Stop, Look, and Listen #37
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: HIV/AIDS; Death; Homophobia; Narcotics.
Five things to look at:
Byron Clark has written for his Feijoa Dispatch newsletter about the recent visit to New Zealand by Zdravka Bušić, a Croatian MP with links to that country’s far right, and the historical role of members of the Croatian diaspora in sustaining fascist politics following the defeat of the Ustaše in the Second World War.
Writing for +972 Magazine, Oren Yiftachel has argued that the war being waged by Israel is the logical outcome of the supremacist vision at the heart of its political project, including destruction of Gaza, colonisation of the West Bank, conflict with its neighbours, and suppression of its own domestic dissidents.
In this piece for his Can We Still Govern? newsletter, Don Moynihan examined the Trump campaign and its allies’ compiling of lists of allegedly treacherous public servants, the chilling effect this dangerous targeting wreaks, and the way its abuse of freedom of information requests impairs public administration.
Vaughn Joy has taken a formalist approach to analysing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in this post for her Review Roulette newsletter, exploring the director’s usage of rich colour and distorted perspective to evoke its detective protagonist John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson’s increasingly precarious psychological state.
In Public Books, Paul M. Renfro reflected on teenager Ryan White’s death in 1990 from AIDS contracted via haemophilia treatment, and how White’s public status as ‘innocent’ victim helped secure investment in treatment, but also legitimised continued demonisation of gay men and drug users as undeserving of support.
Five things to listen to:
Imogen Saunders spoke to Douglas Guilfoyle and Ntina Tzouvala on the Called to the Bar podcast about the UK’s agreement to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and how international legal conventions facilitated this deal, but also the exclusion of the Chagossians themselves from the negotiations.
This episode of the Jewish Currents’ On the Nose podcast featured Peter Beinart in dialogue with Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new book The Message: Writing and the World, Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians, and the need for moral clarity in rejecting such injustice in the face of the logic of legitimising arguments.
Adam Smith discussed the 1992 US Presidential Election on the The Last Best Hope podcast with guests Bruce Schulman and Dan Rowe, including Bill Clinton’s successful reinvention of the Democrats and establishmentarian incumbent George H. W. Bush’s discomfort in following Ronald Reagan at the White House.
On the New Books Network podcast, Miranda Melcher interviewed Peter C. Kunze about his book Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance, and the role of creative talent drawn from the world of theatre in reviving the studio’s fortunes and reinventing the animated musical.
Also on New Books Network, Roland Clark spoke to Bruce Gordon about his book The Bible: A Global History, the emergence of canonical single volumes from the scriptures used by different groups of early Christians, and the Bible’s later deployment both in justifying and subsequently resisting colonisation.
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