1. Joshua Bell is a post-doctoral researcher in the Maths Department at Oxford University; he also beat more than eight million (!) other players worldwide, including the world’s best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, when he won the Fantasy Football League in 2019/20. (Carlsen ended up tenth or eleventh, I think.) Two reasons why Bell might be quite a good person to predict the outcome of the World Cup currently taking place in Qatar, so here’s his A Mathematician’s Guide to the World Cup https://youtu.be/KjISuCarlsenZ5o06Q PDF of Dr Bell’s predictions below

and here’s another of his lectures, Can maths tell us how to win at Fantasy Football? https://youtu.be/LzEuweGrHvc

2. This World Cup is a controversial one in several ways. Here’s a piece from Spiegel International, Qatar Has Spent Years Preparing, But Is the World Ready? https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-winter-world-cup-qatar-has-spent-years-preparing-but-is-the-world-ready-a-21d5c58f-86f6-4bd4-b394-289649e0cebe

and here’s the lively inaugural podcast from The i newspaper, The truth about how Qatar treats LGBT people https://inews.co.uk/news/the-i-podcast-the-truth-about-how-qatar-treats-lgbt-people-1980698?ico=in-line_link

3. I mentioned Green ELT earlier this month. At 14:00 UK time this Friday, 25th November, Arran Stibbe, who’s Professor in Ecological Linguistics at The University of Gloucestershire, will be talking about ELT & ecology: how language shapes our world More info and registration here https://green-action-elt.uk/events/

4. Here’s a blog post from the Cambridge Dictionary explaining their surprising choice of ‘word of the year’ for 2022 https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2022/11/16/cambridge-dictionarys-word-of-the-year-2022/

5. And, finally and doggedly, a highly effective visit to the market https://twitter.com/TansuYegen/status/1593239732649332744?t=9mdbacmejCtno37hJG_Isg&s=19