Issue 40 | January 2026

December 31, 2025

Welcome to the first edition of Miaaw Monthly for 2026, courtesy of Beehiiv.com.

We have big news this month. From the middle of December, we switched from using SoundCloud and Spotify to distribute our podcasts to using Podbean.com. Podbean dedicates itself to audio and video podcasts whereas both SoundCloud and Spotify have started moving relentlessly towards the streaming music market, which has made using their systems less and less easy. Using Podbean.com. has already made it much simpler at our end to get everything for December and January online.

This means that the website looks different, because it is no longer hand-crafted by us - but some might say that constitutes a welcome upgrade, and who are we to argue! The website will have more features added to it as we familiarise ourselves with it, and we will slowly go back and switch all the podcasts into the new format. We can see that most of the older podcasts have lost their links and references. All that will get fixed in the coming months.

And in another piece of mildly interesting news, in December we published our 250th podcast.

Finally, in January, we move back to a weekly schedule, just as we promised we would. Here, then, come all five of the podcasts for January 2026

PODCASTS FOR JANUARY 2026

Friday January 2

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 82

In an episode called Position, influence & income, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Su Jones about the reactions she has received to her paper , and what she hopes happens next.

Friday January 9

Parallel Streams | Episode 1

Sophie Hope introduces the first in a new Miaaw series. The Irene Taylor Trust present Solidarity Tracks, a podcast about working with music in prisons.

Friday January 16

A Culture of Possibility | Episode 48

In episode 60 of A Culture of Possibility co-hosts Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Griselda Goldsbrough, Art and Design Development Manager of the National Arts in Hospitals Network, “a resource for arts managers in hospitals to champion hospital arts across the UK, supporting recovery and wellbeing.”

Friday January 23

Echoes and the Unsaid | Episode 1

Echoes and the Unsaid is the second new series starting this month. In the first episode Jo Gibson and Sophie Hope introduce their research into social practice programmes and look at projects at Guildhall School of Music and Drama from the 1970s to the 2020s.

Friday January 30

Friday Number Five | Episode 20

This month sees the first episode pf the year of the guaranteed-irregular Friday Number Five, and this year we return to the theme of old time radio. We hunt down old episodes of radio series you may never have even heard of that not only tell a good story but also illustrate in their own quirky ways the manner in which cultural assumptions and the acceptable and unacceptable change and shift over time.

Every time we find a month with five Fridays we will pull together a programme for your and our enjoyment. And every time we do, we will find something interesting you probably haven’t heard before…

A THOUSAND WORDS

Clive Russell: from the “Flag for a Nation of Neighbours” brief

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Round and round and up and down we go again

In the time that I remember we have gone from wonder at the emergence of eight bit personal computers (hello Spectrum!) to marvelling at the world wide web, with its apparently effortless built-in democracy (information wants to be free!), to a fidgety world of surveillance and compulsory dopamine hits.

But now its time to reinvent naivety!

Last month we came across a website called local first software! This lets you “experience apps that work offline, keep your data private, and sync seamlessly across your devices. Your data stays with you, not locked in the cloud”.

The site welcomes us “to a better way of using software”: what we might describe as the early nineties way. On the other hand: why throw shade, as the cool people said for a few minutes a few years ago? It does offer a better way of working. It does keep your data safe(r). Its just a little sad that it needed to be expressed as “reinventing” rather than the more accurately described process of reclaiming something.

We didn’t lose anything. We had it taken away from us while Big Conjurors distracted us.

Do you keep a to-do list?

Several of us have been through several different ways of keeping track of our schedules digitally, from home made lists in Libre Office to paid subscriptions to Todoist or TickTick.

In an end-of-the-year list we found a completely free, open source alternative, that does (almost) everything that Todoist does, as well if not better.

Meet Super-Productivity. It cheerfully announces itself as an app that “makes deep work simple by combining tasks, time tracking, and notes inside one open-source task manager and workspace built for makers”.

It invites you to “stay in flow. Focus on what matters”, because its a “tool made for you to build your system, not someone else's”. Presumably it says it like this because the developers know the people they are talking to. Leaving that aside it actually does what it claims, with no money changing hands.

Moreover, it probably counts as local first software. We mention this as a public service, in case anyone has “organise my task lists” as their New Year resolution.

A Flag for a Nation of Neighbours

John Phillips and Clive Russell have written that “Our nation needs new flags to represent how we live together. Flags to celebrate how we accept one another’s differences and find common ground, flags to honour hard won battles against inequalities, flags to glorify the welfare state, our love of the commons, and the rich histories from all over the world which make up our nation. Flags to combat a misguided nostalgia for the good old days.”

They want submissions for flags by March 6. The flag they choose “will appear in 2026 across the UK:

  • A selection of flag artworks will be used on Billboards / 6 Sheets / 4 Sheets in various UK locations.

  • All flags will be printed as flags and exhibited at the Southbank Centre and at other ‘Fête of Britain’ events across the UK.

  • Flags will be given for display to community groups via the Humanity Project.

You can find out more by emailing Clive and John at [email protected].

David Rovics’ imaginary friends

David Rovics writes songs. We have mentioned him several times before.

This year he decided to explore AI rather than just make sneer or up theories from the sidelines. He decided to see what would happen if he used it as a tool rather than let it use him.

He has written that

if you want to have some idea of how amazing AI music-generation technology is right now, I would like to invite you to listen to Ai Tsuno. Ai Tsuno is the name I chose for my collaborative musical efforts with Suno, which is one of a number of different AI music generation platforms in popular use today.

I know so many people who really seem to be suffering from some form of future shock with all this stuff, and they avoid ever listening to, looking at, or reading anything they know to be AI-generated content. While I completely agree with anyone who says that the internet is massively polluted these days with ever-more abundant and ever-more realistic AI slop of every conceivable description, to just dismiss AI technology because of this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

First of all, don’t take my word for it. If you haven’t heard Ai Tsuno’s latest album, Army of Robots, or the one before that, Where the Algorithms Rule, take a few minutes to go to the music streaming platform of your choice and listen to a couple songs. Then come back to me here.

You can listen to <em>Where the Algorithms Rule</em> if you choose to click here. There is also a guided tour of the album available.

And if you want to access everything on Soundcloud by David Rovics, solo, with other musicians, and with his imaginary friends, you can start here.

And next month…

The February edition of Miaaw Monthly will appear in your inbox on Wednesday, February 4 with the first podcast of the month arriving just two days later.

Whenever that is!