Daniella Shreir reports on the unrest in France: "Despite three weeks of blockades and protests that had already led to more than six thousand arrests (most of them of minors), Macron claimed to have been surprised by the scale of the protests on 17 October."
Shem Law argues that the BBC's decision to close Radio 4 Extra is a terrible mistake.
"Illich’s censure of industrialized society originated in his criticisms of the Catholic Church. As a young priest of formidable intellect, Illich was known in the Vatican and seemed clearly destined to become a prince of the church. But his experience of missionary attitudes, first in Puerto Rico and then in Brazil and Mexico, turned him into a vociferous critic of what he saw as a corporate-religious developmentalism that paved over Indigenous customs and encouraged dependency." Justin McGuirk looks at the ideas of Ivan Illich in his centenary year.
Malin Hay visits the Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends exhibition at the Young V&A: "Of late, a note of techno-optimism has crept into the Aardman canon. The most recent Wallace and Gromit film, Vengeance Most Fowl, feints towards a Luddite message, as Wallace’s obsession with gadgets threatens Gromit’s peace and the simplicity of their lives."
"The history of an organisation's change programmes can tell you a lot about what is behind its current initiatives. Sometimes they are a reaction to what went before, other times they are an attempt to do the same again, only with different language. Often, there is little understanding of why the last change attempt failed. People want to bury the embarrassment of previous projects and move on." Flip Chart Fairy Tales undertakes some workplace archaeology among the ruins of past change programmes.
