Stop, Look, and Listen #63
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: Death.
Five things to look at
Beau Baumann dissected the reasoning behind unitary executive theory in American constitutional law for his Passing Political Time newsletter, arguing that the various historical precursors it references do not stand up to scrutiny, but that jurisprudential inertia and its apparent clarity are sustaining it beyond its intellectual shortcomings.
In this post for the Illiberalism Studies Program blog, Erin Lockwood argued that an ‘America First’ foreign policy always underpinned the liberal international order and its imperfections, and that the current US government’s postliberal foreign policy is better understood as ‘Trump First’, with debates over national interest marginalised.
For Bright Wall/Dark Room, Lindsey Romain evaluated Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day in relation to the director’s prior filmography, highlighting his latest film’s theme of radical empathy as a speculative leap in and of itself, and how the cynical response this has garnered in some quarters fails to grasp the political value of optimism.
Responding to mounting concern about indicators of declining US literacy levels in the digital era, Jeffrey Lawrence contrasted this situation with that of Spain for his Avenues of the Americas newsletter, where a state-supported literary ecosystem is sustaining rising levels of popular readership despite similar technological challenges.
Seth Cotlar reflected in his Rightlandia newsletter on the career of Bob Packwood, the moderate Republican former Senator for Oregon who died in June 2026, and how the far-right elements he considered an irrelevance early in his career increasingly challenged his incumbency and came to dominate the local party by the end of it.
Five things to listen to
Matt Seybold presented this episode of The American Vandal podcast, in which speakers at the ‘Modes of Reading Today’ Symposium at Berkley explored aspects of close reading as academic practice, including the nature of reading and interpreting texts, whether it defines literary studies as a field, and the significance of context.
In this two-part episode of The Next Picture-Show podcast, Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Tasha Robinson compared the 2010 film True Grit with recent release Supergirl, and their respective treatments of themes of wronged child heroines, lawless genre-defined worlds, and the relationship between justice and vengeance.
On the International Crisis Group’s The Horn podcast, Alan Boswell was joined by former US diplomat Payton Knopf to discuss rising tensions over Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the prospects of a resurgence of the conflict that raged there between 2020 and 2022, and the relationship between local and regional factors in fuelling hostilities.
Douglas Guilfoyle spoke to Ntina Tzouvala on the Called to the Bar podcast about her research on US Dollar hegemony as a crucial factor in shaping international law in areas such as jurisdiction and sovereign immunity, and the tensions between the US’s increasing leveraging of this influence and the interests of global capitalist actors.
Jonathan Wilson, Miguel Delaney, and James Horncastle reflected on the two World Cup semi-finals on the Libero podcast, and on how a close familiarity with their respective international set-ups and players has contributed to the success of the finalists’ respective coaches: Spain’s Luis de la Fuente, and Argentina’s Lionel Scaloni.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
The Making of the Political Economy of Post-War English Professional Football
English professional football had long functioned as a closed political economy, but changing circumstance after the Second World War resulted in its partial opening up.
The Apprentice
The depicted relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump links law, real estate, and politics, as well as establishing a lineage of the American right running from the 1950s to the present day.
Superman
The latest big-screen incarnation of the Man of Steel defies some dominant conventions of superhero movies, while concerning itself explicitly with corporate power, geopolitics, and polarisation.