1. Just under 25 minutes into this episode of Matt Chorley’s Politics Without The Boring Bits podcast you’ll find an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of education in the UK since the 1944 Education Act which introduced free secondary education – and free milk! – for all pupils. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-red-box-politics-podcast/id660638948?i=1000642106550

2. A provocative piece – with which not everyone will agree – from the latest issue of History Today by Andrew Ong & Minh Bui Jones, How ASEAN Lost its Way https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/how-asean-lost-its-way

“ASEAN was founded to promote peace between the nations of Southeast Asia. Incapable of moving with the times, what is the point of it?”

Minh Bui Jones founded and edits The Mekong Review https://mekongreview.com/ Try Tales from the Shan hills https://mekongreview.com/tales-from-the-shan-hills/

3. Two pieces about Facebook, neither to be found on Facebook itself, I imagine:

a Whistleblower Aid piece about a Facebook donation to Harvard University and its consequences https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-press-release/ Whistleblower Aid home page here https://whistlebloweraid.org/

a piece from The Markup, Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

4. Here’s a BBC Radio 3 production of Thomas Otway’s C17 play, Venice Preserved that I enjoyed this morning on the way up to Yorkshire https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001g40k

Be ready for the slightly OTT sound effect when someone gets stabbed at the end of the play!

I didn’t know much about Otway: he was just a name on a list of dramatists I’d vaguely heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Otway

5. And, finally and challengingly, two quizzes from the BBC for the weekend:

first, one all about the use of apostrophes (I don’t agree with all the answers!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/12vbByzjT1hcmFgh79f2MHw/are-you-grammatically-gormless-or-a-punctuation-perfectionist

second, Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz (very few of the answers agree with me!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5m4tC2Z6xbk7T7sF5KkDHgV/test-your-perfect-pub-quiz-knowledge