Weekend Recommendations July 14: Podcasts, movies, articles and books
Debut post with 'best-ever' materials.
Welcome to the maiden recommendation post here at Straight from Jiwan. This week has been hectic but as I have promised my audience at daily Clubhouse room NewsGuff to deliver this newsletter starting this week, I am keeping the word now.
For now, I plan to send these every Thursday so that I can also talk about recommended materials in weekend episode of NewGuff on Fridays. I'll keep the weekly routine unless I am blown off my feet by health issues or pressure at work.
Meanwhile please subscribe if you haven’t already:
On style, this post is going to be decidedly informal. Wherever possible, I'll try to add a blurb to the material I am recommending but please don't except that after each of them. I'll also try to give the link to the original content wherever possible.
This being the first ever post of this kind, I'll recommend some of the best content that I have come across over past few years rather than this week. Following weeks will provide a mix of both until a routine of weekly recommendation settles. As this post is going to be longer and richer than subsequent ones, you may want to save it, archive it or forward it to some close friends.
1) The best long piece/creative non-fiction
The Gradual Extinction of Softness by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, Hippocampus Magazine. This sublime 2021 piece encapsulates the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia better than anything else I have read on the subject.
How This All Happended by Morgan Housel, The Collaborative Fund (2021). The comprehensive yet lucid story behind how the consumption-driven economy took over the USA and the world.
The Vietnam Wars bu Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Rolling Stone (1980). Super long but super informative.
Human Impulses Run Riot: China's Shocking Pace of Change by Ya Hua, The Guardian (2018). Also available as podcast with same title.
The Really Big One by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker (2015). Breath-taking details of how a part of human civilization will be decimated by an inevitable earthquake.
Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell. The New Yorker (2010)
2) The best podcasts: You can search and listen all of these in any podcast app (I use Podcast Go)
1619 (6 episodes): A candid tale of how slaves built the United States while being subjugated and robbed of fruits of their own labor ever since the first ship full of slaves anchored in the US coast.
Catch and Kill (10 episodes) Ronan Farrow’s journey through the underworld ruled by people like Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump
The Documentary Podcast (BBC): The Climate Tipping Points: Listen this podacast as many times as needed until you can decipher the meaning of the abyss towards which we are sprinting now.
Cautionary Tales: Fire at the Beverly Hills Super Club. Never miss a prescient life lesson in this podcast.
The Last Archive: For the Birds: Jill Lepore explores the fate of the now-extinct passenger pigeons. Tells a lot about our own journey towards civilizational collapse.
The Trojan Horse Affair (8 episodes): A tale of a creepy plot to stoke xenophobia and Islamophobia in UK.
Rabbit Hole (8 episodes): The intimate details of how youtube—and the internet along with it—descended to the place it now is in.
3) The Best Cinema
Sounds of Sand dir. Marion Hansel (Only clips available at Youtube) Best ever fictional portrayal of the future with climate breakdown
Force of Nature dir. Sturla Gunnarsson. Best ever documentary encapsulating the essence of climate issue. Focuses on inter-generational justice and our moral responsibility to protect the planet.
Night and Fog dir. Allain Resnia Finest short non-fiction about the holocaust.
The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence dir. Joshua Oppenheimer Unparalleled history of the Indonesian genocide of 1965. These deal with the complacency of all of us as consumers in sustaining slavery in modern world.
Apu trilogy fro Satya Jit Ray: Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. Three Bengali fiction films depicting the entire life of an average Indian person in 20th century. Profoundly moving.
4) Books
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (2014)
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016)
Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra (2006)
5) My own writings in Nepali:
जीवन बदल्ने एउटा सिनेमा
प्रविधिको दुखान्छः लक्ष्य स्वर्ग, गन्तव्य नर्क
सन्तानको सुख लिने हाम्रो अन्तिम पुस्ता
Substack recommendation of the week:
‘Coming soon…..!’ recommendation:
Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire; Coming 4 August 2022.
