Stop, Look, and Listen #34
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 warnings: Islamophobia; Transphobia.
Five things to look at:
- has written for Balkan Diskurs about the traumatic legacies of post-partitionist violence in Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and peace activists’ efforts to overcome competing ethnic narratives of these countries’ histories in order to build a durable collective identity rooted in shared struggle.
In this post for his
newsletter, explored how Narendra Modi presents yoga as a secular exercise in India’s diplomacy towards Muslim states, while denying this policy’s Hindu nationalist underpinnings as he demonises India’s own Muslim minority for not embracing the activity.Robyn Huang has written for New Lines Magazine about third-gender identities in French Polynesia, and how the nuances of those identities, the legacies of colonialism, and the size and religiosity of individual islands shape the extent to which holders of those identities are accepted by their families and wider society.
- wrote this post for his newsletter about how John Rawls’s experiences in the Second World War compelled him to abandon the theological underpinnings of his Episcopalian upbringing, and ambitions of joining the seminary, to pursue philosophy instead.
Writing for his digressionsimpressions newsletter, Eric Schliesser (
) examined how the Federalist Papers used the Achaean League of Ancient Greece as a model for a new federalism based on common foreign policy and laws, which could be implemented in the nascently independent United States.
Five things to listen to:
- podcast, and guests reflected on how Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age portrayed the enclosure of the American commons, and sought out a possible political model for American society despite its misgivings about human nature.
On the
podcast, spoke to about the film career of Nicolas Cage, his early efforts to escape the shadow of his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, and how a combination of artistic integrity and material circumstances shaped his idiosyncratic selection of film roles.On this episode of the
interviewed about her book Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia, and how the fragile position of economic elites in countries like Indonesia and China prompted them to pursue short-term self-enrichment.- and Cameron Abadi discussed the implications of the American Federal Reserve’s much anticipated interest rate cut, on this episode of Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, as well as how Winston Churchill’s worldview influenced his economic decision-making during the Second World War.
Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley examined the trajectory of the horror movie between the 1920s and the 1960s on the Why Theory? podcast, including the influence of German expressionism, the shift from depicting the monster to the monstrous, and the question of whether its is a fundamentally reactionary genre.
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