Stop, Look, and Listen #40
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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:
Dave Karpf wrote this post for his The Future, Now and Then 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 The Archimedean Point newsletter, Cyril Hédoin 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.
Writing for his Pages and Frames newsletter, Daniel Moran 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.
Elif Shafak 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 New Books Network 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.
Paris Marx 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, Adam Tooze 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.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.
Thank you!