Stop, Look, and Listen #24
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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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: Homophobia.
The past week’s recommended podcasts and articles, grouped thematically, on the topics of:
The UK General Election.
Political fictions.
Digital futures.
Moral panics and culture wars.
The UK General Election
James Butler reflects in this piece for the LRB Blog on Rishi Sunak calling an election despite his party being so badly behind in the polls, as well as on the dominant Labour right’s continued determination to ruthlessly wield control over the party.
Writing for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush examines the unrealistic nature of both parties’ proposed programmes, given the challenges facing Britain’s next government, and the conditions that enable both to put these agendas forward regardless.
Phil Burton-Cartledge makes the case in Jacobin that the Conservatives’ reliance on a fragile, ageing electoral coalition has left them vulnerable to the historical defeat they are now facing, exacerbated by the decisions made by Sunak and his predecessors.
Colm Murphy and Patrick Diamond argue in this article for The Guardian that Labour’s promise of fiscal discipline is justifiable in relation to both the current economic climate and the party’s ideological inheritance, but only if combined with a bolder approach to taxation.
Chaminda Jayanetti writes for Bloomberg on how Labour’s looming likely landslide masks the shallowness of the party’s support, which could leave them vulnerable to voters deserting them en masse in the longer run.
Also in Bloomberg, Morgan Jones warns that Keir Starmer’s approach to party management could taint his and the party’s reputation, and leave him short of internal support once in government.
Political fictions
Rowan Wilson reflects, in this article for Public Books, on teaching Chaucer’s fourteenth-century epic poem Troilus and Criseyde, and its depiction of human relations and emotions amid the siege of Troy, in the contemporary moment when Gaza is also being besieged.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 poem The Masque of Anarchy on the London Review of Books’ Close Readings podcast, and its scathing depiction of the political class in the wake of that year’s Peterloo Massacre, but also its optimism about the possibility of social transformation.
In Parts I and II of this episode of the Past Present Future podcast series on ‘Political Fictions’, David Runciman examines George Eliot’s 1872 novel Middlemarch, and its depiction of provincial town life four decades earlier, against the backdrop of large-scale socioeconomic, technological, and religious change.
Melvyn Bragg is joined by Laura Bradley, David Burnett, and Tom Kuhn on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme to discuss the life and work of the twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and how his commitment to Marxist politics shaped his efforts to revolutionise theatre as a cultural form.
Vaughn Joy writes for her Review Roulette newsletter about the 1988 film Cocktail, analysing Tom Cruise’s depiction of an aspiring would-be business entrepreneur moonlighting as a barman, within the broader context of the decade’s financial revolution and its cultural impact.
On the Novel Dialogue podcast, Min Hyoung Song interviews Egyptian-Canadian author Omar El Akkad about his novels American War and What Strange Paradise and their treatment of themes of climate change and the geopolitical relationship between the West and the Middle East.
Digital futures
Dave Karpf writes for his The Future, Now and Then newsletter about how – despite hyperbole about the transformative potential of new technologies – the reality is that the speed of digital innovation and the scale of its impact on everyday life is lessening.
Miles Doyle writes for Commonweal Magazine about how US Congress needs to follow other countries’ lead and focus less attention and funding on advancing AI technology and more on regulating it and protecting the privacy of internet users
In this piece for his The Future of Everything newsletter, Tim Dunlop considers the significance of a new content deal between Google AI and News Corp, and what it signifies about the diminishing prospects for the as-yet unevenly realised democratisation of news and information in the online age.
Henry Farrell examines, in this post for his Programmable Mutter newsletter, how Google AI has increased Google’s visible culpability for the decreasing functionality of its search engine, in a way that could potentially damage its brand going forward.
Moral panics and culture wars
In the first episode of the new series of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast, ‘Gays against Briggs’, host Christina Cauterucci explores the flourishing of San Francisco’s gay community in the 1970s, and its activism in response to both official and street-level homophobia.
Writing for his Dreams in the Which House newsletter, Adrian Daub revisits Klaus Rainer Röhl’s 1995 book Deutsches Phrasenlexikon: Politische Korrektheit von A bis Z, and how its importation of anti-political correctness discourse from the US related to a more tacit project to rehabilitate Germany’s difficult history.
On the Ill Effects podcast, Ben Litherland and Richard McCulloch discuss the turn-of-the-twenty-first century battle between the Parents Television Council and the World Wrestling Federation over the latter’s influence on children, and its significance as a microcosm of tensions within the evolving American right.
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