Surprise meEntangled Vale
Help, Identity - and Mr Rogers
What if identity wasn’t something to defend, but something to offer—an ethic, not a battleground?
Surprise meMaker's ForgeEntangled Vale
Wedgwood, Novelty and the Progress Narrative
In our rush for novelty, have we overlooked not only the enduring value of the familiar but also the many other ways we might choose to value what we create?
Surprise meEntangled Vale
The music of politics
How fresh political arrangements can help us conduct democracy in a way that values and voices harmony amid inevitable discord.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Everybody hates a tourist: why socio-political theory never gets it right about common people
Metaphors matter. When too many of our core conceptual analogies about people and politics try to bring a knife to a gun fight, are we left trying to eat soup with a fork?
Surprise meHearthlandsEntangled Vale
Critical Thinking or Care-full Thinking?
Is it possible that our prized tool for dissecting truth—critical thinking—might actually be sharpening divides rather than bridging them? Peter Gilderdale confronts a paradox at the heart of a cherished intellectual tradition: are we merely critiquing, or are we truly considering?
Surprise meUnfolding Realm
27 gifts of life-changing learning and one radical conclusion – an audio essay | S3E9
If you could gift someone a life-changing learning experience, what would it be and why? We discuss the combined wisdom of 27 of my podcast guests and what it means for how we approach the practice of education.
Surprise meMaker's Forge
Reflections on Educational Content Creation
Educate with the baggage of the institutional framework, or with the baggage of the algorithm? The stuffy mansion, or the Wild West? How to choose; how to escape from the double-bind?
Surprise meUnfolding Realm
Why I refuse to sacrifice my curiosity for the sake of passing a test - Danu Poyner | S2E4
In this solo episode, Danu discusses how his own squiggly career is animated by his troubled personal relationship with education, and reflects on the traits that people who are 'still curious' have in common.
Surprise meUnfolding RealmEntangled Vale
No time to be curious when you're constantly at the grind - Kat Daley | S1E10
Kat is the Program Manager for the Bachelor of Youth Work and Youth Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. We discuss how 'street wisdom' and lived experience of chronic disadvantage, child abuse and homelessness helps Kat and her students tackle systemic injustice for young people.
Surprise meUnfolding RealmMaker's Forge
Creativity, classrooms, calligraphy: "You never know what it's going to be until it's finished" - Peter Gilderdale | S1E6
Peter Gilderdale is a freelance writer and calligrapher and recently retired lecturer in Design History at Auckland University of Technology. We talk about the difference between education that gets people creative and excited vs turning out people who just want to tick boxes.
Surprise meWild Margin
Deschooling the mind
If we want to avoid letting school interfere with education – that is, if we want to avoid confusing how we do learning with what it's for – we will first need to deschool our minds. This is easier said than done.
Surprise meWild Margin
What's at stake in education
Over the next decade, long-overdue digital transformation means that tech money and the aims, aspirations and assumptions that come with it are likely to fundamentally reshape what education looks like. Software eats the world and education is next on the menu.
🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen
Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr
Read the note ↗🎥 Who Is the Worst Person Louis Theroux Has Met?
Louis Theroux has spent decades sitting with people most of us would keep at a distance and gently asking them to explain themselves. What he keeps finding isn't unbridgeable otherness but something more unsettling: familiar motives, loosely held, rarely examined. Echoing Arendt's 'banalit
Read the note ↗👁️ To Be There but Not to Be Seen
A former New York City pickpocket, Wilfred Rose, returns to the subway where he worked, narrating how he did it and what it cost him — how to read a crowd, choreograph attention, pass without notice. Alongside the craft is the other side: arrests, family, loss, and a habit he describes as
Read the note ↗📖 Iran's Ultimate Banned Book
'Iran has been trapped in a cycle of self-love and self-hate for centuries, and nothing captures that contradiction like The Blind Owl.' Banned both before and after 1979, the novel follows a troubled painter through a surreal, fragmented narrative. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces its strange aft
Read the note ↗🗿 When a Culture No Longer Wants to Live
Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak pushes past the 'Neanderthals were basically us' rehabilitation to something more unsettling: what if they were genuinely different — different minds, different relationships to territory and meaning? He suggests their disappearance followed a collapse of
Read the note ↗🎙️ A Real Company Staffed by Fake People
A podcast in which a journalist investigates entrepreneurship in the AI age by trying to run a real company staffed by fake (AI) people. Somewhere between investigative journalism and deadpan performance art — no breathless futurism, no moral panic. It quietly shows how much of 'running a
Read the note ↗