Stop, Look, and Listen #40
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:
- wrote this post for his newsletter on how the community that once existed on Twitter has wholly reassembled on BlueSky, and why arguments BlueSky is an echo chamber miss the point that the migration of ideologically repelled users is Twitter’s rather than Bluesky’s problem.
In this post for his
newsletter, compares the forms of liberal political epistemology present in the work of Walter Lippmann and Raymond Aron, and the implications of their concern with the limits of political knowledge for governance and ethics respectively.- newsletter, has revisited the Coen Brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man, and its reinterpretation of the themes of the Book of Job through its the prism of a middle-aged Jewish man in 1960s Minnesota, struggling to come to terms with God’s will and the meaning of life.
Mihaela Mihai and Camil Ungureanu wrote for the London School of Economics’ EUROPP blog about the Alliance for the Union of Romanians and its singular brand of far-right populism, concerned with the perceived economic colonisation of Romania, and drawing on both Orthodox Christianity and environmentalism.
- reflected, in this post for her Unmapped Storylands newsletter, on the centrality of immigrant families’ interconnected experiences and of intergenerational trauma in her novels, and on the importance of writers and poets as memory-keepers of their societies, particularly where democracy is weak.
Five things to listen to:
On the
podcast, Elisa Prosperetti interviewed Samuel Fury Charles Daly about his book Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire, and the ideological centrality of militarism as an experience and a mode of social mobilisation that drove coups in Nigeria and other postcolonial African states.Andromachi Sophocleous and Kemal Baykalli reflected on the proposed multiparty talks over the future of Cyprus, on this episode of Nicosia Uncut, as well as the likely implications of Donald Trump’s election as US President for Greek-Turkish relations generally and for the Cyprus conflict more specifically.
Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman were joined by Jamieson Webster on the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Radio Hour podcast to discuss Sigmund Freud’s neglected psychoanalytical interpretation of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, as well as the value of psychoanalysis for interpreting contemporary US politics.
- spoke with Becca Lewis on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast about the role of right-wing figures such as George Gilder and Newt Gingrich in shaping nascent American internet policy in the 1990s, and its significance as a key precursor to the contemporary right-wing turn in Silicon Valley.
On Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast,
and Cameron Abadi examined Germany’s flawed recent economic trajectory, the implications of the likely election of Friedrich Merz as its next Chancellor, and the consequences of Angela Merkel’s fateful decisions during her lengthy stint in the role.
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