Mayukh Chakrabarty explored the 19^th-century emergence of India’s life insurance industry at the intersection between competing British ideological currents of free-market liberalism and colonial paternalism, as well as Indians’ own pursuit of respectability and security.

Five things to listen to:

• Anna Arutunyan joined Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova on the Eurasian Knot podcast to discuss her book Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from Tsars to Navalny, and how the myth of a strong Russian state and a docile population is undermined by the centrality of rebel figures and revolutions to its history.

• On the Libero podcast, Jack Pitt-Brooke, Miguel Delaney, and Tariq Panja considered the recent dismissals of Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and Arsenal executive vice-chair Tim Lewis in the context of the transformation of English football through club ownership by sovereign wealth and private equity funds.

• Reuben Silverman interviewed Selim Koru about his book New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country on the New Books Network podcast, and how far-right and Islamist strands in Turkey and an oppositional relationship with the West have reshaped its domestic and foreign policy.

• Olga Oliker and Elissa Jobson welcomed Valery Kavaleuski onto the International Crisis Group’s War & Peace podcast to explain Belarus’s balancing act between its subservient relationship with Russia and efforts to improve relations with NATO states, and possible ramifications for the country’s repressive domestic politics.

• Charlotte Lydia Riley talked about ‘Baby on Board!’ badges with hosts Kasia Tee and Dan Hancock on the Cursed Objects podcast, within the broader contexts of public service messaging, problematic discourses on pregnancy, and the paradoxical positions of pregnant people and of small children in public space.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Genocide.

Five things to look at:

• Marc Lynch discussed the historical precedents for Israel’s recent strike on Doha and why it still signals a drastic escalation, in this post for his The Ghost of Abu Aardvark newsletter – one likely to alienate the other Gulf Arab states, show up the US’s ineffectual position, and pave the way for the occupation of Gaza.

• Writing for the History Workshop blog, Benjamin Thomas White examined the historical intersection between French archaeological photography and aerial military surveillance in Syria, and the need or scholarship that draws upon these images to recognise the colonial political contexts in which they were generated.

• In this post for his Patterns of Translation newsletter, András Kiséry traced the history of the translation and publication of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost across Europe before 1800, amid growing uses of vernacular languages for literary purposes, and the increasing centrality of English literature to European culture.

• Vaughn Joy has revisited the 1980 film The Blues Brothers for her Review Roulette newsletter, and its deployment of Black musical history – including casting the likes of Cab Calloway and Aretha Franklin – in order to challenge indifference to poverty and Black culture and community in the present.

• Andy Beckett has reviewed a new collection of Tony Benn’s political writings for the London Review of Books, exploring Benn’s zealous faith in the power of democracy, the insightfulness and unappreciated subtlety of his thinking, and his occasional misassumptions about the future, including that of the Labour Party.

Five things to listen to:

• On CBC’s Ideas programme, Robert Macfarlane – in discussion with Jon Johnson, Jennifer Bonnell, and others – explored what it means to consider rivers to be alive and possessing rights, states’ and corporations’ culpability in degrading them, and the role of indigenous communities in stewarding and reviving them.

• Janet Anderson interviewed Melanie O’Brien on the Asymmetrical Haircuts podcast about why the International Association of Genocide Scholars deems Israel’s actions in Gaza to constitute genocide, the issues taken into account in making such a decision, and the obligations it imposes upon other states.

• On the This Day podcast, Kellie Carter Jackson, Jody Avirgan, and Nicole Hemmer revisited retired Vermont farmer Fred Tuttle’s passage from starring as himself in a 1996 mockumentary to surprisingly winning the state’s 1998 Republican Senate primary against the recently arrived businessman John McMullen.

• John Brewin was joined by Miguel Delaney and Tariq Panja on the Libero podcast to evaluate Arsène Wenger’s career, including his initial revolutionisation of English football at Arsenal, his subsequent struggles to compete with newly wealthy rivals, and his current role as FIFA’s chief of global football development.

• On The Totally Football Show, James Richardson, Duncan Alexander, Felipe Cardenas, and Luis Miguel Echegaray reflected on Colombia’s incredibly talented men’s football team of the 1990s, from their ascent in a context of cartel-driven violence, to their hugely consequential first-round exit from the 1994 World Cup.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Murder.

Five things to look at:

• Adrian Daub reflected for his In The Which House newsletter on the Hollywood sword-and-sorcery films of the early 1980s, their aesthetic combination of nerdish fantasy and bodybuilding cultures, the diversity of their themes, aspirations, and targeted audiences, and their spectacular but confused presentations of gender.

• For his Unexpected Delirium newsletter, Ian King examined the mounting crisis at Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, with bills going unpaid, players leaving, and the stadium decaying, and the culpability of both owner Dejphon Chansiri and English football’s authorities for this perilous state of affairs.

• In this post for her Angle, Anchor, and Voice newsletter, Ezgi Basaran contended that the misremembering of the millet system and its alleged role in the decline of the Ottoman Empire has distorted Turkish political discourse, resulting in a fear of too much pluralism in a polity that has persistently lacked enough.

• Gagandeep Singh has written for New Lines Magazines about the legacy of the assassination of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar leader in Canada in 2023, allegedly at the Indian government’s behest, and its role in fuelling a new wave of Sikh diasporic activism and tensions with their Hindu counterparts in the country.

• Ken Opalo discussed Ethiopian underdevelopment for his Africanist Perspective newsletter, and how the advantages and strategies that helped Ethiopia maintain its sovereignty amid European colonisation of Africa in the 19^th century rendered the state complacent over the need for it to modernise and adapt in the 20^th.

Five things to listen to:

• In parts one and two of this episode of the It Was What It Was podcast, Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper revisited Red Star Belgrade’s victory in the 1991 European Cup, framing the success of its hugely talented pan-Yugoslav set of footballers against worsening ethnic conflict and the country’s looming breakup.

• On BBC Radio Four’s Screenshot programme, Ellen E. Jones, Mark Kermode, and guests discussed the evolution of the police procedural on film and television, the relationship between documentary and fiction in the genre’s evolution, and the extent to which it can challenge the underlying inequalities within policing.

• Eric Gordy reflected for his East of Ethnia podcast on Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik’s ban from holding public office in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and how by successfully cultivating ethnic tensions and separatist sentiments, he helped create a patronage network that no longer needs him to operate effectively.

• Mark Leon Goldberg spoke to Jennifer Hadden on the Global Dispatches podcast about the declining influence of non-governmental organisations in world politics since the 2000s, as they compete with each other for scarcer resources amid worsening persecution by increasingly authoritarian states.

• On this episode of the Leading Labour podcast, Izzy Conn and guests explored Michael Foot’s political career, his unconventional route to eventually becoming Labour leader in 1980, his struggles to keep an increasingly polarised party together, and ultimate landslide defeat in the 1983 UK general election.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Five things to look at:

• In this Guardian ‘Long Read’, Daniel Trilling explored the paradox of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s professional background as a human rights lawyer on one hand and his own government’s inconsistent record on human rights on the other, including Starmer’s own frequently ambiguous position on this issue.

• Joshua Tait wrote for his To Live Is To Maneuver newsletter about the 1981 selection of William Bennett to chair the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities, and the contest between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives over Republican education policy that lay behind this appointment.

• Jos Betts and Lydia Wilson examined the continuing fragmentation of UK politics, in this article for New Lines Magazine, and former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana’s vision for building a new left-wing party rooted in civic life a manner similar to the post-war Labour and Conservative parties.

• In this post for his DigressionsImpressions newsletter, Eric Schliesser discussed Nicolo Machiavelli’s advocacy of checking potential tyrants within republican political systems through popular accountability, and how and why Montesquieu (and subsequently Alexander Hamilton) preferred a more elite-centred approach.

• Liam Kofi Bright reflected for his Sooty Empiric blog on the ascendancy of ‘wokeness’ as an ideological paradigm in 2010s America, its main concerns, foibles, and achievements, and the question of its significance as a political discursive framework after the pandemic and Donald Trump’s 2024 election win.

Five things to listen to:

• In this two-part episode of The Last Picture Show podcast, Genevieve Koski, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, and Chris Klimek discussed the 1978 and 2025 Superman films respectively, including Superman’s enduring symbolism, the challenges of putting him on screen, and how both productions reflect the politics of their eras.

• Samantha Hancox-Li spoke with Aaron Ross Powell on Liberal Currents’ Neon Liberalism podcast about the realignment of some US libertarians against Donald Trump’s right-wing coalition, and why the salience of minority rights has increased for a group that previously prioritised economic over social freedoms.

• Hedi Nermin Aziz presented this episode of the BBC World Service’s Assignment programme on how contemporary Greenlanders are negotiating questions of identity, decolonisation, and potential future independence, amid continued economic dependence on Denmark and unwelcome US government attention.

• In this instalment of the Institute of Historical Research’s Leading Labour series, Izzy Conn and guests considered James Callaghan’s spell as UK Prime Minister between 1976 and 1979, including his inclusive style of leading a divided party, and the economic problems and tactical errors that defined his premiership.

• On this episode of BBC Radio Four’s Screenshot, Ellen E. Jones and Mark Kermode explored the economic and artistic dynamics of the cinematic remake, including for both Hollywood and television, and the question of how and under what conditions remakes might improve upon or add something to the original film.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Genocide; Famine.

Five things to look at:

• Matthias Goldmann wrote this piece for the EJIL: Talk! blog about the contest in the Global North between universalist and sovereigntist understandings of international law, and the need for the former – for all its hypocrisies – to win out to prevent the undermining of those states’ own domestic constitutional orders.

• In this post for Opinio Juris, Kate May argued that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities highlights the lack of protection of educational rights under international law, but that conceptualising this scholasticide as part of a wider genocidal project raises obligations for third-party states to respond.

• Parts I, II, and III of this series by Branko Milanovic for his Global Inequality and More 3.0 newsletter explored the emergence of a new ‘homoploutic’ capitalism in many developed economies, whereby a disproportionate share of income from capital but also labour accrue with the same small fraction of the population.

• Ken Opalo concluded his recent series on Kenya for his An Africanist Perspective newsletter with this post on the country’s historical political economy, and how an uneven development model and increasingly personalistic business-state relations have seen living standards there fall behind those of its neighbours.

• For his Chartbook newsletter, Adam Tooze emphasised the singularity of worsening famine conditions in Gaza, arising not from civil conflict or chronic poverty as in acute hunger risk hotspots elsewhere, but from a military campaign by a rich, fully sovereign state, and threatening the entirety of its population.

Five things to listen to:

• On the In Bed with the Right podcast, Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub discussed the Unification Church from its foundation by Sun Myung Moon in Cold War South Korea, including its extreme theological approach to sex, the complex racial politics of its global spread, and the generational dynamics of its decline.

• Jeff Hawn joined Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova on the Eurasian Knot podcast to talk about Russia’s 1993 constitutional crisis, its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how President Boris Yeltsin’s power grab was legitimised by his international partners and undermined nascent Russian democracy.

• Alexandria Miller spoke to Eskor David Johnson on the Strictly Facts podcast about the Jamaat al-Muslimeen’s attempted coup in Trinidad in 1990, the political and economic discontent that drove recruitment to the group, and how a lack of consequences for the perpetrators has since harmed the rule of law there.

• On the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, Adam Boswell and Sarra Majdoub explored the Rapid Support Forces’ shifting strategy since losing Khartoum in the Sudanese Civil War, including allying with other local political movements and consolidating its control over Darfur and Kordofan.

• Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg interviewed Aarif Abraham, Christine Chinkin, and Ewelina Ochab on the Asymmetrical Haircuts podcast about the new Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes initiative to compel the UK to take a more coherent and consistent approach to upholding international law.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Violence against women; Genocide.

Five things to look at:

• David K. Renton wrote this piece for his newsletter on the way that Keir Starmer’s period as Director of Public Prosecutions presaged the worst aspects of his leadership of the Labour Party and his time as UK Prime Minister, in his tendency to subordinate policymaking to pursuing right-wing press approval.

• In this article for Foreign Affairs, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami discussed the prospects and drawbacks of more countries recognising Palestinian statehood, if this is not accompanied by material action to counter Israeli encroachment, hegemony, and violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

• This post by Ian King for his Unexpected Delirium newsletter revisited the debacle of ITV Digital, whose seemingly lucrative package for screening Football League matches promised to put the lower divisions on a closer footing to the Premier League in the early 2000s, only to instead nearly bankrupt many clubs.

• Writing for his Back of Mind newsletter, Dan Davies highlighted the problem of ‘infrastructure brain’ undermining much UK government policymaking, which frames environmental protection as a trade-off with economic growth, when successful development is instead often dependent upon complex ecosystems.

• Debbie Sharnak reflected for her Uruguay in Perspective newsletter on the recent conviction in Uruguay of a defendant implicated in the state murder of three young women in 1974, and the long delay in attaining justice for victims of the country’s former dictatorship following the 2011 repeal of its amnesty law.

Five things to listen to:

• On the Diasporas Speaking podcast, Rina Limoni spoke to Selma Jahić about her survival as a child of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and her family’s subsequent escape to and resettlement in Austria, as well as her current work as an activist in sustaining the memory and raising awareness of the Bosnian genocide.

• Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi profiled the twentieth-century US economist John Kenneth Galbraith on Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, exploring Galbraith’s expansive understanding of his discipline, role as public intellectual and political insider, and pessimism over American consumerism and militarism.

• Chris Lee interviewed Will Huddlestone for the Outside Write podcast about his research into the history of Uruguayan football, including its rapid development after independence, role in bolstering the relatively small country’s global profile from the 1920s, and utilisation to both legitimise and challenge dictatorial rule.

• On the LRB Podcast, Thomas Jones spoke to Andy Beckett about the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile’s connections with both interwar fascism and the New Right, including British conservatives’ admiration for his violently implemented free market reforms, as well as his subsequent arrest in London in 1998.

• Richard McCulloch and Ben Litherland considered the question of ‘Copaganda’ on the Ill Effects podcast, examining the saturation of media with positive, highly partial depictions of policing in both the US and Britain, as well as the question of how far these representations shift public perceptions of the police.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Anti-Blackness.

Five things to look at:

• In this post for The Political Economy Blog, explored the ideological roots of Labour’s malaise since last year’s UK General Election victory, including its statist focus, its difficulty engaging directly with questions of class conflict, and its lack of engagement with intellectual traditions beyond social democracy.

• Sean Williams has written in New Lines Magazine on the divided Filipino response to the International Criminal Court’s arrest of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, in the context of his brutal war on drugs as mayor of Davao and then nationwide, and of the rivalry between the kleptocratic Duterte and Marcos dynasties.

• On the London School of Economics’ EUROPP Blog, Marika Djolai discussed the warrant issued in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik, his escalation of tensions by responding with new separatist legislation, and the fragility of his support that these moves have revealed.

• For New Lines Magazine, Anna Adima revisited the brief episode of Polish refugee settlement in Uganda during the Second World War, and their uneasy place in the colony’s racial order, as they experienced chauvinism from British administrators while themselves exhibiting anti-Blackness towards the African majority.

• wrote for his newsletter about the different potential frames for analysing Donald Trump’s chaos-inducing presidency to date, including authoritarianism, patrimonialism, kleptocracy, and ideology, the insights each of these approaches offer, and their explanatory shortcomings.

Five things to listen to:

• reflected on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay programme upon how changes in Britain’s National Health Service, driven by new ideas of medical expertise and the pursuit of efficiencies, have eroded the recognition of mothers’ care work and need for rest that was once integral to maternity wards.

• On this episode of the podcast, Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova interviewed Serhiy Kudelia about his book Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine, and the interaction between the Russian state, separatist militias, and local officials in the outbreak of the war in Donbas.

• and guests discussed the history of print journalism through to its hollowing out in the digital era, in the first and second instalments of a two-part episode of the , the role of social media in malign parallel news-making structures, and the possible futures of print and institutional media.

• Kornel Chang joined Nicholas Gordon on the ’s Asian Review of Books podcast to discuss Chang’s book A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation, and how American military administrators’ narrowly anti-communist focus facilitated the establishment of an authoritarian South Korean regime.

• On the Called to the Bar podcast, Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Imogen Saunders revisited Slovakia’s dispute with Hungary over a joint dam-building project on the Danube, and why the significance of the International Court of Justice’s 1997 ruling on the case goes well beyond environmental law.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Ethnic cleansing.

Five things to look at:

• Lucía Cholakian Herrera wrote for New Lines Magazine about the ascendancy of the Conservative Political Action Conference as a new form of right-wing diplomacy animated by a sense of civilisational mission, albeit whose US-oriented culture war politics translate uneasily across different national contexts.

• In this piece for her newsletter, drew connections between Donald Trump’s proposals for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and population transfer projects in the former Ottoman Empire during the interwar period, and the danger of such an approach being renormalised.

• argued in this post for his newsletter that forecasts of a potential US slide into competitive authoritarianism under Trump’s presidency have underestimated this risk, given Elon Musk’s heightened role and the weakness of institutional resistance since the inauguration.

• Writing for his , Eric Schliesser () reflected upon J. A. Hobson’s realist rather than moralising liberal critique of imperialism, which Hobson viewed as a distorted manifestation of nationalism that harmed even its practitioners by destabilising the international order.

• In this post for his newsletter, discussed the protest movement in Serbia against the authoritarianism and corruption of President Aleksandar Vučić’s administration, and how its avowed apoliticism broadens its support but also limits its capacity to oppose him.

Five things to listen to:

• On the podcast, Eric Paglia spoke to Christian Prip and Gosia Smieszek-Rice about the Kingdom of Denmark’s coming chairship of the Arctic Council, the balance of authority between Nuuk and Copenhagen in this role, and outgoing chair Norway’s handling of geopolitical tensions between members.1

• Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Alex Kane discussed the detention of Palestinian former student activist Mahmoud Khalil in the US, on Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast, the role of establishment and new reactionary Jewish organisations in instigating his arrest, and liberal and left-wing Jewish groups’ opposition to it.

• On the Called to the Bar podcast, Douglas Guilfoyle and Imogen Saunders considered the legacy of the ‘Caroline Case’, when British forces sank steamer the Caroline near the US-Canada border in 1837, and its frequent misapplication to justify the dubious principle of ‘anticipatory self-defence’ in international law.

• Geraldine Gudefin interviewed Simon Rabinovitch on the podcast about his book Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History, and the ways in which in different times and locations, diasporic Jewish communities utilised their legal rights and status as minorities to practice greater autonomy.

• Also on , Stephen Satkiewicz spoke to Daniela Richterova about her book Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, and Czechoslovakia’s complex relationships with violent non-state Middle Eastern actors, operating partly independently of the Soviet Union.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: HIV/AIDS; Homophobia; The Holocaust; Antisemitism.

Five things to look at:

• Writing for the History Workshop blog, Lucy Kelly explored the efforts of gay activists to challenge the homophobia and censoriousness of much official AIDS education in the US during the 1980s, and the potential lessons from that in resisting the Trump administration’s contemporary attacks on queer people.

• In this article for Public Books, Melanie Shi outlined the often overlooked history of settlement by Chinese and other Asian communities in Paris over the past century, their differing ideological outlook and affiliations, and their shifting place in the city’s urban fabric, culinary cultures, and intellectual life.

• reflected in this post on a recent trip to London with her young daughter to London to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet, on guiding a child through cultural experiences that are relatively new to oneself, and on the capacity of young children to navigate complex and emotive subject matter.

• has written for his on the connection between ideas about the exceptionalism of the Holocaust and of the Israeli state, rooted in a negative secular version of theological concepts of Jewish uniqueness and mission, resulting in the frequent framing of criticism of Israel as Antisemitic.1

• In this post for her newsletter, revisited the 1952 film High Noon, exploring the film’s advocacy of collective resolve in the face of threats to members of a community through the contexts of its Jewish director, writer, and producer’s experiences of interwar fascism and post-war anticommunism.

Five things to listen to:

• On the It Was What It Was podcast, Rob Draper and covered firstly how Pep Guardiola’s and Barcelona’s brand of possession football revolutionised the global game from the late 2000s, and secondly how a new generation of Basque coaches might potentially supplant that approach.

• On the Called to the Bar podcast, Tamsin Phillipa Paige, Ntina Tzouvala, Imogen Saunders, and Douglas Guilfoyle discussed how Donald Trump’s foreign policy jeopardises the future of international law, but is also a logical culmination of the growing gap between that legal system and the material inequalities it masks.

• Roland Clark interviewed Stefan Cristian Ionescu on the podcast about his book Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950, and Holocaust survivors’ efforts to reclaim their property through the legal system amid the rise of communism.

• joined Thomas Jones on the LRB podcast to talk about hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, his trajectory from Liberal Democrat donor to owner of GB News, the role of his evangelical Christian faith and friendship with Michael Gove, and the strategy behind his growing right-wing media portfolio.

• On the Recall This Book podcast, John Plotz, Lori Allen, and Ajantha Subramanian discussed diasporic Zionism and Hindutva, the relationship between claims to wounded minority sentiments and affiliation with illiberal majoritarianism, and the potential limitations of ethnonationalist political projects within diaspora.2

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Ethnic cleansing; The Holocaust.

Five things to look at:

• Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar have written for Protean Magazine about the real estate ideology underpinning Donald Trump’s outlandish proposals for Gaza, and its roots in longstanding connecting ideas about property and sovereignty, now shorn of the legitimating narratives underpinning previous imperial projects.

• In this post for her newsletter, meditated upon the film Conclave, and how its depiction of the Vatican navigating challenges of corruption, extremism, and succession speak to a misplaced liberal faith in the virtues of professionalism and the durability of institutions.

• wrote this piece for his newsletter about sacred significances historically invested in trees and forests, the limited surviving traces of such practices, and the value of long-lived flora and ecological spaces beyond the meanings humans have relatively recently invested in them.

• Writing for his newsletter, explored the implications of several recent domestic and international political shifts for Japanese democracy, including the weakening of the Liberal Democratic Party, the partial recovery of opposition parties, and changes in US foreign policy.

• In this post for his , Eric Schliesser () reflected upon the shortcomings of an international human rights regime that does not centre war prevention, and the challenges posed by Bertrand Russell’s agonistic understanding of politics to the prospect of preventing violent conflict.

Five things to listen to:

• On Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast, producer Max Freedman explored the story of Jerry Lewis’s lost 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried, and the intrigue and infamy it provoked, within the context of Lewis’s then declining career, and the near absence up until that point of the Holocaust from Hollywood cinema.

• joined and on the In Bed with the Right podcast to discuss the recent German elections, electoral fragmentation caused by declining traditional voting habits, and the failure by different parties to inhibit the rise of Alternative für Deutschland by tacking right themselves.

• Stephen Pimpare interviewed Timothy P. R. Weaver on the podcast about his new book Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, and the competing neoliberal, law-and-order conservative, and egalitarian imperatives that have shaped the city’s politics since the 1970s.

• Franceso Belcastro and Guy Burton were joined by on The FootPol Podcast to reflect upon the global history of football tactics, their relationship to broader cultural and political developments, and the potential role of anti-technocratic politics in fuelling a turn away from possession football.

• On this episode of the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast, host Peter Korchnak examined the history of Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement, the ideological and pragmatic underpinning of its anticolonialism, and its support for postcolonial states and liberation movements in Burma, Algeria, and Palestine.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warning: Anti-Asian racism; Antisemitism; Misogyny.

Five things to look at:

• Andrew Liu has written for N+1 about the long roots of Donald Trump’s tariff advocacy and anti-China rhetoric in his response to Japanese economic competition in the 1980s, as well as how lessons from Japan’s subsequent economic eclipse inform China’s present wariness of consumption-driven growth.

• In this piece for his newsletter, has explored the roots of contests over the meaning of Antisemitism in terminology, history, and theology, and the way both religious and secular Jews have argued for and against the idea of Antisemitism as an eternal, transhistorical phenomenon.

• Anna Zacharias has written for New Lines Magazine about both the historical Saint Brigid and her defiance of gender norms in sixth and seventh-century Ireland, and the saint’s continued potency as a feminist symbol in the country as it wrestles with the legacy of the Catholic Church’s role in the abuse of women.

• In this post for his newsletter, has reflected on labour lawyer Ernst Fraenkel’s theorisation of the interregnum period in 1930s Germany, when a kind of dual state operated amid the Nazis’ increasing grip on power, and its relevance to understanding our contemporary historical moment.

• Eric Schliesser () drew upon Nicolo Machiavelli’s writings, in this piece for his , to explore why, despite the focus on anticorruption in the US Constitution, its lack of capacity for renewal has nonetheless allowed corruption to proliferate in its contemporary political system.

Five things to listen to:

• Erik Voeten interviewed Ji Yeon Hong for the Good Authority podcast about the crisis in South Korean democracy following President Yun Sook Yeol’s failed coup last year, the deepening polarisation in South Korean society along gender lines, and the influence of American tropes on the Korean far right.

• Gil Morejón, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, and William Paris examined the work of Karl Polanyi on What’s Left of Philosophy, his critique of the creeping marketisation and commodification of human life, and his rejection of what he saw as excessive economism in neoclassical and Marxist economic thought.

• On this instalment of podcast, and guests explored the influence of Advanced Placement programmes on the teaching of English and literature in American schools and universities, as well as addressing the need to encourage curiosity among students, and finance its indulgence.

• Marc Kermode and Ellen E. Jones considered the continuing appeal of the hitman in film and television, in this episode of BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot, including the question of why professional contract killer are such figures of fascination, and the ideas about moral codes and gender that underpin their representation.

• Kim Pernell discussed her book Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation with host Miranda Melcher on this episode of the podcast, and the historical roots of regulators’ very different responses to similar banking crises in the US, Canada, and Spain.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Five things to look at:

• wrote this post for his newsletter on how the community that once existed on Twitter has wholly reassembled on BlueSky, and why arguments BlueSky is an echo chamber miss the point that the migration of ideologically repelled users is Twitter’s rather than Bluesky’s problem.

• In this post for his newsletter, compares the forms of liberal political epistemology present in the work of Walter Lippmann and Raymond Aron, and the implications of their concern with the limits of political knowledge for governance and ethics respectively.

• Writing for his newsletter, has revisited the Coen Brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man, and its reinterpretation of the themes of the Book of Job through its the prism of a middle-aged Jewish man in 1960s Minnesota, struggling to come to terms with God’s will and the meaning of life.

• Mihaela Mihai and Camil Ungureanu wrote for the London School of Economics’ EUROPP blog about the Alliance for the Union of Romanians and its singular brand of far-right populism, concerned with the perceived economic colonisation of Romania, and drawing on both Orthodox Christianity and environmentalism.

• reflected, in this post for her Unmapped Storylands newsletter, on the centrality of immigrant families’ interconnected experiences and of intergenerational trauma in her novels, and on the importance of writers and poets as memory-keepers of their societies, particularly where democracy is weak.

Five things to listen to:

• On the podcast, Elisa Prosperetti interviewed Samuel Fury Charles Daly about his book Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, and the ideological centrality of militarism as an experience and a mode of social mobilisation that drove coups in Nigeria and other postcolonial African states.

• Andromachi Sophocleous and Kemal Baykalli reflected on the proposed multiparty talks over the future of Cyprus, on this episode of Nicosia Uncut, as well as the likely implications of Donald Trump’s election as US President for Greek-Turkish relations generally and for the Cyprus conflict more specifically.

• Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman were joined by Jamieson Webster on the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Radio Hour podcast to discuss Sigmund Freud’s neglected psychoanalytical interpretation of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, as well as the value of psychoanalysis for interpreting contemporary US politics.

• spoke with Becca Lewis on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast about the role of right-wing figures such as George Gilder and Newt Gingrich in shaping nascent American internet policy in the 1990s, and its significance as a key precursor to the contemporary right-wing turn in Silicon Valley.

• On Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, and Cameron Abadi examined Germany’s flawed recent economic trajectory, the implications of the likely election of Friedrich Merz as its next Chancellor, and the consequences of Angela Merkel’s fateful decisions during her lengthy stint in the role.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warnings: Homophobia; HIV/AIDS; Death; Bereavement; The Holocaust.

Five things to look at:

• revisited Julian Clary’s joke at the 1993 British Comedy Awards about ‘fisting Norman Lamont’, in this post for his Utopian Drivel newsletter, situating it within the the upsurge in homophobia amid the AIDS pandemic, and the Conservatives’ stoking of moral panics to rescue their flagging popularity.

• Writing for the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’s blog, Kevin Schürer discussed the longevity of England’s North-South divide, illustrating iterations of its existence dating back to the Roman period, through to its more modern manifestations in trends like migratory patterns.

• In this piece for her newsletter, Melissa Florer-Bixler urged American churches primarily concerned with overcoming electoral polarisation among their congregations to learn from the failure of the Confessing Churches of Germany in the 1930s to effectively resist the ascendancy of Nazism.

• wrote this post for her newsletter about the marking of both Armistice Day and Martinmas in November in the Low Countries, and the recurring significance of the intersection of these two very different occasions as an opportunity for peace activism.

• In this post for the newsletter, reflected on the centrality of loss to the public and private experience of the First World War, and the procedures and paraphernalia pertaining to dead soldiers’ loved ones’ experiences of bereavement, and to their subsequent commemoration

Five things to listen to:

• This episode of the Cited podcast explored the long evolution of the Democrats’ economic approach over the past forty years, from the Clinton administration’s abandonment of ‘sunset’ for ‘sunrise’ industries, to the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild the party’s electoral base through its new industrial strategy.

• Tom Leeman spoke with Michal Ovádek about the political career of Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico on the The Hated and the Dead podcast, and his ideological trajectory from seeming social democratic luminary to an increasingly authoritarian leader surrounded by allegations of corruption.

• On this episode of the podcast, and discussed the parallels between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the American and Turkish liberal-lefts’ failure to mount an effective response to them, as well as the implications of Trump’s electoral win for US-Turkey relations.

• Ran Zwigenberg interviewed Anne Berg on about her book Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, and the interconnection between the Nazi regime’s singular focus on waste reduction and recycling, and its connection to its genocidal, expansionary project, and disregard for human life.

• On this instalment of podcast, and guests examined the long history of philanthropic capitalism as an insufficient basis for financing historically Black colleges and universities, and its connection to the contemporary financialization and exploitation of those same institutions.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warnings: Antisemitism.

Five things to look at:

• In this post for her newsletter, discussed the importance of Flanders as a hub of Catholic networks at the outset of the seventeenth century, and its centrality therefore to the political and intellectual development of the men involved in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

• has written this piece for his newsletter about Smokey and the Bandit and the broader trucker film cycle of the 1970s, their celebration of an unconstrained Southern masculinity, and the complex and ambiguous politics underpinning this vision.

• Writing for Religion Dispatches, has argued that while antisemitism is indeed on the rise in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s focus on left-wing and pro-Palestinian movements defies evidence, including its own statistics, of its greater virulence, centrality, and violent potential on the right.

• considered the parallels and contrasts between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in this post for his newsletter, highlighting their shared revivalism, executive centralism, and extractivism, as well as their differing managerial styles, religious outlooks, and attitudes towards immigration.

• In this article for London Review of Books, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite explored the ideological trajectories of both the left and right of Britain’s Labour Party through the biographies of some of their principal standard bearers of recent years, including Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Keir Starmer.

Five things to listen to:

• Alexander Sergeant and Christopher Holliday meditated upon Farah Mendelson’s Rhetorics of Fantasy in this ‘Footnote’ episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, applying her classifications of intrusive, immersive, portal quest, and liminal fantasy stories to analyse the worldbuilding and narrative rules of fantasy films.

• Adam Smith revisited the 2008 US Presidential Election with Bruce Schulman and Dan Rowe on the The Last Best Hope podcast, including Barack Obama beating Hilary Clinton to the Democratic nomination, the coalescence of a new electoral coalition around him, and the racist backlash his victory provoked.

• On , Morteza Hajizadeh interviewed Eric Helleiner about his book The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, the heterogenous roots of neomercantilism as a response to increasingly globalised trade, and the spread and separate genesis of neomercantilist ideas in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

• discussed historically Black colleges and universities with Dominique Baker, Andrew Douglas, Jelani Favors, Jared Loggins, and Crystal Sanders on the podcast, including their centrality as a crucible of radical activism and their continued appeal to Black students today.

• On the On the Nose podcast, Aparna Gopalan, Mari Cohen, E. Tammy Kim, and Prachi Patankar explored the Anti-Defamation League’s influence on the Hindu American Foundation’s laundering of ethnonationalism as Hindu rights advocacy, and on the Asian American Foundation’s establishmentarian response to racism.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warnings: HIV/AIDS; Death; Homophobia; Narcotics.

Five things to look at:

• has written for his newsletter about the recent visit to New Zealand by Zdravka Bušić, a Croatian MP with links to that country’s far right, and the historical role of members of the Croatian diaspora in sustaining fascist politics following the defeat of the Ustaše in the Second World War.

• Writing for +972 Magazine, Oren Yiftachel has argued that the war being waged by Israel is the logical outcome of the supremacist vision at the heart of its political project, including destruction of Gaza, colonisation of the West Bank, conflict with its neighbours, and suppression of its own domestic dissidents.

• In this piece for his newsletter, examined the Trump campaign and its allies’ compiling of lists of allegedly treacherous public servants, the chilling effect this dangerous targeting wreaks, and the way its abuse of freedom of information requests impairs public administration.

• has taken a formalist approach to analysing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in this post for her newsletter, exploring the director’s usage of rich colour and distorted perspective to evoke its detective protagonist John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson’s increasingly precarious psychological state.

• In Public Books, Paul M. Renfro reflected on teenager Ryan White’s death in 1990 from AIDS contracted via haemophilia treatment, and how White’s public status as ‘innocent’ victim helped secure investment in treatment, but also legitimised continued demonisation of gay men and drug users as undeserving of support.

Five things to listen to:

• Imogen Saunders spoke to Douglas Guilfoyle and Ntina Tzouvala on the Called to the Bar podcast about the UK’s agreement to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and how international legal conventions facilitated this deal, but also the exclusion of the Chagossians themselves from the negotiations.

• This episode of the Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast featured in dialogue with Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new book The Message: Writing and the World, Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians, and the need for moral clarity in rejecting such injustice in the face of the logic of legitimising arguments.

• Adam Smith discussed the 1992 US Presidential Election on the The Last Best Hope podcast with guests Bruce Schulman and Dan Rowe, including Bill Clinton’s successful reinvention of the Democrats and establishmentarian incumbent George H. W. Bush’s discomfort in following Ronald Reagan at the White House.

• On the podcast, Miranda Melcher interviewed Peter C. Kunze about his book Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance, and the role of creative talent drawn from the world of theatre in reviving the studio’s fortunes and reinventing the animated musical.

• Also on , Roland Clark spoke to Bruce Gordon about his book The Bible: A Global History, the emergence of canonical single volumes from the scriptures used by different groups of early Christians, and the Bible’s later deployment both in justifying and subsequently resisting colonisation.

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Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warnings: Anti-migrant violence

Five things to look at:

• Melvyn Ingleby, Ylenia Gostoli, May Bulman, and Mesut Tatuz have written for New Lines Magazine about the inhumane treatment and irregular deportation of Syrian and other refugees in Turkey, and the complicity of the European Union in financing and facilitating Turkey’s hard-line turn in this area of policy.

• has written this piece for his newsletter about Nikolai Berdayev’s notion of an apocalyptic messianic strain in Russian political thought, bestowing different transformative missions upon its people, and its significance to understanding contemporary Russian politics.

• In this post for his newsletter, has written about the Gulhane Edict of 1839, the domestic and international political considerations that facilitated its passing, the liberal and Islamic intellectual currents that influenced it, the dissent it provoked, and its contested legacy today.

• Kushtrim Istrefi and Luca Pasquet have blogged for EJIL: Talk! about Albania’s plans to create a microstate for the Bektashi Muslim Sufi order in Tirana, obstacles to its establishment in domestic and international law, and the extent to which Vatican City offers a parallel through which to examine its prospects.

• Nilab Saeedi interviewed Marinos Sariyannis for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog about the disenchantment of Ottoman thought from the late seventeenth century, the persistence and evolution of different divinatory practices, and the underlying social conditions that underpinned these changes.

Five things to listen to:

• On the Called to the Bar podcast, Juliette McIntyre, Tamsin Phillipa Paige, and Aoife O’Donoghue discussed proposals for reform of the United Nations Security Council, and the inherent limitations of such a programme when the UNSC was established to shore up the Allies’ dominance after the Second World War.

• Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz reflected on The Apprentice, the new film portraying Donald Trump’s early rise in the world of real estate, for the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, our broader contemporary concern with origin stories, and the extent of their explicatory value in politics.

• Michael O. Johnston interviewed Lisa-Jo Van den Scott about her book Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls on the podcast, the imposition of colonialism on indigenous people in Nunavut through domestic architecture, and the agency they express in reinventing those spaces.

• On the BBC World Service’s The Fifth Floor programme, Selin Girit joined Faranak Amidi to explain the symbolism of the ‘wolf salute’, its association with Turkey’s far-right ‘Grey Wolves’ movement, and why several states have clamped down on both the organisation and the gesture among their Turkish populations.

• Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant examined the place of the city in animated and fantasy films on this instalment of the Fantasy/Animation podcast’s ‘Footnotes’ series, the inherently fictionalising nature of representing real urban environments on screen, and their role in our relationships with those spaces.

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Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.

Content warnings: The Holocaust; Ethnic cleansing; Death; Violence.

Five things to look at:

• Heather Sullivan reflected for Good Authority about how the bipartisan consensus in the US on hardening border security has increased the perilousness of the journey made by migrants, and has seen Central American countries like Mexico and Panama effectively enforcing US border policies for financial gain.

• Silke Hackenesch has written for the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog about the activism of journalist Mabel Grammer, who campaigned after the Second World War for African American families to adopt biracial children born in Germany to Black servicemen and local women.

• In this post for his newsletter, ruminates on the narrow purview of Eastern European nationalist elites who have allied with the West against Russian imperialism, ostensibly as champions of liberalism, only to become increasingly imperialist after gaining statehood.

• Writing for his newsletter, has discussed how the absence of effective metropolitan governance in Nigerian cities beyond its capitals of Abuja and Lagos undermines the country’s ability to use its relatively dispersed urban expansion to generate higher economic growth.

• Giovanni Pigni has written for New Lines Magazine about the way Russia has enlisted its prison population to fight its war in Ukraine, exploiting their predilection for violence, desire for freedom and fulfilment, and unquestioning patriotism, and deploying them as fodder for its most lethal missions.

Five things to listen to:

• On the Polar Geopolitics podcast, host Eric Paglia spoke with Ingrid Medby about the ways in which a range of international actors mobilise claims to a form of Arctic identity to legitimise their involvement in the region’s governance, and the ways these draw upon ideas of both geography and temporality.

• Kerry Anderson interviewed Daniel Chardell for the Horns of a Dilemma podcast about the need to locate the first Gulf War within the context of the end of the Cold War, and how the decline of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance to American influence fuelled Saddam Hussein’s paranoid worldview.

• On the The Fire These Times podcast, and discuss what it means to consider the Holocaust and the Nakba in conjunction with each other, and how Israeli state memory of the former erases other traditions of its commemoration and facilitates the forms of settler colonialism it was rooted in.

• Jen Hoyer spoke on the podcast to Lisa Fletcher and Elizabeth Leane about their book Space, Place, and Bestsellers: Moving Books, and about exploring the geographies and parameters of the bestseller category, combining analysis of these texts with the spaces in which they are sold.

• On this episode of the podcast, and guests discussed the inevitability and necessity of presentism in historical research, and the shortcomings of forms of activism among historians that draw them closer to liberal elites while ignoring the material conditions harming their discipline.

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