Stop, Look, and Listen #29
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: Racism; Queerphobia; AIDS; Bereavement.
Five things to look at:
Massimo Faggioli writes for Commonweal about the far-right administration of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, its complex relationship with a Pope and Italian Catholic Church ostensibly at odds with her government’s position on migration and the constitution, and why the Vatican has not opposed her more strongly than it has.
In this post for his Back of Mind newsletter, Dan Davies writes about the concept of austerity and the damaging fiscal orthodoxy towards the issue of the government deficit, including how the damage done by the Truss/Kwarteng budget of 2022 has been misremembered to sustain support for this position.
Martin D. Brown discusses, in his On this and that, and the other newsletter, his recent trip to Riga, the Latvian capital’s ease with its cosmopolitan urbanism, and the way its complex history is borne out in its built heritage, including in the components of it that are best preserved and those that are neglected.
In this moving piece for his newsletter, Harry Stopes writes about becoming a father and the metaphors of transport that have helped him make sense of and contextualise the moment, as well as reflecting upon broader questions and representations of fatherhood and masculinity.
Writing for New Lines Magazine, Pablo Albarces reflects on what the video of Argentina’s national team singing a racist and queerphobic song about the France team, dating back to the 2022 World Cup, can tell us about the broader place of toxic whiteness and masculinity in Argentinian national culture.
Five things to listen to:
Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi discuss the economic legacy of Joe Biden’s presidency on this episode of the Ones and Tooze podcast, including those policies that have proven radically transformative and those that have been less impactful, and the extent to which this adds up to a genuine break with neoliberalism.
This episode of the BBC World Service’s Crowdscience programme, presented by Anand Jagatia, considers the way different languages are structured around and inculcate meaning through gender, the extent to which this tendency prefigures rigid thinking about gender, and ways in which it can be changed.
Pete Kunze talks to Kathleen Loock on New Books Network about her book Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes, Sequels, and Franchises Shape Industry and Culture, and the way in which debates around the alleged unoriginality of contemporary Hollywood film overlook earlier waves of remakes and sequels.
On the BBC World Service’s Lives Less Ordinary programme, Mobeen Azhar interviews Jason Evans about how his father’s death from AIDS impacted his childhood and motivated him to campaign for truth and justice for all those who, like his father, were infected with the disease via contaminated blood products.
Daniel Moran and Mike Takla discuss the 2004 film Collateral on the Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics podcast, the performances of Jamie Foxx as taxi driver Max and Tom Cruise as hitman Vincent, and the way in which the film and Vincent’s chilling philosophy encapsulate the cultural changes of the twenty-first century.
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Exactly! If you give us a batch of films you like, we can see if we did them already or do one in the future.
Thanks for the shout-out!