Carl Wilson referees the poptimism wars & explores nostalgia, protest & world-building in music

Katherine Stewart decrypts how Christian fundamentalism is seizing power in the United States

Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the documentary feature, God & Country. I wanted to speak with Katherine to talk about the United States' evangelical bet on Christianity as a means of galvanizing a divided nation, and her research into the ways that this has been leveraging by the elite as part of a movement for securing minority rule. The Power Worshippers, our main focus here, looks at how "the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.... [T]his is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. #fourthofjuly #july4 #independenceday #americanpolitics #uspolitics #christianity #christianfundamentalism #evangelicalism #dominionism #christiannation #christiannationalism #whitenationalism

Alex Marland scrutinizes party loyalty in Canada as a program of coerced consent

What are the politics of party loyalty in Canada? Why do politicians follow the leader and rarely rock the boat? What solutions could exist for strengthening Canada's democracy by injecting more dissent into the system? Alongside Mireille Lalancette and Jared J. Wesley, Alex Marland is the author of No “I” in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, a book that offers in-depth analysis of the social and cultural forces that inform party loyalty in Canadian government. Their book is essential reading for anyone that wants to understand why political change is so rare in Canada. What it reveals is that ossification and pious attachment to the ruling party are the rules of the game, that Canada is, in many ways, constitutively allergic to political change at the highest level of governing power. Alex Marland is Acadia University’s inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership. A Professor of Canadian politics, he has authored or edited over a dozen books, including the acclaimed Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control (2016) and Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada (2020). #canada [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/canada] #canadianpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/canadianpolitics] #canadaday [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/canadaday] #nationalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/nationalism] #partypolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/partypolitics] #partisanpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/partisanpolitics] #politics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/politics] #politicalloyalty [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/politicalloyalty] #partyloyalty [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/partyloyalty] #liberalparty [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/liberalparty] #trudeau [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/trudeau] #justintrudeau [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/justintrudeau] #pierrepoilievre [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/pierrepoilievre] #markcarney [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/markcarney] #leadership [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/leadership] #politicalleadership [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/politicalleadership]

Carl Wilson referees the poptimism wars & explores nostalgia, protest & world-building in music

Carl Wilson is a Canadian music critic who has written for many publications including The Globe and Mail. He writes wonderful long thought-pieces on music for Slate. Best known for his classic book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, published in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Wilson unpacks the claims of that book in terms of contemporary trends in music. Let's Talk About Love is putatively a critique of Celine Dion's bestselling album Let's Talk About Love, but it's more accurately an act of self-reflection and cultural analysis that gives a robust language for understanding what's at stake when we litigate taste. Follow Carl at https://carlwilson.substack.com/ [https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqblBvMkZPNVBtOWZXYjVnS2g4bldGLUIwSmE0Z3xBQ3Jtc0tuS0lOcUtUSUpSdGFMWklSbzlyUGY1LVZGTGFZMWMtQTBZSDRjLVY5UG9fODdlTF9rWVVGbWthdW54QkFHZ2FLcUVjZjVuZ2dyc2JEcHN0QkRZVEM0QTVfN1c1QVpwalI5SEJLeEdQd3pkVTVYdm9KZw&q=https%3A%2F%2Fcarlwilson.substack.com%2F&v=T0oG6P7dPiI] 🎸

Marta Figlerowicz thinks Maria Janion’s political insights are key to navigating our present chaos

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child. Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos. Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism

Alexander Gallant & Joel Plaskett harmonize on concept albums & finding the lyrical in everyday life

Alexander Gallant and Joel Plaskett are songwriters based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have both written extraordinary records that take genre and move it a few degrees to the left to make something unexpected. In this conversation, we talk about Plaskett's foundational relationship to the Halifax Pop Explosion of the 1990s, the music that made that scene, and the ways that sacred spaces for musicmaking and performance solidify a sense of place. Joel was a member of Thrush Hermit in the 1990s, but has written and produced albums solo and with The Emergency in the decades since. Alexander is a prolific folk songwriter with a remarkable new album called The Prince of Birchy Head that is replete with meditations on being pulled madly out in opposite directions: toward love, away from greed, but also toward struggle and away from beauty. We chat about where their inspiration comes from, the pitfalls of social media, the power of working collectively to build and protect vitality at the local level, and how their paths converge at 45 Portland Street in gritty, gorgeous downtown Dartmouth. When you hear a song that speaks to you, listen again. If it stays with you, it pays to wonder why. #songwriting [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/songwriting] #writing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/writing] #creativity [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/creativity] #inspiration [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/inspiration] #music [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/music] #musicians [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/musicians] #producing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/producing] #sound [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sound] #popculture [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/popculture] #art [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/art] #mcluhan [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/mcluhan] #novascotia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/novascotia] #dartmouth [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/dartmouth] #halifax [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/halifax] #livemusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/livemusic] #historyofmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/historyofmusic] #localmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/localmusic]