SSDAB solution not a comprehensive substitute for analogue provision. There are 332 community radio stations in the UK mostly broadcasting o...

I'm excited to share a set of community-focused activities taking place across Leicester in spring 2026 that may be of interest to volunteers and organisations involved in community media, local storytelling, and civic participation. These events offer practical opportunities to develop skills in community reporting, hosting and facilitating public activities, and sharing ideas about how local media contributes to a sense of belonging, shared history, and understanding of the places we live in and come from.

The recent episode of This Isn’t Working, featuring HR commentator Tanya de Grunwald in conversation with clinical psychologist Jaco van Zyl, circles an issue that many organisations have been attempting to handle through policy alone: how should employers respond when a small number of activist staff members claim an outsized mandate to shape workplace culture, language, and institutional positioning on contested social questions.

The Intangible Labour and the New Folklore exhibition, taking place at Leicester Adult Education Gallery on Belvoir Street brings together artists, performers, and musicians who are interested in the kinds of work that usually go unnoticed. This is not labour measured in hours, wages, or output, but the quieter effort involved in creativity, care, endurance, and emotional commitment. The exhibition and the accompanying podcast explore how much artistic work happens below the surface. Artists speak about the time, risk, and personal investment involved in making images, performances, and music. Much of this labour leaves little behind once a moment has passed, yet it shapes how culture is felt and remembered.

This episode of Distraction Therapy unfolds as a winter conversation, shaped as much by mood as by argument. Recorded in mid-January, it opens in that familiar seasonal threshold when light is scarce, patience thinner, and attention drifts instinctively towards escape, whether imagined holidays or internal refuges. From that place, the discussion moves into questions of trust, scepticism, authority, and how individuals orient themselves when systems feel brittle or overbearing.

The recent Triggernometry conversation with Helen Andrews centres on a provocative but important claim: that many of the cultural pathologies now gathered under the label “wokeness” may be less an ideology, and more a predictable shift in group dynamics as institutions become demographically and temperamentally feminised. Andrews’ argument is not that “women cause all problems,” but that certain modes of consensus-making, conflict-avoidance, and moral judgement can become institutionally decisive once a critical mass is reached, particularly in environments that historically relied upon adversarial contest, eccentricity, and the toleration of disagreement as part of their operating logic.

This edition of Spotlight on Arts explores Computala, a digital and new media exhibition currently showing at LCB Depot in Leicester. Through a Radio Lear podcast conversation recorded at the launch, artists and curators reflect on how artificial intelligence, robotics, and generative systems are reshaping creative practice. Rather than promoting technology uncritically, the exhibition asks open questions about human agency, authorship, systems, and our relationship with machines. Visitors encounter installations, visuals, sound works, and participatory pieces that invite reflection rather than instruction. The podcast aligns closely with Soar Sound’s focus on accessible arts conversations rooted in local cultural life. Computala is open throughout January at LCB Depot, Leicester, with exhibitions, workshops, and events running alongside the main show.

When people speak about “breaking free of social convention”, they often mean a change of attitude, a refusal of conformity, or a personal re-imagination of one’s identity. Gnostic and Hermetic traditions press the question further. They treat convention not merely as social pressure, but as enchantment. The force that keeps a person compliant is not only external sanction. It is an inner captivity of attention, desire, fear, and borrowed language.

The government is aware of the potential irreversible impact (physical and emotional) of puberty blockers, having acknowledged an 'unacceptable safety risk’ following the Cass Review. Yet, hundreds of...

One way of understanding the work of the psychologist is to see them not primarily as a technician of symptoms or a manager of behaviours, but as a kind of drama critic. This is not a metaphor designed to trivialise psychological suffering. On the contrary, it allows us to approach the seriousness of psychic life with greater precision. Human beings do not merely live; they perform.

Julie Bindel’s Pride and Predator is a sober and unsettling piece of investigative journalism that raises questions many institutions have been reluctant to face. At its core, the podcast is not simply an exposé of one individual’s crimes, but an examination of the cultural, organisational, and ideological conditions that allowed those crimes to go undetected, minimised, or rationalised for far too long.

This article examines the gender identity controversy through a distinction between ideological and cosmological worldviews. It explains why contemporary debate is dominated by legal and institutional critique, while deeper mythological and symbolic questions are neglected. Drawing on Jung, depth psychology, and Western philosophical traditions, it clarifies why the conflict feels immediate, moralised, and unresolved. The public dispute over gender identity is often framed as a conflict of “views” or “values”.

I went into the Triggernometry conversation with Jimmy Carr expecting to be mildly irritated, or at best indifferent. I have never been a fan of Carr’s comedy. That is not a moral critique, and it is not a denial of craft. It is simply that his style does not land for me, and I rarely seek it out. What surprised me was that, once the conversation found its rhythm, it became something else entirely.