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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 and bereavement; Alcoholism.
Five things to look at
For African Arguments, Francesco Rota laid out the incomplete, competing claims between Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and Tigray People’s Liberation Front on executive power in Tigray, and how the resulting stalemate, increasingly coercive modes of governance, and external interference is fuelling a slide back towards war.
Margrét Ann Thors reflected, in this post for Literary Hub, on writing her debut novel Freyja in dialogue with both her late Icelandic grandmother, through her own memories and her grandmother’s archive of correspondence, and her six-year-old daughter and her precocious valuation of, and practice in, writing.
Santiago Ospina Celis argued in New Lines Magazine that explanations of Latin America’s rightward shift centred on either the influence of Donald Trump or the failings of the region’s domestic left both overlook the rising sense of insecurity and pessimism among the lower middle-classes that far-right politicians have tapped into.
In this piece for Polyphony, Jennifer Wallis explored the analytical, ethical, and personal possibilities and challenges of writing history in conjunction with memoir, through the prism of researching the history of alcohol and its abuse from her own perspective as someone who grew up with an alcoholic parent.
Mairav Zonszein examined, for International Crisis Group, the prospective renewal of the long-term memorandum of understanding setting US military aid levels to Israel, and how declining domestic US support for Israel and crises in the Middle East point the way towards a new partnership based on less unconditional, more mutual support.
Five things to listen to
Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi and Mohammed Alsudairi welcomed Roy Bar Sadeh onto the New Books in the Indian Ocean World podcast to discuss how South Asian Muslims negotiated their categorisation as a minority, and participated in wider networks and communities, within the shifting late 19th and early 20th-century international order.
On the Thresholds podcast, Sean Guillory spoke to guest David Roediger about the process by which Eastern European migrants to the US came to be defined as white, how this related to questions of labour categorisation and wider Cold War geopolitics, and the continuing contingency of that whiteness under Donald Trump’s presidency.
Charles Lichfield joined Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast to explain the state of Russia’s war economy, its initial resilience following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and its now mounting challenges of a growing deficit, rising inflation, labour shortages, and the crowding out of its civil industries.
Andrada Fiscutean presented this episode of BBC World Service’s The Documentary on the entrepreneurial youths who built improvised local internet networks to supplement Bucharest’s limited telecommunications infrastructure in the late 1990s, laying the groundwork for post-communist Romania’s burgeoning digital sector.
Jessica Ann Levy interviewed Danielle Wiggins on the Who Makes Cents? podcast about her book Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism, and what the city illustrates about Black politicians’ role in the forging the ‘New Democrats’ through their embrace of neoliberal employment and welfare policies.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Do You Understand Where I’m Coming from?
Making sense of the way I do history necessarily involves shifting my gaze two thousand miles away from Britain to the small Mediterranean island where my grandparents were born.
Doubt (1991)
Jesus Jones’ breakthrough second album combines post-Cold War optimism, a rejection of moral certainties, and a multivalent response to postmodernity.
Dead Man’s Wire
A film that captures the economic discontents and ideological confrontations of 1970s America, albeit in ways that elide some of the dynamics at play in the real events it is based upon.