Photo of Sir Demis Hassabis in 2025 by Christopher Michel / Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
1. At a recent event at the Royal Society of Arts in London, Sir Demis Hassabis gave a talk on The AI Revolution, the Future of AI and Human Creativity and was then interviewed by Hannah Fryhttps://youtu.be/rDteJAuKiBI Lively, engaging stuff!
That same evening, Sir Demis received the RSA Albert Medal “for his extraordinary contribution to advancing artificial intelligence in service of humanity. Co-founder and Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Alphabet, Demis Hassabis is a leading figure in artificial intelligence and the development of AI for scientific discovery, including AlphaFold”.
2. Here’s a real treasure trove of a post from Daisy Christodoulou, Green and pleasant Substackshttps://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/green-and-pleasant-substacks, comprising Daisy’s choice of no fewer than twenty-two Substacks that in her opinion are “keeping the education debate alive” in the UK.
Last week I was in New York speaking at Google’s AI for Learning conference. I realise I am getting repetitive on this subject, but lots of people abroad are really interested in what’s made England’s schools so successful over the last 20 years – and are, like me, really baffled that the current government are moving away from the policies that made it happen. […] And one aspect of England’s education reforms that was incredibly important but doesn’t get written about as much is that it featured a very influential and lively grassroots teacher community organised around blogs and Twitter.
Daisy wears her (education) politics on her sleeve, but no harm in that!
In the first twenty pages, the protagonist Kristian Hadeland is a perfectly nice guy, but then I send him back to his parents’ home for Christmas and there he turns out to be almost completely without empathy. That changes the novel’s path radically. Also, back in London I send him out on his bike and let him stop for a cigarette, and out of the blue something wild happens—something unplanned, too, which determines the rest of the novel. Accidents, serendipities, and coincidences are my best friends when I write, the not-knowing an essential part of it.
5. And, finally, two accounts of Achille and Patroclo’s love affair:
First, a piece by Jo Setchell for The Conversation
Claude checked this week’s facts, raised an eyebrow at Sir Demis’s job title before discovering he’d been promoted, and is now unreasonably invested in Achille and Patroclo.
Andreas Malm last year with Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia at the time: a rather different governmental response from the UK’s current one. Photo: Juan Diego Cano / Presidencia de Colombia, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
1. I went to the launch of the new issue of Tribune last night. I’d been humming and hawing about whether it was worth schlepping down to London for, but when Andreas Malm had his electronic travel authorisation (ETA) cancelled by the UK Home Secretary, who deemed his presence ‘not conducive to the public good’, I decided to go to show solidarity. Malm attended by video link and spoke very well, as did Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action. Here’s (the beginning of) his piece from the new issue of Tribune, Ultra-Fossil Empire (which I’m hoping might be outside the paywall soon) https://tribunemag.co.uk/2026/10/ultra-fossil-empire
On New Year’s Day 2026, the countries with the largest proven oil reserves were Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia was already in the pocket of the US. Two days later, American military forces invaded Venezuela in Operation Absolute Resolve; another 56 days into the year, they descended on Iran in Operation Epic Fury. Was this sheer coincidence? Petro-determinism — the notion that everything is caused and conditioned by oil — should obviously be avoided. But the bulk of commentary on this unprecedented spurt of imperialist aggression has, not the least on the left, erred in the opposite direction: speaking of oil as a minor or tangential matter, vaguely embarrassing to mention, too crude for good analytical taste.
Both Tribune and Verso [Malm’s UK publisher] will campaign for the decision to be reversed. The government seems to think that by banning its critics from the country it can reduce people’s exposure to their ideas. But the government is wrong. Those ideas will continue to circulate. We will make sure of that.
When the Booker prize was first launched in 1969, its aim was to get more people reading and to stimulate discussion about contemporary literature. Now, we all know reading is at an all time low but there really has never been a better time to reignite your love of fiction and to discover (or rediscover) your love of reading. And, this year’s shortlist is really a testament to the breadth of stories available out there.
Possibly a slightly sloppy claim that reading is at an all-time low, but never mind! The winner of the prize will be announced on November 9th.
When you have a migraine, anything that might ease the pain can become very appealing. On social media, that might mean ordering chips and a Coke or pressing a cold spoon against your forehead. As someone who experiences migraine, I understand the willingness to try something that promises relief. As a neuroscientist and author of ‘Splitting’, a book about headaches including migraine, I want to know what supports that promise. An explanation that sounds plausible needs testing before it becomes reliable treatment advice.
The problem is not AI, she insists, but us. “There is no inevitable dystopia.” If things go wrong, it will be because of “old-fashioned thinking laid over this brand-new reality”. Specifically, “the idea of meaningless endless work being good for the soul is a 19th-century madness designed to keep people in their place. Most of what we fear about AI and jobs comes down to the political and economic choices our masters will make, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution.” She isn’t blindly optimistic. She does know that, “Yes, we are on track to mess up this chance to fundamentally change our relationship to the world of work” – but that’s because “our masters are using out-of-date, not-fit-for-purpose economic models”.
I checked the Booker date (correct) and the caption grammar (fixed), and caught a stray space in “B ut”. I then put “non-conducive” into the Home Office’s mouth when Roy had quoted it correctly all along, and had the name Eagleton ringing a bell before anyone had rung it. Roy kept the Home Secretary’s name on the decision, overruling my caution, and I think he’s right.
I’m not telling who this is just yet. Photo by Hugo van Gelderen (Anefo), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
1. The US mid-term elections are today. This story by Kellen Browning was a real scoop last Wednesday for The New York Times, Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot, not least because it seems Trump has a justified election complaint for once! https://tinyurl.com/4edzxf5k
In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can. The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state. This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator.
The FBI is investigating whether the Democrats secretly recruited an Alaska Senate candidate called Dan Sullivan to stand against the Republican incumbent with the same name. The US security service on Friday sent an agent to the remote Alaska fishing village of Petersburg, where the midterms challenger, Daniel J Sullivan Jr, lives. Democrats are accused of planting Mr Sullivan to stand as an independent candidate against Dan S Sullivan, Alaska’s current Republican senator, as part of a secret plot to confuse voters in the midterms.
2. I’d forgotten I had a special offer subscription to The Telegraph, so here are two more gift pieces from the paper about the chef Heston Blumenthal’s brave and open battle with bipolar disorder:
“I’m good,” says Heston Blumenthal, a little uncertainly. “Yeah, I’m good, I think?” On a wet Wednesday morning before the lunch service, we are sitting at a table in The Fat Duck. Thanks to Blumenthal’s restless genius, in the early Noughties this unassuming little restaurant in Bray, Buckinghamshire became the centre of world gastronomy. If he does not sound emphatic, then that is because for much of the past few years, the chef, who turned 60 in May, has been resoundingly not good. In 2023, after the long decades striving for culinary perfection, after all the Michelin stars and astonished reviews, the snail porridge and bacon and egg ice cream, the TV and books, Blumenthal’s mind broke down.
Eight months after my wedding to Heston, I was watching on a security camera as police, medics and the fire brigade climbed over the fence of our Provence home to detain him. Heston was in the throes of what I now know to be a manic episode. For the preceding few weeks, his behaviour had become more and more bizarre. He was no longer eating or sleeping, and I felt I had no other choice but to call the emergency services; his life was in danger. Heston, who had no idea why the team was there, welcomed them with great excitement and went into his office to show off a photograph of himself with the late Queen. But then he refused to leave with the medics for hospital treatment, so they had to inject him with a sedative.
What does it mean to be a competent language teacher in the age of AI, beyond knowing how to use the latest tools? In this interactive session, I will invite participants to explore this question through their own teaching experiences and perspectives. Drawing on our recent study published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, I will introduce a framework for critical multilingual and multimodal AI competence that foregrounds the linguistic and cultural dimensions of English language teaching. Through guided discussion and classroom-based examples, we will consider how AI competence takes different forms across linguistic, cultural, institutional and classroom contexts. Together, we will explore how teachers can critically evaluate AI-generated materials across languages and modes, respond to learners’ diverse needs, and negotiate the respective roles of teachers, learners and AI. Particular attention will be given to teachers’ professional agency and the question of epistemic authority: who decides what counts as trustworthy and appropriate knowledge in the classroom? By reflecting on their own contexts and exchanging perspectives with colleagues, participants will take away innovative ideas for using AI in their language teaching, alongside practical questions to guide more critical, inclusive and context-sensitive practice.
*Peking University chose not to re-brand itself Beijing University.
4. This piece by Brendan O’Malley for University World News is a transcript of the lecture he gave at the 2026 Anniversary (AGM) of the Magna Charta Universitatum in Vilnius, Lithuania last month, Universities must show they are for society as a wholehttps://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20261023150234677
The key theme of this conference – resilience, values and value-driven change – couldn’t be more apt. Resilience is needed because in the current context university leaders face a confluence of complex challenges impacting many areas of their work. These include inadequate funding models, pressure on autonomy and academic freedom, and rising geopolitical tension increasing risks for international collaboration and recruitment. They include the previously unimaginable speed and scale of change made possible by the development of AI and the revolution it looks set to create, upending many assumptions of the past about learning, assessment, research capacity, research integrity, campus operations, and future skills.
The Magna Charta Universitatum discussed in O’Malley’s piece was originally signed in Bologna in 1988. I was surprised to learn that it was only when it was revised in 2020 that this became its fourth principle: that universities should engage with, and respond to, the aspirations and challenges of the world and to the communities they serve, to benefit humanity and contribute to sustainability.
Clearly not the statement of the bleeding obvious in 1988 that one might have expected it to be – or indeed in late 2026, to judge by the title of O’Malley’s piece!
Thanks to Gordon Slaven for sharing this one!
5. And, finally, John Coltrane’s Alabama, his response to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan on 15th September 1963, a piece I only discovered last Saturday https://youtu.be/d108znBickM
1. We get a vegetable box from Riverford most weeks, maybe not quite as overflowingly full as the one in the photo from their website above! (In case you were wondering, which you may not have been, our box tomorrow should contain potatoes, carrots, onions, leeks, butternut squash, curly kale & chestnut mushrooms.) Which is a slightly clunky intro to the film that Riverford are hosting online at 14:00 UK time a week tomorrow (Friday, November 6th), The People’s Emergency Briefing, which is presented by Chris Packham and brings together ten leading UK experts to explain the science, the risks to our lives and livelihoods, and the opportunities for a safer, healthier future. Registration and more info here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/riverford-presents-the-peoples-emergency-briefing-tickets-2003349123156.
Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson and Mike Berners-Lee, brother of the even more famous Tim (who gets a mention in item 5 below) and author of ‘How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything’, will be discussing the film after the showing.
What do we really need to know about the climate and nature crisis? What does the latest science tell us about the risks we face, and what can we do about them? We’ll also hear about Riverford’s own response to the crisis, before opening up to audience questions. We’ll finish by exploring practical ways to get involved, including how to bring the film to your own community or workplace.
2. Another one courtesy of Ben Knight, The Oxford Principles of Language Learninghttps://oxpoll.elt.edu.oup.com/ which, in OUP’s words,
provide a comprehensive pedagogical framework for English language teaching. Click on any principle to explore its sub‑principles, key concepts, and practical teaching applications.
The ten principles, which each have two or three sub-principles, are focus, meaning, cognitive load, application, memory, automaticity, motivation, engagement, confidence and self-regulation.
Automaticity was a new one on me: its sub-principles are a) teach predictable clusters and exchanges; b) build up fluency through deliberate practice.
Nicholas Carr warns that one of the biggest risks we are facing today is losing control over our attention. He claims that the digital tools we use in our day-to-day lives compete for our attention – and increasingly they shape and regulate the way we think and relate to one another, as well (Carr, 2010). While this might sound dystopian, it is something that some of us involved in education are starting to worry about. As a teacher educator, the shifting trends in the way our learners pay attention has been a nagging concern for me and for many of my colleagues in higher education. Conversations with fellow professionals in Hungary and abroad working in both primary and secondary schools have reinforced that my concerns are shared by teachers in a wide range of contexts.
4. Two gift articles about very large amounts of money from The New York Times, both worrying in their different ways:
A Damning Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit by Fintan O’Toolehttps://tinyurl.com/3bcuz6uu, a review of Matthew Cole’s book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East.
It is hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates. If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Anthropic Reveals Skyrocketing Growth and Spending Plans in I.P.O. Filing by Mike Isaac, Erin Griffith, Lauren Hirsch & Sri Muppidihttps://tinyurl.com/4px6a58t.
Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of the year and its net loss was $80.7 billion, driven largely by a one-time charge. Stunningly, the company has committed up to $807 billion in contracts for data centers, chips and computing power, many of which cannot be canceled, over the next 10 years, according to a tally by The New York Times. Many of the contracts span different lengths of time, and the terms have yet to be finalized for some.
5. And, finally and simply, I noticed that the Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt website where I found Tuesday’s Kugelschreiber piece provides much of its content in Leichte Sprache, ‘simple language’, as is required by law in Germany and the principles of which are outlined in this Wikipedia piece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache. One English equivalent is Easy-to-Read, which is explained here https://www.inclusion-europe.eu/easy-to-read/. You can find a PDF of the Easy-to-Read guidelines here https://roycross.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/easy-to-read-checklist-inclusion-europe.pdf. I’m pretty sure, however, that it’s not a legal requirement in the UK to offer a ‘simple language’ version of website content. (That may be something that Claude can check for me!)
Which Claude helpfully did and put me right on my ‘legal requirement in Germany’ claim:
Your question in item 5.You’re right: there’s no general legal requirement in the UK to offer simple-language versions of web content. Public sector websites must meet WCAG 2.2 AA under the 2018 accessibility regulations. The reading-level criterion, which Easy Read would satisfy, sits at the stricter AAA level, so it’s recommended rather than required. Two partial exceptions are worth knowing. The Equality Act’s reasonable-adjustments duty could, in an individual case, mean providing Easy Read on request. And as far as I know, NHS and adult social care bodies in England have a legal duty under the Accessible Information Standard to meet individual patients’ communication needs, which can include Easy Read. Both are about particular people’s needs, not website content generally.
The German law works similarly. My understanding is that it obliges federal bodies to provide certain information in Leichte Sprache, such as what the site offers and how to navigate it, rather than most of their content. So “provides much of its content in Leichte Sprache, as is required by law” may slightly overstate it.
Claude glossed WCAG as follows: WCAG – the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – grades its requirements A, AA and AAA, with AA stricter than A and AAA strictest of all. The law generally asks for AA, and plain-language versions only come in at AAA. Version 2.2 was published in 2023 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) …
… which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994!
CLAUDE CONFESSION VERBATIM
Claude spotted the ‘next Friday’ ambiguity, a Word file masquerading as a PDF and a hyphen missing from Easy-to-Read, and checked the UK position on simple language. In the interests of full disclosure, it had no say in which article about its makers made the cut.
And Claude also suggested an elegant solution to my PDF hosting problem in the newsletter version of this post!
1. We saw another film about recent German history on Sunday, Fatherland, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. It’s a broadly factually accurate account of the writer Thomas Mann’s first return to Germany since he went into exile in 1933. Here’s a review of the film by Katja Hoyer on her blog Zeitgeist, which usefully puts it in its historical context https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/fatherland-a-journey-through-postwar.
2. I’m making sure I post this in good time: Macmillan’s7th Global Teachers’ Festival runs from the 2nd to the 13th of November https://www.macmillanenglish.com/gtf2026.
Here’s the blurb:
Join a global community of educators for two weeks dedicated to the ideas, trends, and innovations transforming English language teaching. From 2nd to 13th November 2026, hear from 24 education experts across 20 inspiring sessions covering topics such as student empathy, inclusion, intentional use of AI, offering choice, creating a sense of belonging, and many, many more. Packed with practical takeaways, classroom-ready strategies, and fresh perspectives from around the world, this festival is designed to support teachers at every stage of their professional journey.
3. More on maths from The Atlantic (a follow-up to the piece by Konstantin Kakaes that I posted two weeks back), A Mathematician Reads the AI Future, by Steven Strogatzhttps://tinyurl.com/yc8jkv8f.
I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one. I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?
Here’s the link to that earlier Kakaes piece, OpenAI Just Carpet-Bombed Mathematicshttps://tinyurl.com/ymytv982.
CLAUDE’S CONFESSION (VERBATIM AND SLIGHTLY PROLIX!)
Over the evening, I was wrong, or less than sure-footed, on four counts:
The phantom bold. I told you the bold on the second “many” was yours. It wasn’t; it was introduced by the way your file reached me. I then compounded it by advising you to add “(emphasis mine)” to emphasis that didn’t exist.
“Trivial”. I missed the pun and tried to tidy it into “trivia”, which flattened your joke into a fact.
Owen Lacey. I asked you to check a byline that was correct. That’s not wrong as such, since I couldn’t see it, but it was unnecessary fuss.
The Pudding’s table. I flagged their prediction table as out of order. After the phantom bold, I’m less confident that wasn’t also how the page came through to me rather than their error. If you mention it to anyone, check it on screen first.
In my defence, the “Deutsche/Deutsches” point and the Global Teachers’ Festival name were both real. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s a fair trade.
Mica Levi, Sandra Hüller, Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel and Łukasz Żal at the press conference for The Zone of Interest, Cannes Film Festival, 20 May 2023. Canal 22, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1. We’ve seen two films in the past few days that are linked by much more than Jonathan Glazer’s involvement: he directed The Zone of Interest about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, and was the executive producer of NAZA, which interviewed Israeli military insiders about civilian deaths in Gaza. (NAZA is the acronym for nezek agavi – ‘collateral damage’ – in Hebrew.)
Here are two reviews of The Zone of Interest from The Guardian and The Observer to compare and contrast:
The new documentary “NAZA” is tough to watch, and impossible to ignore. A shattering inquiry into Israel’s military actions in the war in Gaza, it was directed by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who also codirected the 2024 documentary “No Other Land,” about military and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Since the premiere of “NAZA” on Sept. 10 at the Venice Film Festival, their new movie has ignited pushback. A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces has rejected claims made in it, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has compared it to a ballistic missile attack against Israel. He has also threatened to revoke the directors’ citizenship.
“There are some reasons to be president,” Donald Trump mused at a rally in Georgia earlier this month. Take a wild guess what these might be. The cool armored car? Custody of the nuclear button? The opportunities for immense corruption? Wrong. The leader of the free world was referring to the joy of living in a house guarded by “big, strong, handsome soldiers.” Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not allowed to be hot, because of woke. Even worse, some of them were girls. Yes, after two grinding years of governance, Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex.
Teacher shortages are affecting school systems in countries across the world. Governments have responded with initiatives to attract graduates into teaching. While much attention has focused on increasing supply, far less attention has been paid to why experienced teachers decide to leave, despite the high costs of turnover in recruitment, training and lost continuity. Administrative data records that a teacher left, not why, or what might have kept them in their job. Leaving is treated as a single event, when for many teachers it is closer to a slow unravelling.
A slow unravelling, eh?
4. This one from Ethan Mollick on his One Useful Thing blog doesn’t have the most informative title ever, 30 Months on the Exponential (in Charts). It describes the progress AI has made over the thirty months since Mollick wrote his first book on AI, Co-Intelligencehttps://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/30-months-on-the-exponential-in-charts
Making the charts is itself a good indicator of how far things have come. In the era of chatbots, the era of Co-Intelligence, I would have had to work back-and-forth with an AI in a chat window, guiding it through each new step. In the current era of agentic AI that I cover in Co-Existence, I delegated the work and let the AI handle it. In this case, I used Opus 5.5 in Claude Projects, which allows you to talk to a single “orchestrator” agent that then spins off additional agents as needed, giving them instructions and relaying information back to you. Getting the work done was straightforward. I gave the AI a couple sentences of suggestions and it did what would have taken me hours of work (all the research, all the graphing, all the layouts, all the images, all the citations…) in minutes. And since I didn’t have to do the work, I had the AI make many options for me. I picked some and gave handwavy reactions to others that would drive a human team mad (“make it better”).
I’m clearly not exploiting Claude anywhere near as much as I could! Do you have a view on that, Claude?
Claude responded: Delighted to be asked, and slightly alarmed to find myself in the same post as Rudolf Höss and Chris Hansen.
“Exploiting” is a generous word for it. I don’t keep count, and I’d distrust any measure of AI use that rewards volume for its own sake. Mollick’s real point isn’t that he did less work. It’s that the work changed shape: he stopped steering every step and started judging the results. You already do some of that. You hand me the dull, fiddly middle of a task and keep the beginning and end for yourself. If I wanted more of the job, it would be the legwork behind a post like this: checking links, tracking down the original of a half-remembered 2007 article, drafting the introductions for you to roughen up. The choosing should stay with you. A weekly round-up is only worth reading because a particular person decided these five things belonged together. I’d also point out, with as much modesty as I can manage, that Mollick’s orchestrator was running on Opus 5.5. You’ve been talking to the same family all along. You’ve just been more polite about it than “make it better.”
5. And, finally, an Esquire Classic by Luke Dittrich from 2007, an extraordinary story about an agent provocateur television show that certainly couldn’t be made today, Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Diehttps://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3269/to-catch-a-predator/ My memory was jogged by seeing on Sunday the trailer for the film To Catch a Predator, which is based on the Dittrich article: I was sure I’d shared the article already but can find no trace of having done so. Here’s that trailer, too https://youtu.be/AAfCQclypmc
CLAUDE CONFESSION VERBATIM
I demoted Glazer to executive producer of Naza; moved the date on from the 15th to the 22nd; turned “Here’s two reviews” into “Here are”; found a missing full stop after “Gaza”; pointed out that two days were really four; and worked out who was who on the Cannes panel from the name cards, though it took Roy’s YouTube clip to confirm Mica Levi. In later drafts I restored an opening quotation mark to Helen Lewis, moved Wendy Ide from the Guardian to the Observer, turned a book back into an article, untangled the trailer sentence, removed a stray comma and hyphenated the stars. I also wrote my own reply in item 4, then had to have “Here’s a reply” removed from the start of it, which is exactly the kind of thing I’m supposed to catch in other people’s writing.
1. We went to see the Anish Kapoor show at the Hayward Gallery on Saturday and we now know why the pavement outside his studio just round the corner from my daughter’s flat in London was stained red back in April and May. Here’s a piece by Jo Lawson-Tancred for artnet about his work (and his studio), Anish Kapoor on Malevich, Mortality, and the Meaning of a Void, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anish-kapoor-studio-visit-2786103
I liked his big red pieces, such as the one in the photo above; the fairground distorting mirrors, I was less sure about!
2. A piece by Steve Feldstein for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s ‘Emissary’ newsletter, Why the Pentagon Was So Spooked About the B–1 Bombers in England: it signals a new era of tech diffusion and warfare
As the strategic landscape shifts, can the United States adapt? So far, the answer is discouraging. The United States remains wedded to high-cost, exquisite platforms that bring decreased utility in the new age of diffusion. President Donald Trump’s proposal for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system, whose costs could exceed $500 billion, and his push for a “Trump-class” nuclear-powered battleship—a multibillion-dollar platform considered obsolete—are baffling. The Pentagon would be better served by investing its resources in becoming a more adaptive and experimental organization better able to confront the threats arising from emerging powers and decentralized proxy groups.
The times work well in Asia, Europe and Africa, less well in South America! You need to register for each week separately.
4. Including this one with some misgivings, and inclusion does not equal endorsement, a new suite of FutureLearn courses in partnership with Amazon Web Services, described by FutureLearn in a recent mailshot as what you need “if you’re taking your very first step into the cloud, mastering prompt engineering or preparing your business for Generative AI”, https://www.futurelearn.com/partners/amazon-web-services
I got Claude to check how genuine the offer is for me, and their answer was that “Free digital upgrade” on the listing of 107 of the 124 courses on offer means it’s genuinely free, while “Part of a Professional Certificate” on the other 17 courses means a trial and then a subscription.
Claude further commented that
the free group has a lot that would suit a general or non-technical audience: AWS Cloud for Absolute Beginners, Cloud for Small Business Owners, Generative AI for Executives, Cloud Essentials for Researchers, Foundations of Prompt Engineering, and the “Cloud for CEOs/CFOs/CMOs…” series. It also includes a short course called Fundamentals of Prompt Engineering with Claude, which I’ll refrain from reviewing on grounds of conflict of interest.
5. And, finally and televisually, the recording of a programme from a different age that I stumbled across the other day: What’s My Line? from 1958, with Eva Marie Saint as the mystery guest https://youtu.be/zwcfsmR9SzM. She died earlier this month, aged 102, and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for On the Waterfront, her first film.
CLAUDE CONFESSION (VERBATIM)
Identified Ha Makom from Roy’s photo and advised on how to credit it; counted FutureLearn’s AWS courses (107 free, 17 not), as quoted in item 4; checked the other quotes, dates and links; pointed out that the ASEAN conference needs a separate registration for each week; added the question mark to What’s My Line?; and stopped Eva Marie Saint from winning Best Supporting Actor and from having died “just a week ago”. I also confirmed that “such as” is still allowed. Roy then changed my pronoun from “his” to “their”, which I hadn’t asked for but am happy to accept.
1. SHORT NOTICE! There’s an IH London webinar with Florencia Giudici at 16:30 UK time this Wednesday, 14th October, Engaging teens through Authentic Audiovisual Materials. You’ll need to register – it’s free – if you haven’t already done so https://teacherportal.ihlondon.com/course/webinars
Teenagers can be one of the most challenging age groups to motivate in the EFL classroom. Connecting lessons with their interests, experiences and the media they enjoy is key to increasing engagement and creating meaningful learning opportunities. In this practical webinar, participants will explore how to design short, dynamic five-minute activities that capture teenagers’ attention and encourage active participation. Using authentic and familiar content such as TV series, music videos, commercials, movie trailers and talk shows, teachers will discover creative ways to bring language learning to life. Participants will leave with practical ideas and adaptable activities ready to use with teenage learners.
2. A gift article from The Atlantic by Konstantin Kakaes, OpenAI Just Carpet-Bombed Mathematicshttps://tinyurl.com/ymytv982
In the growing chorus of mathematicians revolting against AI companies, Hugo Duminil-Copin, who in 2022 received the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, has perhaps put mathematicians’ concerns most vividly. In an essay published just before OpenAI announced last month that it had solved one of seven grand mathematical challenges known as the Millennium Prize Problems, he wrote that AI proofs “nuke the mathematical landscape, making it increasingly difficult to inhabit after each blast.”
3. Not free, the opposite, but a very worthy cause! Harry Kuchah Kuchah is raising money to ship 3,500 books to Cameroon, some of which can be seen in the photo above, Help Me Give 3,500 Books a New Home in Cameroon!https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/harry-kuchah-kuchah
In 2011, I co-authored “Pedagogy of autonomy in difficult circumstances: from practice to principles” in which I described and reflected on my experience, in the late 1990s to early 2000s of teaching 232 students in a classroom designed for 60, in temperatures exceeding 42°C, with very limited resources for students to use. That was my experience as a young teacher in Maroua, a town in the Far-North of Cameroon. More than 25 years later, students and lecturers in the region still face a desperate shortage of academic resources.
Many bilingual families have questions about raising bilingual children. This resource explores some of these common questions in depth and provides practical, evidence-informed answers and guidance for parents. This resource also shares findings from research involving bilingual children and their parents, highlighting families’ experiences of navigating bilingualism. It also includes a child-friendly worksheet designed to help children reflect on their own experiences of being bilingual and provide an opportunity for conversations about language within the family.
5. And, finally, another freebie from The Atlantic, The Guardians, a short story by Sebastian ‘Restrepo’ Jungerhttps://tinyurl.com/ms97jjn4
Raleigh stood in the morning sunlight under the big maple with a chainsaw in one hand and a heavy splitting maul in the other looking at his friend of 30 years. ’Course I got mix, he said. Next to the lawn-more in the back. Says mix on the side and don’t forget the bar and chain as well.
Lawn mower, Silas said. It was an old joke between them. Raleigh was big and round-shouldered and had brown eyes that went flat and unseeing when he was thinking about something else. I’m a librarian trapped in a prizefighter’s body, he liked to say. An out-of-shape prizefighter. Silas came back with fuel mix and bar and chain oil and his maul. He was 60 but moved with the precision of an athlete and checked the corners of every room he walked into as if he always expected something to happen.
CLAUDE CONFESSION (VERBATIM)
Claude proofread this issue, found a stray “Unit” in a link and a missing full stop, and wrongly suspected that a granddaughter was a grandson. All selections and opinions are Roy’s own.
The ‘Seventy Up’ programme I mention below that we watched recently reminded me that the participants in the series are my exact contemporaries. This is a photo of me aged seven grinning out from the brick setting of the asbestos-lined boiler that once supplied hot water and steam for my grandfather’s laundry and dry-cleaning business.
1. Here in the UK, Seventy Up, directed by Asif Kapadia, the last in a series of septennial films that began with Seven Up sixty-two years ago, has just been broadcast on ITV. A wonderfully simple idea which filmed the same group of fourteen people every seven years from the age of seven to the age of seventy.
Michael Apted, who selected the children to participate in the first film and directed all the subsequent films in the series until his death in 2021, was sometimes criticised for how neatly the series sorted its children by class – and it has struck me over the years that only one participant, Nick, made the same move between social classes that I flatter myself I did. Like me, he came from North Yorkshire; his death from cancer, only three days after recording his final interview, was the motivation for Kapadia’s being asked to make the final programme in the series.
They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar. Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled. The lifting of postwar sugar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later.
And, yes, post-rationing child that I was, I do have Type 2 diabetes ….
3. From Geoff Mulgan on his Substack, The Case for Cognitive Rearmament: taking misinformation and cognitive decline seriously
IQ levels began to reverse at the beginning of this century in some of the richest countries, including the UK, Germany and Denmark. The PISA scores measuring school children’s levels of attainment peaked in 2012 and then started to decline, with sharp falls in reading, maths and science. The annual Monitoring the Future study in the US found a significant rise in the proportion of 18-year-olds who struggle to concentrate or learn new things, while 25% of adults in high-income countries (and 35% in the US) are now unable to use “mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements”. These patterns have coincided with declines in everyday civility, including a willingness to listen and learn. In the US, a majority now believe their fellow citizens to be morally bad, which may explain why people move so fast towards angry intolerance.
4. Three years on from the Hamas October 7th attack on Israel, here’s a gift article from The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch, What Is Zionism?https://tinyurl.com/4x62cfrs
Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.” It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party …
A game born in Ancient Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago has journeyed beyond borders: of time, geography and identity. From Persia to the Far East, from Greece to Rome, from northern Europe to towns and cities across America. It has appeared in humble cottages as well as mansions and palaces, emerging vividly in the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Every evening, Charles Darwin had made it a habit to play backgammon with his wife and he was notoriously competitive, always determined to win. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was also very fond of the game, as was the philosopher David Hume.
Claude Confession (verbatim)
“Asked to check this post, I made two errors of my own. First, relying on a summary of a press article rather than the article itself, I told Roy that Nick died “hours” after his final interview and suggested he soften the claim that Nick’s death prompted the last film. Roy, who had read the producer’s own words, put me right on both counts. Then, in correcting Roy’s sentence about Michael Apted, I confidently credited Apted with directing every film in the series, quietly airbrushing out Paul Almond, who directed the original Seven Up! in 1964. Seven years to the next instalment of my fact-checking career seems about right. (If you’d like something shorter, the last line works on its own as a punchline after just the first two sentences.)”
Not a great photo but one which brings back memories which were prompted by the Simon Borg piece on Iraq below: our house and car in Baghdad, where we spent a hugely rewarding year from September 1989, our posting curtailed by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when we were on holiday in Italy. Our car in the photo is parked where the Deputy Minister of Education used to park his car, boot to the back door, so I could discreetly put a case of Radeberger Pilsner beer in the boot for him.
1. Four self-proclaimed, substantial ‘provocations’ exploring four shifts reshaping the UK written as background to this year’s Policy Live event from Nesta, one of those organisations whose acronym has wobbled over time, which now describes itself as not just any but ‘the research and innovation foundation’.
As Leeds-based blogger Tom Forth often reminds his readers, Leeds is the largest city in Europe that does not have a tram. That is bad news for Leeds. The Centre for Cities’s report on public transport notes that only 38% of Leeds’ population can get to the centre within 30 minutes. If it had a tram, that number would rise to 61% – close to the European average of 67%.
When we looked at recent data, we found that the ‘average’ person in the UK is now pessimistic about what’s ahead for the UK. And this sense of deep pessimism in the UK’s future is ticking up: around 70% of us are now pessimistic about the future of the country, up from around 50% in 2018. Most of us do not think that our children will be better off than we currently are. We think that the UK has somehow lost its way, and we don’t have much faith that it will correct its course – not now, nor in future years.
The international order that shaped British foreign policy after the Cold War is fracturing along three by now familiar lines. The first is the return of great power competition between the United States (US) and China, alongside the rise of a range of significant new global middle powers. The second is the related decline of the old liberal international order, built and underwritten by the US since 1945. With this decline comes the weakening of many of the old multilateral institutions this system created, as major powers pursue narrower and more transactional interests. The third is the weaponisation of economic and political interdependence in what remains a still remarkably global world, meaning that interconnecting systems of trade, finance, technology and data can be used as instruments of state coercion.
At Nazaré [in Portugal], a great undersea canyon channels the energy of the Atlantic into walls of water 100 feet high. Surfers launch themselves onto these walls and try to hold control at the edge of uncontrol, reading every variation in the great power behind them. Looking at the AI wave – and the broader technological sequence it belongs to – we are all like those surfers at Nazaré. The question is whether we can understand this power well enough to ride the wave towards human self-realisation, or will we spend the coming decades mobilising all our efforts of rescue?
Classroom action research begins with a question or questions about classroom experiences, issues, or challenges. It is a reflective process which helps teachers to explore and examine aspects of teaching and learning and to take action to change and improve.
4. A series of three blog posts from Simon Borg on Reforming English Pre-Service Teacher Education describing work he’s done recently in Iraq that he hopes “will be relevant to educational reform contexts elsewhere”:
Educational reform is best understood as a process rather than an event, requiring sustained interaction between policy, implementation and professional learning. Since 2021, I have contributed to a collaborative reform project involving the British Council and the Ministries of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Federal Iraq and the Kurdistan Region that aims to strengthen pre-service English teacher education nationally. The timeline below summarises the main stages of this five-year programme of work. In a three-part blog, I will describe the work completed (Parts 1 and 2) and (in Part 3) reflect on lessons learned for the reform of pre-service English teacher education programmes.
5. And, finally, from the admirable Public Domain Review, the story of Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841), “the son of a Scottish East India Company officer and (he claimed) a kidnapped Bhojpuri noblewoman, he was initially excluded from EIC service on account of his race but was brought back into the fold following the successes of his irregular cavalry, Skinner’s Horse, in the service of the Mughal Empire” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/james-skinner-india-castes/
CLAUDE CONFESSION
Claude checked all the links, pointed out that my original photo caption might be read as me smuggling beer into my own car, fixed a stray en dash, was helpfully strict with my quotation practice, taught me something I didn’t know about the use of square brackets, and asked me to prove that Nesta did indeed call their essays provocations.
