Nationalism
Nationalism on Spoot baby... spooooooot!: a running collection of 2 stories we have gathered and hand-picked because they are worth your time. Every post here touches on nationalism in some way — the news, the analysis, the deep dives, and the occasional surprise find. # Spoot. New stories are added to this page as we find them, so check back if you want to keep up with what is happening around nationalism, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get them as soon as they are published. Browse the collection below, or head back to the homepage to see everything Spoot baby... spooooooot! is covering right now.
Joyce and Nationalism.
Terry Eagleton, as ever, refuses to let a dead fish lie. His LRB review of Frank Callanan's *James Joyce: A Political Life* (23 July 2026; archived) yanks the curtain back on the notion that Joyce was some aesthetic hermit, revealing instead a man who was, in Eagleton's framing, "a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell." That's the razor clam buried in the sand: Joyce wasn't above politics, he was pickling in it, marinating his modernism in the very nationalist brine he claimed to ignore. The review circles the serpentine relationship between the political and the artistic, and it's the kind of footnote that swallows the text whole. For a deeper dig into how language itself buries and surfaces secrets, our piece "A Name Emerges: Family, Memory, and the Secrets We Bury" sits nearby, waiting.
1905: The Linguistic Renaissance.
January 1905 cracked the Russian Empire open, and for two years the whole thing refused to close. Protests and strikes rippled out like someone kicked the anthill of history, and the tsar, cornered, coughed up October's concession. That's the kind of moment that makes you want to check the footnote, the razor clam buried in the mud of geopolitics. Zachary Mazur, via Joel of Far Outliers, hands us the good stuff, and we're the ones who'll take it and run sideways with it. Language, after all, is just another revolt waiting to happen. If you're circling back for more, our piece on whether vocabulary changes who you are, "Still You, Just With More Vocabulary," fits the obsession neatly. Stay spooty.