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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: Sexual assault.
Five things to look at
Tim Cresswell mused during a trip to Vancouver on what it means to produce and eat ‘local’ food, in this piece for his Place Matters newsletter, conceptualising this less in terms of physical proximity, than of a set of relationships shaped by ethics and attention, and by a commitment to place that extends beyond one’s own environs.
For his Chartbook newsletter, Adam Tooze reflected on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel Magic Mountain, and its setting of an early-20th century Swiss sanatorium as metaphor for both the fragmented way modern time is experience, and for history’s reimposition on those divorced from it in the looming spectre of the First World War.
Sergey Eledinov wrote for African Arguments about how the transition of the Wagner Group’s presence to the ostensibly Russian state-controlled Africa Corps in the Central African Republic masks the service’s increasing autonomy, having substituted many of the the host state’s functions and embedded itself in local networks.
Emmanuel Osayande discussed, in this post for Opinio Juris, how drafters of Nigeria’s nascent constitution actively drew upon and translated emerging international norms around self-determination and rights into their own legal order in the 1950s, to address issues around federal bargaining, minority concerns, and religious pluralism.
For his All Old Strange Things newsletter, Francis Young considered Christianity’s historical ramifications for pagan gods, arguing that pre-Enlightenment Christians perceived them as inferior deities displaced by Christ rather than non-existent, thus redeeming their own pre-Christian ancestors and the Classical culture they venerated.
Five things to listen to
On the Why Theory podcast, Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan explored the nature of screen adaptations of literary works, the way film strips away most of literary characters’ interiority, and the need for good adaptations to have a unique perspective on their source material, often related to the specificity of film as a medium.
Andromachi Sophocleous and Kemal Baykallı reflected on the Nicosia Uncut podcast on outgoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ announcement of planned talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders, guarantors Greece, Turkey, and Britain, and the UN, amid continued inertia on the island over resolving its de facto partition.
On the Called to the Bar podcast, Juliette McIntyre and Douglas Guilfoyle spoke about Karim Khan’s recent dismissal as International Criminal Court Prosecutor following an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct, the process of his removal and its shortcomings, and the episode’s implications for the ICC as an institution.
Miranda Melcher interviewed Monalisa Adhikari on the New Books Network about her book A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management, objectives underpinning India’s and China’s approaches to peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, and local actors’ responses to their involvement.
Ryan Gingeras joined host Faisal Al Yafai on New Lines Magazine’s The Lede podcast to discuss the significance of organised crime as paradigm both for state formation and how state function is popularly understood, as well as how state prohibition of certain activities creates the very spaces in which organised crime is able to flourish.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Silence of the Lambs (2002)
A four-part docusoap about farmers affected by the 2001 Foot-and-Mouth Disease outbreak captured both a strong sense of pride in family and community, and fierce hostility to the government.
The Secret Agent
This political thriller draws upon motifs of carnival and film genre to evoke the paranoia, lawlessness, and inequality of 1970s Brazil.
‘It’s Time We Were Trying Prosperity for a While’
Pursuing a literary career while suffering with persistent tuberculosis, Dashiell Hammett’s 1920s correspondence negotiated both his being disabled and his financial insecurity.