Taking off with Bunga Airways

Hey gang, you may be jetting off on your summer holidays this month, so make sure you choose Bunga Airways.

Here's what we're serving up in August:

• Has tourism jumped the shark? This massive industry is turning many cities effectively into company towns. Is there way to be critical of this process without succumbing to snobbery about "those type of people"? We ask Marco D'Eramo.

• JD Vance may be tanking in the polls but what Trump picking him surely indicates something. We investigate his Hillbilly Elegy with the help of Ryan Zickgraf.

• China is a monolithic, integrated state. WRONG. Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri tell us why.

• How about we DECOLONIZE civil society? The state and NGOs have taken over. Matt Thompson and Jonny Gordon-Farleigh tell us how.

• In the Reading Club, we present Julien Benda’s classic 1927 The Treason of the Intellectuals. In Benda’s time, it was the intellectuals' adoption of national particularism that was the biggest crime. But what should we expect from intellectuals today, in a time of conformity, and of the bureaucratisation and commodification of thought?

• And we respond to your questions and criticisms in Aufhebonus Bonus + much more.

ICYMI - July on Bungacast

• Nowhere has ever suffered de-development like the former Soviet Union. Volodymyr Ishchenko explained the deep causes of the Ukraine War, and why the young look back to the USSR.

• Even dictators pretend to be democrats and dutifully hold elections. Why do they even bother? We try to find an explanation in the Reading Club discussion of the late Dmitri Furman's "Imitation Democracy". 

• Victimhood has become marketised and turned into an identity – no one is merely a victim, they always have an ulterior motive. Renowned sociologist Eva Illouz explains.

• The Bunga Boys peered deeply into the V O I D (UK General Election and Keir Starmer's hollow victory).

• Macron rolled the dice in France, reckoning no one really wants to be Prime Minister. Why is it the worst job? Charles Devellennes talked us through the election results.

• It's an NGO like no other. Please donate to the Catherine Liu Foundation for Attacking Badness. Forget decolonising – we're gonna expropriate the canon!

• What are the contours of the global culture war? This plus your questions on fertility declines, film, music and more in AufheBonus Bonus.

Bunga Extended Universe

• Phil Cunliffe took part in a panel debate organised by Platypus in London, alongside Malcom Kyeyune, Georg Kurz, and Andreas Wintsperger.

• Reflecting on the UK election, Phil contemplated the Rule of the Void in Northern Star (w/ Peter Ramsay) and asked "Is Brexit safe under Starmer?" in UnHerd. He was also cited in Newsweek on the failure of sanctions on Russia.

• George Hoare argued that Euro 2024 reminded us that football is the best and the worst pastime humans have invented, in Café americain.

• Leigh Phillips explained that extinction is destructive but also entirely natural, in The Atlantic.

• Alex Gourevitch was interviewed in Catalunya Plural on republican freedom and the knights of labour.

From the Archive

Maduro still hangs on in Venezuela after (unfair and unfree) elections over the weekend. That regime is one of the last remnants of the so-called Pink Tide. What went wrong? Fabio Luis explained back in 2021.