Stop, Look, and Listen #41
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 warning: Anti-Asian racism; Antisemitism; Misogyny.
Five things to look at:
Andrew Liu has written for N+1 about the long roots of Donald Trump’s tariff advocacy and anti-China rhetoric in his response to Japanese economic competition in the 1980s, as well as how lessons from Japan’s subsequent economic eclipse inform China’s present wariness of consumption-driven growth.
In this piece for his Shaul’s Substack newsletter, Shaul Magid has explored the roots of contests over the meaning of Antisemitism in terminology, history, and theology, and the way both religious and secular Jews have argued for and against the idea of Antisemitism as an eternal, transhistorical phenomenon.
Anna Zacharias has written for New Lines Magazine about both the historical Saint Brigid and her defiance of gender norms in sixth and seventh-century Ireland, and the saint’s continued potency as a feminist symbol in the country as it wrestles with the legacy of the Catholic Church’s role in the abuse of women.
In this post for his The end of times newsletter, Pavlos Roufos has reflected on labour lawyer Ernst Fraenkel’s theorisation of the interregnum period in 1930s Germany, when a kind of dual state operated amid the Nazis’ increasing grip on power, and its relevance to understanding our contemporary historical moment.
Eric Schliesser (nescio13) drew upon Nicolo Machiavelli’s writings, in this piece for his digressionsimpressions’s Substack, to explore why, despite the focus on anticorruption in the US Constitution, its lack of capacity for renewal has nonetheless allowed corruption to proliferate in its contemporary political system.
Five things to listen to:
Erik Voeten interviewed Ji Yeon Hong for the Good Authority podcast about the crisis in South Korean democracy following President Yun Sook Yeol’s failed coup last year, the deepening polarisation in South Korean society along gender lines, and the influence of American tropes on the Korean far right.
Gil Morejón, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, and William Paris examined the work of Karl Polanyi on What’s Left of Philosophy, his critique of the creeping marketisation and commodification of human life, and his rejection of what he saw as excessive economism in neoclassical and Marxist economic thought.
On this instalment of The American Vandal podcast, Matt Seybold and guests explored the influence of Advanced Placement programmes on the teaching of English and literature in American schools and universities, as well as addressing the need to encourage curiosity among students, and finance its indulgence.
Marc Kermode and Ellen E. Jones considered the continuing appeal of the hitman in film and television, in this episode of BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot, including the question of why professional contract killer are such figures of fascination, and the ideas about moral codes and gender that underpin their representation.
Kim Pernell discussed her book Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation with host Miranda Melcher on this episode of the New Books Network podcast, and the historical roots of regulators’ very different responses to similar banking crises in the US, Canada, and Spain.
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