Stop, Look, and Listen #39
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: Homophobia; HIV/AIDS; Death; Bereavement; The Holocaust.
Five things to look at:
- revisited Julian Clary’s joke at the 1993 British Comedy Awards about ‘fisting Norman Lamont’, in this post for his Utopian Drivel newsletter, situating it within the the upsurge in homophobia amid the AIDS pandemic, and the Conservatives’ stoking of moral panics to rescue their flagging popularity.
Writing for the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’s blog, Kevin Schürer discussed the longevity of England’s North-South divide, illustrating iterations of its existence dating back to the Roman period, through to its more modern manifestations in trends like migratory patterns.
In this piece for her
newsletter, Melissa Florer-Bixler urged American churches primarily concerned with overcoming electoral polarisation among their congregations to learn from the failure of the Confessing Churches of Germany in the 1930s to effectively resist the ascendancy of Nazism.- wrote this post for her newsletter about the marking of both Armistice Day and Martinmas in November in the Low Countries, and the recurring significance of the intersection of these two very different occasions as an opportunity for peace activism.
In this post for the
newsletter, reflected on the centrality of loss to the public and private experience of the First World War, and the procedures and paraphernalia pertaining to dead soldiers’ loved ones’ experiences of bereavement, and to their subsequent commemoration
Five things to listen to:
This episode of the Cited podcast explored the long evolution of the Democrats’ economic approach over the past forty years, from the Clinton administration’s abandonment of ‘sunset’ for ‘sunrise’ industries, to the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild the party’s electoral base through its new industrial strategy.
Tom Leeman spoke with Michal Ovádek about the political career of Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico on the The Hated and the Dead podcast, and his ideological trajectory from seeming social democratic luminary to an increasingly authoritarian leader surrounded by allegations of corruption.
On this episode of the
podcast, and discussed the parallels between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the American and Turkish liberal-lefts’ failure to mount an effective response to them, as well as the implications of Trump’s electoral win for US-Turkey relations.Ran Zwigenberg interviewed Anne Berg on
about her book Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, and the interconnection between the Nazi regime’s singular focus on waste reduction and recycling, and its connection to its genocidal, expansionary project, and disregard for human life.- podcast, and guests examined the long history of philanthropic capitalism as an insufficient basis for financing historically Black colleges and universities, and its connection to the contemporary financialization and exploitation of those same institutions.
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