Some good things from the past week.

Mainly podcasts. Also new glasses and classroom joy.

This week has been my first proper week in my new teaching job, and the first time I’ve been in a teaching role since 2022. I am now doing a long commute twice a week, which means lots of podcasts and lots of novels. Here are my highlights from the last week. Plus, new glasses and start-of-teaching-year excitement.

• To mark the one-year anniversary of the 7th October attacks, Naomi Klein has written a long piece, ‘How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war’, published on 5th October in the Guardian. This is a fascinating and troubling read that details the commemoration efforts for the 7th October Hamas attacks, which include films, art, virtual reality, and ‘dark tourism’, and how the Israeli government has weaponised this very real trauma to shore up support for its endless war.

• My friend and comrade Dr Dion Georgiou (author of the Academic Bubble newsletter) has been working on a mini-series of articles on Universities, Solidarity and International Boycotts, which we’re delighted to be publishing on the UCU Commons blog. The first of these articles ‘Apartheid and the Boycott of South African Universities’, went up on 9th October to mark the one-year anniversary of the October 7th attacks, and the resumption of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. Given the recent calls for academic boycotts of Israeli and Russian universities in response to atrocities committed by these states, Dion’s article is an essential contribution to a careful consideration of academic boycotts past, present and future.

• This week marked the release of the first episode of Paris Marx’s (host of the excellent podcast Tech Won’t Save Us) special series on data centres, ‘Data Vampires’. I also listened to the hilarious Trash Future Pod episode which had Marx on as a guest to talk about the vampiric rise of data centres and what we can do about them. Both come highly recommended.

• Another extremely funny listen from this week was In Bed With The Right’s episode on Hulu’s new reality show ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’, which has been the subject of multiple podcast episodes recently. Kate Kelly, who is a former Mormon, joined the IBWTR hosts Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub for a fascinating and hilarious deep-dive into Mormon gender and sexual politics.

• Finally, as I type up this post I am listening to the latest episode of Conspiracy, She Wrote on the seriously unhinged conspiracy genre of ‘transvestigation’ (basically, skull-measuring with an added fixation on ‘clavicles’). This episode includes two brilliant academic guests from the UK: Lexi Webster from the University of Southampton and Fran Amery from the University of Bath, who has recently published some excellent research on organised transphobia and ‘gender-critical’ movements.

• A novel! I’ve been reading The Happy Couple (2023) by the Irish novelist Naoise Dolan. This book is extremely funny and might be the only one I’ve ever read with two openly bisexual protagonists, who also happen to be in a relationship with each other. I’m racing through it so quickly, I expect I’ll finish it on my Friday commute.

And, finally:

New glasses! I can finally see properly! It turns out the world actually shouldn’t always be a bit blurry!

Teaching! I’ve had my first time back in front of a university classroom since 2022, and I had forgotten how much I needed the frequent intersubjective rewards that teaching brings. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was an undergraduate student myself, and I’m so happy to have a chance to do it now. The students even laughed at one of my terrible jokes. Aww.