Issue 46 | July 2026

Author

Owen Kelly
July 01, 2026

Welcome to Wednesday July 1st which, among other things, signals that it is time for another edition of Miaaw Monthly, courtesy of Beehiiv.com, the people who make this possible and relatively simple for us.

We have made more progress on the Miaaw.net website during the last month, and we will try to burst through some significant milestones during summer.

Last month’s newsletter featured some spelling mistakes and some misplaced dates. Our fingers have been attending retraining sessions, and hopefully you will spot the difference.

Having said that, and having noted that this is another month with five Fridays, here come all five of the podcasts for July 2026, each with its own capsule description!

PODCASTS FOR JULY 2026

Friday July 3

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 88

Recently Sophie Hope set about reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for historical reasons, and because she was curious how it fitted into the history of ethnographical writing (if it did).

She persuaded Owen Kelly to join her in this enterprise, and together they discuss James Agee’s writing and Walker Evan’s photographs as a possible beach option in our annual holiday reading episode.

Friday July 10

Parallel Streams | Episode 7

Owen Kelly introduces a recent episode of Cory Doctorow’s podcast which features a live (and lively) recording of a discussion about his latest book: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Friday July 17

A Culture of Possibility | Episode 66

In episode 66 of A Culture of Possibility co-hosts Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Paulo Lameiro, a musician, educator and musicologist, based in his hometown of Leiria, Portugal.

For decades, he’s led Concertos para Bebes (Concerts for Babies), an amazing ongoing series of interactive performances by professional musicians, created to engage very young children in music.

He started his career in opera as a baritone, and still works on co-created opera, but the center of his work involves collaboration with communities including incarcerated youth and Romani communities.

Friday July 24

Echoes and the Unsaid | Episode 7

In this episode Jo Gibson and Sophie Hope interview the educator Peter Renshaw, who has been a huge influence on the development of socially engaged practice and research at Guildhall and all the initiatives we’ve heard about in this series so far.

Friday July 31

Friday Number Five | Episode 22

This month continues to the theme of old time radio in which 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.

We have still to make up our mind about our choice for this month, which depends in part in finding a high enough quality recording of the episode we want to play.

Stay tuned, as they used to say!

A THOUSAND WORDS

David Cayley (1946 - 2026)

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

David Cayley

We learned last week from the newsletter The Convivial Society, run by LM Sacasas, that David Cayley had died on June 10th.

In the words of LM Sacasas:

Cayley was an accomplished journalist and documentarian. For over thirty years, he found a home at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where he produced CBC Radio’s Ideas series. During this run, his programs explored the work of Charles Taylor, Simone Weil, Richard Sennet, George Grant, and René Girard among many others. Happily, Cayley created a personal website, where he made an archive of these shows available. There is an education to be had in this archive for those with the time to listen.

But it is likely that Cayley will be chiefly remembered as the great advocate and interpreter of the work of his friend, Ivan Illich. Those of you who have been reading the Convivial Society for some time will know that the name of this newsletter is taken from Illich’s work and that my own thinking and writing has been indelibly shaped by my reading of Illich. So, like many others who have sought to learn from Illich, I am, and will remain, in Cayley’s debt.

We heartily agree. Cayley’s interview with Ivan Illich (later turned into a book) is well worth seeking out.

And so is the newsletter The Convivial Society!

Listening Glossary

Hannah Kemp-Welch who ran the very-well-received Ways of Listening podcasts for Miaaw has edited a book called Listening Glossary, which comes out in October from Silver Press.

We will hopefully be talking with Hannah about this in the coming months but we wanted to alert you to it as soon as possible. You can see its Amazon page right here right now!

Pre-ordering is not forbidden!

PubPub

François Matarasso alerted us to something interesting this month: the existence of PubPub, “the open-source, community-led, end-to-end publishing platform for knowledge communities”.

We have just begun exploring this, and will report back when we have something sensible to say. You can begin your own exploration if you click here to access their site.

PubPub is an initiative of Knowledge Futures, “a small team powered by a large community. Click here to find out more about that.

Finally, the dial tone retires…

You might like to know that on June 30th (that’s yesterday to you), Finland closed down its only remaining line-phone network.

From Wednesday, the country's landlines will fall silent as telecom operator Elisa retires its fixed-line network for both private customers and businesses.

Elisa's competitor Telia discontinued its own landline service in 2019, while DNA stopped supporting landline networks at the start of this year.

Finland has had a landline telephone network since the 1880s, and Finns were eager early adopters.

By the 1960s, Finland rose to seventh place in Europe for landline subscriptions, and the number of landline phones in Finnish homes peaked in the early 1990s.

The numbers started to steadily decline after that however, with the advent of mobile phones, especially as Finnish firm Nokia became a world leader in the new technology.

And next month…

The August edition of Miaaw Monthly will appear in your inbox on Wednesday, August 5 with the first podcast of the month arriving just two days later.

Which science tells us should be on August 7!