28 min listen
Embed Code This week: Sophie Winkleman tells us why she’s fighting to ban smartphones for children (01:01), Svitlana Morenets details how Ukraine plans to revive its birthrate (05:52), Candida Crewe laments the blight that is UHT milk (12:41), and Ysenda Maxtone Graham mourns the loss of the St John’s Voices choir (22:43).
The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see cows all the time from the train and they just sort of lounge about, ruminating, don’t they? But this wants you to look, really look, at what it is to be a cow. And you do and you will invest. (Oh, Luma.) Arnold spent four years, off and on, filming Luma, a cow at a
How do you help the environment and improve your quality of life? Why, buy milk in bottles. Some of us can remember them – foil topped, left outside the door, washed, then returned…a virtuous cycle which worked because it made practical sense. Life went downhill when the milk industry was deregulated in the 1990s and milk turned up in plastic cartons, homogenised and in supermarkets, and so it has remained, until quite recently. But the rattle of the milk van is returning to the streets in parts of London and elsewhere…things, folks, are looking up. It was one of the great advances in human civilisation when we developed lactose to
