Weekend Reading #1
Bowie's books, Elite athletes & Covid, Fintan O'Toole, Hyperpolitics, Twitter abuse, Greenflation, Irish history wars & a Brexit boom
Welcome to the first Fault Lines Weekend Reading newsletter.
Here I share some of the most interesting and diverting articles, reports and social media that have come across my radar recently.
I hope you enjoy it and if you do, please share it with a friend. Word of mouth is still the best recommendation!
Son of a silent age
While Bowie’s travels around the Soviet Union are a lesser known part of his biography, photographs from that trip (most of them made by the star’s personal photographer Lee Black Childers) continue to circulate online, exciting the imagination of fans in both East and West. In 1973, Bowie, who was afraid of flying, decided to return to Europe from the Japanese leg of his tour via the Trans-Siberian Railway. This eight-day train journey clearly made a lasting impression on the artist, and he even returned to the Soviet Union in 1976, bringing along his great friend, Iggy Pop.
It’s hard to believe that it’s six years since the death of David Bowie. If anything, he has never been more relevant, as reflected in the recent sale of his entire back catalogue for a reported $250 million in one of the largest music publishing deals yet.
Among the many reasons that Bowie’s star shone brighter than his peers was his recurring love of literature. This piece from the excellent Calvert Journal explores how this came together with another of his passions: Eastern Europe.
The books that defined David Bowie's love of Eastern Europe
More than a bad run of form
“After five minutes of movement I had to stop because I was struggling to breathe,” explained Paulo Dybala in March 2020. It was a common experience of covid-19 relayed by a very uncommon man. Mr Dybala is a star forward for Juventus, a leading Italian football team, whose athleticism fetches more than $10m a year.
Unremarked on during the frenzy around the unvaccinated and recently infected Novak Djokovic’s tangle with Australia’s immigration authorities, was the worrying research about the impact of Covid on professional athletes:
For elite footballers, the effects of covid-19 linger for months
“Unwitting provincialism”
Fintan O’Toole is claimed to be Ireland’s leading public intellectual. This review of O’Toole’s recent personal history of Ireland by Luke Warde in the Dublin Review of Books highlights a tendency in his work towards the parochialism he professes to deplore.
Is there anything specifically Irish, then, about the “structures of feeling” that O’Toole identifies? The bleak truth is that it would be hard to name a single European society not afflicted by a culture of forgetting, evasion and myth-making; to suggest otherwise is to indulge in what the Dutch cultural historian Joep Leerssen calls “auto-exoticism”: the habit of being fascinated by one’s own apparent singularity, a trait usually associated with the kind of nationalism O’Toole (quite rightly) deplores.
Luke Warde: Are We Civilised At All?
My take on Warde’s critique here:
The end of the end of history
In many ways we can describe this period as a transition from ‘post’ to ‘hyper-politics’, or the re-entry of politics into society. Yet our new ‘hyper-politics’ is also distinct in its specific focus on interpersonal and personal mores, its incessant moralism and incapacity to think through collective dimensions to struggle. In this sense, ‘hyper-politics’ is what happens when ‘post-politics’ ends, but not on terms familiar to us from the twentieth century — the form political conflict takes in the absence of mass politics. Questions of what people own and control are increasingly replaced by questions of who or what people are, replacing the clash of classes with the collaging of identities.
For those of us who came of age in the 1990s after the “end of history,” technocracy ruled. Then, in the wake of the Financial Crash, came populist anti-politics. Now, as this excellent piece argues, everything is political. But all is not what it seems:
Anton Jäger: How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics
Nasty, brutish & 280 characters
This disparity in the relative amount of abuse women receive compared to men within Local government and the Seanad is of particular concern as these two offices of government are the most common paths of to entering the Dáil and may be one cause of many disincentives in encouraging women to run for election. This disparity may also lead to women who are already in those offices of government to not use the platform and as such may not be increasing their communication or recognition with voters, thus hampering their chances of being elected to the Dáil.
Groundbreaking research on the abuse of Irish politicians on Twitter. As the author suggests, the level of abuse directed towards female politicians, in particular, may act as an implicit barrier to women entering politics.
Ian Richardson: The dynamics of political incivility on Twitter towards Irish representatives
Greenflation?
Energy poverty is a serious threat to the cohesion of our society and to the support for climate-related policies. Compensation measures are therefore important.
But such measures need to be designed in a way that does not reduce the incentives to lower carbon emissions.
It would be a serious mistake if governments, faced with rising energy prices, would backtrack from their commitment to reduce emissions. Governments should also not slow down the pace of the transition or delay the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies.
One of the greatest fault lines in liberal democracies is the likely impact of the energy transition on different social groups.
This speech by ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel is admirably honest about the impact that the shift to a low-carbon economy will have on poorer households and why policymakers should not use fear of another ‘Gilets Jaunes’ moment as an excuse for inaction.
Isabel Schnabel: Looking through higher energy prices? Monetary policy and the green transition
Unfortunately, she appears to have subsequently walked back a bit from her remarks!
First-world privileges
In higher-income countries, it is between 22 and 34% cheaper to eat sustainably than it is to eat a diet that continues to feature meat in a starring role. But take that to lower-income countries, and suddenly it becomes 29% more expensive to eat sustainably than to consume a conventional diet. In fact, in high-income countries almost all four sustainable diets were cheaper than the norm—but this pattern was not reflected in poorer nations.
When some of us make our excursion to the local farmers’ market this weekend, it is worth recalling that ‘organic consumerism’ is very much a Western privilege!
Not worth the trouble?
Partition was not the making of people in NI, but nor too was it the making of the generations of Irish ministers and officials who bore witness to the Troubles. They could not simply undo it, or unleash ‘Armageddon’ by deploying military personnel or, as Thatcher seemed to at one point contemplate, relocate northern Catholics into the south.
Ireland’s history wars are heating just as the centenary of the Civil War looms into view
Did Ireland really fail northern Catholics during the Troubles?
“They’re absolutely flying - it couldn’t be better for them.”
“The UK government has decided to fundamentally alter its economic model,” says Stephen Kelly, chief executive, Manufacturing NI. “The secret is knowing the change is irreversible and to win more than we lose and, at this point in time, we seem to be doing that.”
Brexit is proving to be a boon for many businesses in Northern Ireland. The politics are another matter!
Northern Ireland exporters are having the time of their lives
Shift in Irish imports from Great Britain to Northern Ireland due to Brexit