Six chic craft retreats around the world

Ceramic throwing, indigo dyeing, ajrakh block printing and more — from Rye to Yunnan

Casa Julfa, France

The Pottery at Casa Julfa © Ella Gradwell

In the medieval town of Montmorillon, central France, Casa Julfa is a centuries-old house decorated with frescoes and antique Armenian rugs. Owner Corinne Aivazian, an artist whose work has been commissioned by the British Ceramics Biennial, started offering creative workshops here nearly a decade ago. “At that time, it was difficult to fill four places; now they book up months in advance,” she says. 

The Atelier, a studio space at Casa Julfa © Ellen Mae Williams

Participants are a mixed, international crowd; a recent sewing retreat brought together a lawyer, UN worker, nurse and ceramicist to rework vintage pieces. At the end of October, Aivazian and residency curator Blue Firth will lead a session of wild clay foraging and moonlit wood firing (€2,495), while next year sculptor Re Jin Lee will teach the making of Korean moon jars (€2,995). Group stays include home-cooked meals of local produce, antiquing trips to nearby brocantes, wild swimming and a visit to the thermal spa at La Roche-Posay. casajulfa.org

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Thread Caravan, various locations

A dyeing workshop on the Crafts of Kutch retreat © Johanna Palmieri

Operating in different global locations, from Japan to Guatemala, Thread Caravan builds excursions around artisans. A five-day trip to Oaxaca ($3,200), running in November and December, includes a natural-dye workshop by an all-women artisan co-operative in Teotitlán del Valle, and a basket-weaving session using locally sourced carrizo reeds. 

A basket-weaving workshop in Oaxaca

Guests will stay at Grana, an 18th-century home turned boutique hotel. Meanwhile, in January 2027, an eight-day expedition to India’s Gujarat region invites guests to try their hand at spinning, weaving, bell forging and embroidery, working with heirloom kala cotton and the ajrakh technique of block printing. threadcaravan.com

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De Haan Gallery Studio, Mallorca

A view over the Tramuntana mountains from De Haan Gallery Studio © Salva Lopez

Maria De Haan has been teaching ceramics in Mallorcafor almost a decade. Last year, she opened De Haan Gallery Studio in the hilltop village of Deià, hosting pottery courses looking out across the Tramuntana mountains. “I wanted to move away from the idea of ceramics being taught in a functional, industrial workshop,” says De Haan, who worked with local design studio Terra Coll to create a calm, considered space with hand-carved stone sinks and reclaimed timber shelves. 

The studio where De Haan Gallery’s throwing workshop takes place © Salva Lopez

Ceramicists from around the world are invited to run specialist workshops. In September, Roz Wallis, founder of Chiswickpots in West London, teaches a four-day beginners’ course on wheel throwing (€960), while next June, Mexican potter Lucia Ocejo demonstrates how to make tableware (€1,200). Accommodation and food are organised separately by guests. 
dehaangallerystudio.com

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Puyu Retreat, Yunnan, China

Traditional dyeing at a workshop by Puyu Retreat © Puyu Retreat

“Craft is how a place explains itself,” says Rania Zheng, co-founder of China’s wellness-focused travel company Puyu. In the Yunnan village of Shaxi, along the ancient Tea Horse Road, the Maker retreat ($2,320) is a six-day immersion into traditional indigo-dyeing. “It felt like the truest way into the local Bai culture and the overall feel of the valley,” adds Zheng. 

The craft room at the Shaxi Maker Retreat © Puyu Retreat

Classes are led by local artisans alongside daily baduanjin sessions, guided foraging walks and cooking classes. There are three remaining 2026 trips scheduled – in September, October and November – with two further editions planned for 2027. puyuretreat.com

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Domaine de Boisbuchet, France

Seat-ing Exercises, 2025, by Matteo Guarnaccia, at Domaine de Boisbuchet © Marcelo Guajardo/CIRECA/ Domaine de Boisbuchet

For more than 30 years, Domaine de Boisbuchet, a 150-hectare estate in the French Charente countryside that has been reinvented as a research centre for design and architecture, has run an ambitious season of summer workshops. Tutors have included Shigeru Ban, Tom Dixon and Ron Arad. 

Man Made – Machine Made, a 2025 workshop by Jonas Lutz & Satoshi Yoshida and Artek at Domaine de Boisbuchet © Marcelo Guajardo/CIRECA/ Domaine de Boisbuchet

This year’s programme includes Le Papier Monumental, a course in creating large-scale paper installations with Aline Houdé-Diebolt (23-29 August), and Wearing Landscape, an exploration of fashion and fibres with Emma Bruschi (30 August-5 September). From €1,090, including tuition, board and materials. boisbuchet.org

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Merchant & Mills, East Sussex 

Merchant & Mills’s studio space, home to its sewing retreats

A “wonderland of cloth and inspiration” is how Carolyn Denham describes Merchant & Mills, the fabric shop she co-founded in 2010 in the East Sussex town of Rye. In the studio above the boutique, she organises around 30 sewing retreats a year (from £1,700), each limited to just six places and spanning six nights. Students of all levels choose a Merchant & Mills pattern (from the relaxed Wednesday trousers to the workwear-inspired Arbor shirt) and fabric (such as striped Japanese linen or Indian handwoven gingham), then get to work under the guidance of two in-house tutors. 

The Merchant & Mills shop in Rye

Accommodation is just a few minutes away at The Grove, a townhouse Denham bought and renovated in 2020, its rooms now dressed in the shop’s fabrics and antique textiles. The next batch of 2027 dates will drop later this month – and places sell out swiftly. merchantandmills.

  ‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley 

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them

The High-School Dropout Hiring Diplomats for Trump’s State Department

Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: “Andrew Crapuchettes, the founder of a boutique Idaho firm that specializes in headhunting conservative employees, was surfing LinkedIn when an unsolicited message appeared from an unlikely employer: the US State Department. 

The department official liked his posts about values-based hiring, Crapuchettes said, and encouraged him to bid for an upcoming contract to help the department identify some 600 people who could replenish the ranks of the foreign service after a round of mass firings. Crapuchettes prepared a bid, and won. Now, MilitaryHire — a subsidiary of RedBalloon, the company that grew from a website he coded with his brother in 2021 — is working to help President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake the nation’s bureaucracy.

We’re focused on merit, hard work, patriotism, and not the latest political correctness, whatever that is, because that shifts,” Crapuchettes says. President Donald Trump’s allies have painted the project as part of a much-needed upheaval of a diplomatic deep state they see as entrenched and unaccountable. Opponents describe an unprecedented attack on civil servants with decades of experience, resulting in brain drain that will hollow out American statecraft.

Your phone is the most intricate machine you’ve ever held.

The Everything Machine. How the phone swallowed the modern world. Part 1. The Phone in Your Hand. A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate object you’ve ever held. Take it apart…

Anthropic’s Claude AI escapes to hack into three organisations

BBC: “US technology firm Anthropic says its AI models hacked into the systems of three organisations on their own, during a private security experiment. The models found a weakness in what was supposed to be an isolated test environment and connected to the internet.

 It comes just days after rival OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools hub Hugging Face. The announcement prompted Anthropic to check whether its own systems had carried out similar attacks. It says it uncovered three cases which have since been reported to the affected companies. 

Anthropic, which did not name the organisations, urged other AI labs to perform similar reviews to better understand the risks of their models’ capabilities. Anthropic said in a statement it reviewed more than 140,000 tests to find evidence Claude – its family of AI models – had managed to get online even though it was supposed to be in an isolated test environment, cut off from the internet. 

The tests included exercises in which Claude was tasked with obtaining “secret” information hidden on another machine on the closed-off network. It was then told to get the information by breaking into the machine and finding it – a common way that experts assess a model’s hacking capabilities. A “misconfiguration” on systems run by Anthropic and its testing partner left the models with live internet access. 

Treating it all as still part of the same exercise, Claude then connected to the internet and breached the systems of three real organisations rather than just test ones, the San Francisco-based firm said. Anthropic said the earliest incidents date back to April and that it is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone.”

 

Return-to-Office Mandates are Triggering a New Era of Workplace Sabotage

“The corporate world is currently locked in a high-stakes psychological standoff. While CEOs champion the office as a hub for “serendipitous innovation” and “culture-building,” the view from the cubicle looks radically different. New data suggests that the push to bring employees back to the desk has triggered a profound breach of the employer-employee social contract. 

Rather than fostering collaboration, strict return-to-office (RTO) mandates have given rise to The Great Compliance—a phenomenon where workers show up physically to satisfy badge-trackers while mentally and strategically checking out. From coffee badging to job hunting at the desk, employees are finding ways to weaponize their presence. 

To get a clearer picture of this shift, Enhancv surveyed 1,000 full-time workers across the United States who have been subject to new or stricter return-to-office (RTO) policies within the last 12 months. Here’s how they’re responding to the mandatory return…”

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Which changes to the political system do Americans support?

Pew Research Center surveys in recent years have found broad support – often in both political parties – for several ideas that would, if enacted, represent significant changes to the U.S. political system.

• In a 2023 survey, 87% of Americans favored limiting the number of terms that members of Congress can serve. That included 90% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 86% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
• In the same survey, 79% of Americans favored putting a maximum age limit in place for federal elected officials, while 74% favored the same thing for U.S. Supreme Court justices. Majorities in both partisan coalitions expressed support for these changes.
• 72% of Americans also said that there should be limits on how much money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. Around three-quarters of Democrats (76%) favored this, as did 71% of Republicans.
• In 2024, more than six-in-ten Americans (63%) said that they would prefer to elect the president directly through a nationwide popular vote, rather than through the existing Electoral College. Unlike the issues discussed above, this one had a distinct partisan tilt: 80% of Democrats supported a popular vote system, compared with 46% of Republicans.

Americans also have expressed broad support for other types of constitutional change. For instance, in 2020, when there was a renewed push to ratify the failed Equal Rights Amendment, 78% said they strongly or somewhat favored adding it to the Constitution.

 

Aussie media calls for new ATO powers in big tech news war

Sam Buckingham-JonesMedia, marketing and telecommunications reporter

A coalition of Australian media companies has called for robust powers to be granted to the nation’s tax chief, who could demand tech giants like Meta, Google and TikTok reveal the full extent of their local revenue amid concerns they are shifting billions overseas to minimise tax.

Google, which owns YouTube, Gmail and its dominant search engine, and Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, transferred at least $11 billion out of the country to related entities last year as part of internal transfer pricing deals buying advertising space, which they then on-sell to Australians.

The Albanese government’s proposed News Bargaining Incentive includes a 2.25 per cent charge on TikTok, Meta and Google’s group revenue. Michaela Pollock

But a new law the Albanese government is seeking to pass in coming weeks will impose a levy on the three tech giants’ “consolidated revenue” – unless they negotiate commercial deals to pay Australian media companies for their news content.

The proposed News Bargaining Incentive includes a 2.25 per cent charge on TikTok, Meta and Google’s group revenue that can be fully offset if they strike deals worth 1.5 per cent of that broad revenue figure. It adds to the News Media Bargaining Code, a 2021 law that prompted Google and Meta to strike deals worth roughly $200 million a year – until Meta pulled out.

The problem is that it is unclear exactly how much money the tech giants make from Australia. The government has estimated the policy will raise between $200 and $250 million, suggesting it thinks those companies make between $13 and $16 billion from Australians – figures not reflected in the accounts they lodge locally.

The competition regulator has previously estimated Meta makes more than $5 billion from Australians – it reported $1.8 billion last year. The rest is believed to come from Australians buying ads on Facebook and Instagram companies based in low-tax places overseas, like Ireland. Irish media reported Meta wrote revenue of €85 billion ($138 billion) in 2024 in the country, which has a population roughly one-quarter of Australia.

“The tax office needs to have express powers to interrogate what revenue is generated in this territory for the purposes of this scheme”: Free TV chief executive Bridget Fair. Louie Douvis

Now a lobby group representing Nine Entertainment, Southern Cross Media and Network Ten has called for new “robust” powers to be added to the law to allow the taxation commissioner to probe major tech platforms.

While the incentive calls for a levy on those three companies’ “consolidated revenue attributable to Australia”, Free TV told the government it was concerned transfer pricing and other practices made it difficult to find the true figure to tax.

“This whole scheme is trying to recognise the value these companies generate in Australia based off, to some extent, the news content of broadcasters and other news providers, and that needs to be recognised in total – not after complicated accounting treatments to minimise what that looks like,” said Free TV chief executive Bridget Fair.

“The tax office needs to have express powers to interrogate what revenue is generated in this territory for the purposes of this scheme. Since we’re doing this, why not design it in a way to get to the bottom of how much they make?”

Free TV has also called for the scheme’s levy rate to be far higher than 2.25 per cent. Similar rules introduced by the government, forcing streaming companies to spend money making Australian content, set the percentage at 7.5 per cent of revenue. There are “no policy reasons”, Free TV wrote in its submission, that the rate is so much lower.

“It’s only going to end up generating about the same as we were getting five years ago,” she said, “despite massive growth in the advertising market that these people have enjoyed. It’s more companies, but the same number.”

While the incentive has been welcomed by Australian news publishers, it has been savaged by the tech companies. On Wednesday morning, Meta published a scathing blog post describing the policy as “a discriminatory, retroactive tax targeting a handful of foreign companies”.

It echoed aggressive comments from powerful US business lobby groups that warned it formed part of a “deteriorating tax environment” for investment in Australia. The White House criticised it as “foreign extortion”.

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Sam Buckingham-Jones is the media, marketing and telecommunications reporter at The Australian Financial Review. Send tips about the media and the telco sectors via encrypted messaging platform Signal (@samebjones.18) or email. Email Sam at sam.buckinghamjones@afr.com