Stop, Look, and Listen #28
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: Animal cruelty; Racism.
Five things to look at:
Joshua Levkowitz writes for New Lines Magazine about the Turkish government’s plans to cull stray city dogs and the vociferous opposition this has attracted, within the context of the cultural divides that shape contemporary Turkish politics and the history of urban human-canine relations in the country.
In this article for Dollars & Sense, Nick French discusses the extent to which ‘Bidenomics’ has marked a significant break from neoliberalism, and why that has not necessarily resulted in the more broadly impactful outcomes across the US that it might have done, not least in the absence of a more powerful labour movement.
Ann Pettifor warns in this post for her System Change newsletter that the UK’s new Labour government’s vision of ‘de-risking’ capitalism will detach businesses’ actions from reward and culpability in a way anathema to the operation of free markets, while also being overly reliant on asset management firms.
Writing for the History Workshop blog, Costanza Bergo explores the Australian government’s symbolic recruitment of the shark to terrorise would-be migrants, its relationship with the role sharks played in the Atlantic slave trade, and the very different Australian response to shark attacks on white settlers.
In this piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lina Abascal reflects upon the history and politics of the Eurovision Song Contest, and the tensions over Israeli participation in this year’s competition amid the ongoing destruction of Gaza, as well as Eurovision’s obscurity in the US relative to its broader popularity.
Five things to listen to:
Michael Paarlberg joins host Dana El-Kurd on the The Fire These Times podcast to discuss the uneasy relationship between the Guatemalan government and the country’s gangs, the way the former relies on the latter’s violence to legitimise its authoritarian rule, and how this is exacerbated by US immigration policy.
Ellen E. Jones and Mark Kermode explore the dynamics of the Western on this episode of BBC Radio Four’s Screenshot, examining the myths of American history that the film genre traditionally embodied and celebrated, and the subsequent efforts of revisionist Westerns to deconstruct and re-examine those myths.
Ryan Tripp interviews Mark Peterson about his book The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865 for New Books Network, and how the city’s unique political economy gave it a strongly autonomous position within colonial America that subsequently eroded following independence.
On the International Crisis Group’s War & Peace podcast, Olga Oliker talks to Marko Prelec about the tense situation in the Western Balkans, given the threat of secession by Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Pristina’s efforts to re-establish its authority over Serb-dominated northern Kosovo.
Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell are joined by Suzanne Schneider on the Know Your Enemy podcast to talk about Israeli nationalist writer Yoram Hazony, the relationship between his illiberal, inegalitarian vision and the founding of the state of Israel, and its influence on the global national conservative movement.
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