Undernotes: Radio, podcasts and politics
My holiday season listening turned a little political, which is not uncommon
Today's undernote covers just a few of the articles, podcasts and radio shows I encountered over the holiday break. A political skew this time, since I take in right wing conspiracies, Labour factions, the unpopularity of Keir Starmer.
In 2024 Zach Mack bet his conspiracy theorist father 10K USD that ten wearyingly familiar right wing predictions would not come to pass in one year. The result was a fascinating but ultimately depressing podcast series for NPR's Embedded. He won the bet, but the rift in his family was far from healed. In this follow up, Alternate Realities - Double or Nothing, Mack returns to consider the question raised by the original series: if proving someone wrong does nothing to change their mind then what hope is there for finding common ground? While the answer is not conclusive, some hope seems to lie in establingh a shared sense of playful enquiry. This is in line with a fascinating paper by C. Thi Nguyen which suggests that playfulness is a possible way of guarding against and escaping what he calls 'epistemic traps'. I'll return to this paper in a future note, I hope.
I also caught up with a Novara Media ACFM podcast on the concept of The Mainstream - from November. This was a free ranging discussion which took in some nice conundrums. If, for example, you relish your outsider status what do you do if your iconoclastic ideas are accepted and adopted? This was all nice background for a more focused podcast on Mainstream the newish Labour faction setting up on the left to challenge woeful politics Starmer and his Blue Labour chums. If, like me, you're a leftie but not a Labour person this offers a really useful primer on the history of Labour factionalism over the last forty or so years.
While we're on the topic of the current administration, Jeremy Gilbert (one of the ACFM presenters) asked the question Why is Keir Starmer so unpopular? in the New Statesman. Unsurprisingly the answer seems to be that, rather than lay out a bold vision, he echoes the racist rhetoric of the right on immigration and offers growth as a jam tomorrow panacea which means as much under Labour as it did under the Tories. Which is to say more or less nothing.
In addition to much enjoyable seasonal nonsense, I found myself relying more than before on NTS Radio and WFMU as an antidote to the creeping indie-forever-ification of 6Music which nonetheless offered up some excellence in the form of Zakia, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, and Mary Anne Hobbs among others.
I tend to read several books at once -- very slowly. I started One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad over Christmas and this caught my eye:
It is a hallmark of failing socities, I've learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist
I have a feeling that this may be something of a theme for 2026.
I'm out of time for now. More soon.
Image: zai Dan
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Undernotes: Let's try this out