Stop, Look, and Listen #31
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.
Five things to look at:
Ishita Singupta writes for New Lines Magazine about the relationship between the Bollywood film industry and the Indian government under Narendra Singh Modi, its projection of triumphalist, Islamophobic narratives about India and its history, and the simultaneous marginalisation of filmmakers critical of Modi.
In this post for his Pages and Frames newsletter, Daniel Moran examines both Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Color of Money and Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film adaptation of it, the significant differences between their plots, but also the similarities in their treatment of re-finding purpose in older age.
Eric Schliesser nescio13 has written for his DigressionsImpressions newsletter about John Bright’s ‘prudential liberalism’, and his critique of Britain’s efforts to maintain a balance of power through participation in the Crimean War, which he saw as inimical to the spread of free trade and extension of democracy.
Tim Cresswell reflects in this piece for his Place Matters newsletter on speed limits and mobility, their current salience in political discourse, and the broader inequalities in who is permitted to travel at what speeds and how far, and who is made to bear the costs of that travel, which underpin this debate.
Adam Tooze has written this post for his Chartbook newsletter about how a new international monetary order emerged in the wake of the First World War as a result of the US’s new hegemony, and the way it shaped macroeconomic debates and policy on issues of debt, industrial relations, inflation, and exchange rates.
Five things to listen to:
Malin Hay talks to James Butler on the London Review of Books podcast about his recent review of Marilynne Robinson’s book Reading Genesis, the tensions and moral challenges that the Book of Genesis poses to the contemporary reader, and Robinson’s efforts to situate it as a foundational text in Western literature.
On the New Books Network podcast, Amir Engel interviews Shaul Magid about his book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, the way he developed his conception of antisemitism and rejection of liberalism in the 1960s US, and subsequently transferred it to Israeli politics.
Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley discuss the sports film on this episode of the Why Theory? podcast, its centring of sporting competition and the pursuit of the impossible, and the way as a genre it frames the relationship between the individual and collective and treats questions of class, race, and gender.
Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell are joined by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld on the Know Your Enemy podcast to discuss the increasing detachment of the US’s two main political parties from the communities that once sustained them, and how this facilitated the rise of the Trumpian right.
On the Hagley History Hangouts podcast, Roger Horrowitz interviews Sean H. Vanatta about his book Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control, and the way the breakdown of a regionalised banking structure facilitated the emergence of credit cards, but also led to fraud and indebtedness.
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