1. “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the YouTube sensation that is Mr Beast” is the first sentence of this article that I read last week. I’ve clearly been living under a rock! https://www.unilad.com/celebrity/news/mrbeast-x-elon-musk-youtube-earnings-835450-20240111

Intrigued (and chastised), I did some research on Mr Beast. Here’s a New Statesman article (which I hope you can read without subscribing; you may need to register) about him https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/social-media/2024/01/understand-gen-z-watch-mrbeast

This video of Mr Beast’s, Protect $500,000 Keep It!, attracted 13,631,744 views in the first five hours after it was posted two days ago (and has now been viewed nearly 68 million times) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ESeQBeikKs and this one, I Spent 7 Days In Solitary Confinement, has so far been viewed 109,214,641 times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E

More Mr Beast here if you think you can cope https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast

2. This Friday, 19^th January, at 15:00 UK time sees the launch of the two volumes of Multilingual Learning in Sub-Saharan Africa by a stellar line-up of its editors and contributors. Volume 1 “explores the development and implementation of multilingual education in diverse African school contexts”, and Volume 2 “the persistence of former colonial languages and monolingual approaches in education, despite the proven effectiveness of multilingual pedagogies”. More info here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-KVn3_VMts

3. Tomasz Kamusella’s Words in Space and Time: a Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe is free to download from the Central European University Press website https://ceupress.com/book/words-space-and-time PDF below; it’s a big file.

“With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time.”

Thanks to Andrew King for sharing this one!

4. There are big differences between US states in terms of the native-to-the-state, other US, and non-US composition of their population – which must surely have an impact on a state’s culture, mustn’t it? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/where-are-americans-born/ More Big Thinking here https://bigthink.com/

5. And, finally and by way of a contrast with Mr Beast, John Drew’s account of the metamorphosis of his own story of the first cricket match in India in 1721 into the medium of dance https://scroll.in/article/1062006/how-a-gujarati-dance-drama-recreated-the-first-known-instance-of-cricket-on-indian-soil-in-1721

Scroll https://scroll.in/ was new to me. Here’s their take on the separation of Burma (Myanmar) from the rest of British India https://scroll.in/magazine/1062050/why-burma-was-separated-from-british-india