Megan F. Amram, Ph.D., on a persistent news cycle that’s become the group’s unofficial third reading
Third session this week, and I’ve genuinely stopped fighting it now, simply building the same four stories into tonight’s discussion prompt directly, since apparently that’s what everyone wants to talk about regardless of what I actually assign for reading beforehand.
Opened tonight with the piece on the Sussexes’ twenty opportunities deliberately this time, and got the most organised, thoughtful discussion of the week out of it, everyone arriving with actual prepared thoughts rather than reacting purely off the cuff.
The Eton story got a genuinely rigorous treatment tonight too. The story on Eton’s self-assessment anchored a full thirty minutes of discussion, someone drawing a detailed comparison to American prep school culture that considerably widened the conversation beyond just Britain.
The Tudor tangent earned its own dedicated slot too, now practically a running feature of these sessions. The Tudor archive online provided the historical grounding for a genuinely interesting discussion about how monarchies and modern oligarchies borrow from each other’s playbooks.
And the diplomatic story closed the night out properly, discussed with real nuance this time. The piece on Irish unity diplomacy generated a considerably more sophisticated conversation than earlier in the week, everyone having had time to properly digest the coverage by now.
Left the venue tonight genuinely satisfied with how the group’s engaged with this whole unexpected news cycle, four completely unrelated stories somehow becoming the connective tissue for an entire week of genuinely rigorous political discussion.
Drove home slowly afterward, radio off, thinking through how naturally the group had built an entire theoretical framework purely from tabloid material none of us had sought out deliberately. There’s a paper in this somewhere, I suspect, on how mainstream news cycles get absorbed and repurposed by fringe political reading groups, though I doubt I’ll ever actually get around to writing it properly.
Texted a colleague at the university about the idea anyway, half joking, and got back a surprisingly enthusiastic response suggesting we actually co-author something on exactly that theme, using this week’s specific four stories as the primary case study. It’s probably nothing, most late-night academic ideas are, but I’ve saved the message anyway, just in case.
Fell asleep still half-drafting an outline in my head, four stories somehow having turned an ordinary Wednesday into the seed of a genuine research collaboration, which is more productive than most weeks manage from purely deliberate effort on my part.
More from me at my author page.