Aleks Krotoski

The Resilient: Taylor Glenn (comedienne, writer and flailing mother)

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 18:44:48 +0000

In this episode of The Resilient, we’re going to hear how getting what you wish for may be the worst thing in the world.

Taylor Glenn originally trained as a psychotherapist in New York City, but over a decade ago, she jumped the Atlantic for a new life and a new career in the UK. After winning her first stand-up competition (surprise!), and winning plaudits and awards across the country, she and her husband decided it was the right time to start a family.

Taylor wasn’t a novice to the motherhood lark: as she herself admits, she was the creepy person at parties who’d borrow the newborn and refuse to give it back. But, when she tried the shoes on herself, she found they didn’t fit.

After the birth of her daughter, she descended into the deep, dark hole of Post-Natal Depression. This is the story of how she managed – through personal resilience, Twitter and the support of “her people” – to crawl her way out again.

Find more of Taylor’s aBillionDaysOfParenthood here.

The Resilient is a podcast about powerful people, like you and me. It’s an eavesdrop session on their toughest times, and what they’ve done since then. It’s about life transitions, difficult decisions and unexpected twists and turns. Because life happens. It’s brought to you by FlowerApp.com and is produced and presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Pillowfort Productions. It is mixed by Katie McMurran.

Listen on Soundcloud and tell us you love us on iTunes!

The Resilient podcast archive guaranteed to restore your faith in humanity

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 22:30:13 +0000

Tomorrow, the latest episode of The Resilient lands in your podcast feeds. And by golly, is it a stormer! In it, I speak with UK-based comedienne, former psychotherapist and current “flailing mother” Taylor Glenn about how Twitter became her best counsellor, and muse.

But before you get your head around that, you can revisit our whole archive of stories of resilience in the series, and remind yourself that it truly is possible survive the awful times, and to create true beauty from them.

Favourites include Paralympian Liz Johnson, who won a Gold medal in the 2008 Beijing games, Polar adventurer Ben Saunders, who found his feet again after conquering his ultimate challenge, and Alua Arthur, whose guidance at the end of life has delivered loved ones and strangers to a dignified and graceful death.

And there’s more! First-time Dad Josh faces sleepless nights and the awesome unknown, peripatetic Toni Myers leans on Facebook when things go wrong, Dr Sue Black leaves behind a violent past to become one of the UK’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, and Dr Kelsey Crowe empowers grievers and their loved ones to work together towards health and well-being.

See you tomorrow!

Introducing The Resilient: a podcast about powerful people like you and me

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:33:21 +0000

For most people, the word “doula” is associated with the beginning of life. But for Alua Arthur, a certified Death Doula, it refers to anyone who helps with a transition. Since 2013, she’s helped many people transition through the end of life.

But despite the nature of her career, her story is full of joy, discovery and infectious belly laughs. And, naturally, loss. Because life happens.

Alua is the first person profiled in The Resilient, a podcast of intimate interviews brought to you by Flower and Pillowfort Productions. The Resilient is a series of stories told by people who, like Alua, have faced personal challenges that gave them the strength, the tenacity and the fortitude to change their lives, even when it didn’t seem possible to keep going. It celebrates the their choices, their mistakes, and the amazing things that happened because.

And that’s what this series is about: it’s about discovering how other people have faced their darkest hours. It’s about learning about their personal resources so we can build our own. It’s about life changes. It’s about chapters. It’s about empathy. It’s about transition.

It’s about a British computer scientist who never imagined she’d be decorated by the Queen thirty years after she left a violent husband on Christmas Eve, with three young kids and a suitcase full of diapers.

It’s about a little girl who was separated from her sister in war-torn Europe, and their reunion 60 years later.

It’s about a first-time mother. An inmate at the end of his sentence. A refugee. A reluctant caregiver taking time out from her career to help her Dad.

The Resilent gives space and time to the voices of powerful everyday people who inspire; they aren’t experts in resilience because they’ve trained, but because they’ve lived. They’re people – like you and me – who’ve been through tough times and have survived.

When my good friend Jean phoned me up last October to pick my brains about a podcast, neither of us expected this series to play a significant part in my own transition.

There’s a reason Alua’s is the first story I sought out.

Listen, and be inspired.

[By Me @] Financial Times: A Narrow Approach to Broadband in Britain

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 15:48:20 +0000

Despite the fact that British adults spend on average more time online than asleep, and use their internet connections to do everything from switching on the lights to finding a mate, access is not considered as important as the electricity that powers homes or the water running from taps.

Should the Internet be classed as a public utility? I debate the question in this weekend’s Financial Times.

Power of Privacy: the film

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 22:19:35 +0000

We have a responsibility to protect our privacy in the digital age. Now, I’m not excusing the role of institutions in this human rights issue, but while they navigate the rocky landscape thrown up by the digital world, we need to get real about how to live responsibly with our data.

I’ve always been careful with my online self, and have tried to keep the important bits offline. And so, with The Guardian and encryption company Silent Circle, I set out on a journey of (online) self-discovery to find out how exposed I actually am after more than two decades of life on the internet.

This is the full 28-minute film – previously released in five-minute shorts – that resulted.

Enjoy.

Keep It In The Ground: the British Journalism Award nomination!

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 23:03:09 +0000

Huge congratulations to the Keep it In The Ground team at The Guardian for their nomination for Best Campaign in the British Journalism Awards!

I presented The Biggest Story In The World, the campaign’s 12-episode investigative podcast series. It was a only small part of the paper-wide climate change effort, which served as the final major project of outgoing editor Alan Rusbridger. Keep It In The Ground had a dual purpose: to get real action to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and to tell an old story in a new way.

My favourite episodes of the podcast are:

Episode 5: Economics
The Guardian’s Economics editor Larry Elliot looks at the numbers behind the three potential outcomes if we stopped using fossil fuels: deep green, light green or no green at all.

Episode 6: Psychology
In this episode, we dig deeper into the reasons why no one wants to talk about climate change, and what techniques have failed before.

Episode 9: Religion
The international spiritual institutions are probably the most crucial ingredient in persuading people to engage with the subject. What can The Guardian – and other climate change campaigners – learn from them about engagement and storytelling?

But truth be told, they’re all worth a listen.

The campaign continues! Phase II was announced in October, running up to the summit in Paris in December. Sign up and continue to make this an issue of extreme urgency and importance.

The BJA gongs are distributed 1 December. In the meantime, once again: congratulations to the team!

Power of Privacy: thinking creatively

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:33:44 +0000

This week’s episode of The Guardian’s Power of Privacy video series asks whether we should turn the privacy debate on its head and – timely, this – open everything up rather than shutting it down.

We go to Japan, to meet the people who created a radiation detector in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident completely from open source materials. The ability to innovate quickly means they were able to iterate seven times to perfect the original model in less than 18 months.

For business, this is extraordinary.

But it means changing how you view data ownership.

Watch it here, and check out the other episodes in the series here.

Power of Privacy: Taking Control

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:36:12 +0000

Tomorrow’s episode of The Guardian’s investigation of privacy in the digital age sees me trying to take back control after information is released into the wild – without prior consent or knowledge.

We visit Mario Gonzales, the catalyst case for Europe’s controversial Right to be Forgotten, to find out how to represent ourselves in the best possible light in an age where information is recorded in perpetuity.

We meet activists who teach encryption techniques to small businesses, journalists and women – and ask whether this is really the best solution to keeping information private in our digital lives.

We find out more – after I’ve been doxxed and hacked – about what I can do to keep myself and my business safe in the 21st century.

Episode 3 is released tomorrow! Catch it at The Guardian.

iWonder: Who made the web so hard to control?

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 21:17:23 +0000

The BBC has released new content for the iWonder project based on the award-winning flagship BBC 2 series The Virtual Revolution. As the presenter, I had the opportunity to write the provocation around the video. Here’s a taster:

We wouldn’t have the same freedom of access if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t released the web to the world for free. We wouldn’t have the same freedom of expression if Vint Cerf and Bob Khan hadn’t created an unbreakable network. We wouldn’t have had the same freedom of thought if the people who populated the early web hadn’t instilled their culture into the fabric of the technology. Their decisions were made within the economic, political and social climates of their time, and they have had a profound and lasting impact on the most important communication technology of our time.

The series hasn’t aged much at all. What do you think?

Digital Human series 8 starts today!

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 11:57:50 +0000

Tune in to BBC Radio 4 today at 4:30pm UK time to listen to the first episode of the new series of the award-winning Digital Human! You can expect some incredible stories, plus some extended content online – including specially commissioned art from our resident illustrator.

It’s been a remarkable fortnight reliving the best of our more than 40 episodes every night on BBC Radio 4; props to our producer Vic for landing a Pick of the Week from Isy Suttie for the atmospheric and eerie celebration of Abandon.

Vic is the first producer up this series, with more thoughtful stories about what makes us human in the 21st century. Listen in at 4:30pm UK time (and on iPlayer after) to find out how online detectives track down the true identities of missing and found persons, when traditional detection methods have failed.

This is crowdsourcing at its most urgent.

We’re on every week at the same time, so tune in! And don’t forget to check out our jam-packed Tumblr for the background check, and exclusive goodies.