Stop, Look, and Listen #42
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: Ethnic cleansing; The Holocaust.
Five things to look at:
Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar have written for Protean Magazine about the real estate ideology underpinning Donald Trump’s outlandish proposals for Gaza, and its roots in longstanding connecting ideas about property and sovereignty, now shorn of the legitimating narratives underpinning previous imperial projects.
In this post for her F*cking Capitalism newsletter, Hannah Forsyth meditated upon the film Conclave, and how its depiction of the Vatican navigating challenges of corruption, extremism, and succession speak to a misplaced liberal faith in the virtues of professionalism and the durability of institutions.
Francis Young wrote this piece for his All Old Strange Things newsletter about sacred significances historically invested in trees and forests, the limited surviving traces of such practices, and the value of long-lived flora and ecological spaces beyond the meanings humans have relatively recently invested in them.
Writing for his Observing Japan newsletter, Tobias Harris explored the implications of several recent domestic and international political shifts for Japanese democracy, including the weakening of the Liberal Democratic Party, the partial recovery of opposition parties, and changes in US foreign policy.
In this post for his digressionsimpressions’s Substack, Eric Schliesser (nescio13) reflected upon the shortcomings of an international human rights regime that does not centre war prevention, and the challenges posed by Bertrand Russell’s agonistic understanding of politics to the prospect of preventing violent conflict.
Five things to listen to:
On Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast, producer Max Freedman explored the story of Jerry Lewis’s lost 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried, and the intrigue and infamy it provoked, within the context of Lewis’s then declining career, and the near absence up until that point of the Holocaust from Hollywood cinema.
Annika Brockschmidt joined Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub on the In Bed with the Right podcast to discuss the recent German elections, electoral fragmentation caused by declining traditional voting habits, and the failure by different parties to inhibit the rise of Alternative für Deutschland by tacking right themselves.
Stephen Pimpare interviewed Timothy P. R. Weaver on the New Books Network podcast about his new book Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, and the competing neoliberal, law-and-order conservative, and egalitarian imperatives that have shaped the city’s politics since the 1970s.
Franceso Belcastro and Guy Burton were joined by Jonathan Wilson on The FootPol Podcast to reflect upon the global history of football tactics, their relationship to broader cultural and political developments, and the potential role of anti-technocratic politics in fuelling a turn away from possession football.
On this episode of the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast, host Peter Korchnak examined the history of Yugoslavia’s role in the Non-Aligned Movement, the ideological and pragmatic underpinning of its anticolonialism, and its support for postcolonial states and liberation movements in Burma, Algeria, and Palestine.
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