The Week 21 Listicle
Activist reading and listening
Regular readers will know I’m an avid podcast fan. This week I’m shouting out some of my favourite audio shows, as well as a few other newsletters with activist themes. Happy reading and listening, and happy weekend.
1. Animal rights: what's pride got to do with it?
Last month was Pride month, and Jasmin Singer had some great thoughts on the interconnections between animal rights and LGBTQ+ activism over on her newsletter Jasmin’s Jargon. Take-away line: it’s about boycotting cruelty. Might sound trite, but it’s not a bad maxim for writing and activism.
2. Pardon my French: Canadaland on the N-word
Anyone who wants to keep up with news from Canada could do worse than subscribing to the Canadaland podcast. Each week host Jesse Brown and his guests discuss how the Canadian media is covering key events around the country. Last week Brown and journalist Emilie Nicolas discussed the recent controversies surrounding the use of the N-word on French-language radio in Québec. Nicolas’s account of the word in the work of the late writer and member of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) Pierre Vallière, and its subsequent interpretation and translation, is a masterful example of intellectual history.
3. Alicia Kennedy on veganism
Trigger warning: in addition to podcasts and substacks, this edition of the listicle is heavy on veganism. Try this one out for size: “No one likes vegans, except other vegans, though sometimes even that is debatable.” I’m not an avid reader of food blogs, but Kennedy is a stellar writer and has lots of interesting stuff to say about life, love, politics – and yes, plant-based eating.
4. Anthony Anaxagorou on the London Writers’ Salon Podcast
Much of this newsletter has been written in the company of hundreds of other writers, courtesy of the online morning writers’ hour hosted by the London Writers’ Salon. It’s a space of support and inspiration, where we write and share our work, tips and ideas. Now LSW has a podcast, featuring a range of writers of different genres. I’m a big fan of the radical poetry of Anthony Anaxagorou, so loved this interview. Anaxagorou is a spoken as well as written-word poet, and at the end of his episode he gifts the listender with a reading-performance of this poem "After the Formalities".
5. Drugs on Substack
My latest post is on the language we use every day to talk and write about different kinds of drugs. I follow a couple of newsletters on drugs: The Microdose, which features discussions and interviews about psychadelics, and On Drugs, about (bad) laws around cannabis and other drugs in the US. The tide is turning on drugs, and not in the direction the UK government wants.
6. "The Politics of Love": Philip McKibbin on Sentientism
If you’ve read any of my posts or writing on veganism, you’ll know that one of the issues I grapple with is the centrality of sentientism in Western animal rights writing and activism, and the way vegans in the West can engage ethically with human-animal relations in different Indigenous societies. So I really appreciated and learned lots from Sentientism host Jamie Woodhouse’s interview with Philip McKibbin, a writer-activist of Māori-European from Aotearoa New Zealand. You can listen to my own discussion with Woodhouse last year here.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
In case you were beginning to think I only get my ideas in bite-size pieces, for my summer reading I finally picked up my late father’s 1960 paperback copy of Arendt’s classic. There is so much to say about this book, written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and its interpretation of European politics and history. Let me just say this: it is some of the best writing I have read in a long time. There are many, many reasons to read and reread Arendt in the early third millennium, and for anyone who things that complex ideas and history can only be written in dreary and convoluted academic prose, this is the book for you.