March 2024

8 articles in March 2024

These are the colours, and the temperature scale that my sister and I are using to create our temperature blankets. (If you’re viewing this on a mobile phone, scroll left to see more details). The colours you see here will vary from screen to screen, but I am so happy with the choices my friend and I made and the way they look in real life. We record our temperatures in Celsius in the UK, so the Farenheit scale here is a straight conversion. If you choose to use our colours you may want to adjust the scale more evenly.

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Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian. A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest. But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know. She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world. Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret. Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but all-too-real …

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Acclaimed writer and journalist Jon Ronson relates his startling journey into the lives of the shamed – people ruined by a badly worded tweet or a work faux pas – in 6 episodes of 15 minutes each. BBC Radio 4 Jon Ronson acknowledges that he was once a public shamer, and in his book, which he is reading from in this podcast, he explores the impact of public shaming on both the shamer and shamee. Neither come through the experience well. He draws a comparison between a social media attack mob and the 17th century practice of locking someone into …

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For generations of music lovers, the liner notes on albums were a central part of the way music was heard. You bought an album and it came with an accompanying narrative: a digression, an aside, a backstory—maybe even an invented history. We intuitively understood that great music required not just listening but conversation between the artist and the audience and the audience and the rest of the world. Broken Record is a podcast that restarts those conversations—in a world without liner notes—for a new audience of music lovers. Broken Record is hosted by Justin Richmond with interviews by producer Rick Rubin, writer …

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What happens when a diagnosis changes everything? One afternoon, Helena Merriman walked into a doctor’s surgery and was given a shock diagnosis. In this series, she interviews people who – like her-were changed by a diagnosis. Told through an immersive sound design, this intimate series shines a light on misunderstood conditions, asking how we cope when our bodies and our minds no longer behave as we want them to. BBC Radio 4 Each episode in this series focuses on an individual story of a person who experienced a shock medical diagnosis and how they came to terms with it. The …

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Two men who’ve been at the heart of the political world – former Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy Alastair Campbell and cabinet minister Rory Stewart – join forces from across the political divide. The Rest Is Politics lifts the lid on the secrets of Westminster, offering an insider’s view on politics at home and abroad, while bringing back the lost art of disagreeing agreeably. Goalhanger podcasts This a podcast I listen to often. Politics in recent years has become ruthless, cruel and characterised by a nastiness that I find horrible. So to listen to two people from opposite …

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If you’ve ever yelled at someone on social media about, say, cancel culture or mask-wearing, then you are a soldier in the culture wars – those everyday battles for dominance between conflicting values. The acclaimed writer and podcaster Jon Ronson has seen friends swallowed up in them to the extent that it’s ruined their lives. Jon was curious to learn how things fell apart, and so he went back into the history of the culture wars to find some of the origin stories: the pebbles thrown in the pond, creating the ripples that led us to where we are today. …

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Well, that was fast, wasn’t it? February is over and my temperature blanket has grown by one more month, twenty nine hexagons, two blank hexagons, and one and a bit rows. I ended my January update with an earworm that had really started to bug me (‘January‘, by Pilot), happily thinking that that was it, month over and therefore earworm over. But of course that’s ridiculous. After parking ‘January’, my brain idly wondered if there were songs about February, and … boom … just like that, another earworm entered my brain. I haven’t been able to dislodge it since. This …

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