A Point of View BBC Radio 4

Sara Wheeler reflects on the experience of being a sibling to her brother who has a lifelong disability.
"Posting on social media on National Siblings Day, which fell on a Wednesday this year, brothers and sisters like me express pride. 'You love them more, not less' is a common thread. Because what all this is really about is the sibling's acute awareness of the lack of empathy routinely shown to the disabled - after all, childhood gives us, the siblings, a unique perspective. It's 'Does he take sugar?' times ten - ignoring the point of view of the disabled person and not even trying to stand in her shoes. Ask us. We know."
Producer: Sheila Cook
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Penny Murphy

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the extraordinary experience of ‘crossing the rubicon separating non-motherhood from matrescence’.
‘I had never quite put aside an abiding ambivalence about having a baby, even during pregnancy,’ writes Zoe.
But in the space of thirty minutes - and the delivery of a baby girl by C-section - Zoe says, ‘my hop over the long-tended, long-contemplated border with motherland rapidly resolved as her tiny features came into focus and a sense of interestingness became a sense of desperate affection and even of familiarity.’
Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

A L Kennedy argues that, as a country with low productivity, we must urgently address our unhealthy relationship with work.
But creating more workaholics like herself, she says, is the last thing we should be doing.
'Toxic work doesn't just blight our business hours - it wearies our affection, steals our time for each other,' Alison writes.
'We rely on free moments and free energy to invent, to recharge, to create. An exhausted, stressed population is docile, but doesn't solve problems well.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Gray assesses what's going wrong for liberals in the US election.
'It's not chiefly Joe Biden's alleged faltering mental powers that lie behind Trump's march to the White House', John writes. 'Far more, it's the evident inability of American liberals to learn from their mistakes.'
And he believes they are displaying a 'reckless hubris' for which they risk being severely punished come November.

Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Adam Gopnik warns of our tendency to normalise evil behaviour. What may pass for entertainment in Mafia movies, must be seen through a different lens in real life.
"The risk of crime is not crime alone, but the abyss that opens at our feet when once we have decided that the rules that count for other people don't count for us."
Producer: Sheila Cook
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Will Self believes we are reaching a state of 'peak envy'.
'Is it any surprise,' Will writes, 'that in this, arguably the second century of self, when for the most part humans see nothing around them but images of those better off than themselves, envy should be quite so epidemic: a greenish toxin - the very mustard gas of modernity.'
Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith