1. First up today, one of those blog posts that I get the gist of, if not the detail: a persuasive but slightly strange blog post throughout which the author, Nik Bear Brown (is that a real name or a pseudonym?), talks about himself in the third person, The Cognitive Commons: How a Paper Quilling Frog Video Reveals the Future of Personalized Learning https://nikbearbrown.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-commons

Since he posted, Nik has been told that his estimate of traditional professional production costs to make his frog video of between $10,000 and $50,000 was a significant underestimate and a more likely costing would be somewhere between $75,000 and $150,000. Nik estimated his own production costs for the video, made by a team of one (Nik) in a matter of hours, at $200!

On December 10, 2025, a YouTube Short appeared that would have been impossible to create five years earlier. Not because the technology didn’t exist, but because the cost would have been prohibitive. The video features five intricately detailed frogs, rendered in a paper quilling aesthetic—each speckled amphibian built from thousands of curled paper strips, sitting on a log surrounded by fantastical mushrooms and flowers. They eat bugs (”Yum yum!”), jump into a pool (”Glug glug!”), and eventually thrive together in an extended narrative resolution that transforms a simple counting song into a story about belonging. The video has garnered over 248,000 views. It’s visually stunning. It’s pedagogically sound, built on neuroscience research showing how such songs activate multiple brain regions simultaneously – the parietal lobe’s numerical circuits, the prefrontal cortex’s executive functions, the motor cortex’s embodied cognition pathways. It teaches backward counting, phonemic awareness, rhythm entrainment, and emotional intelligence through narrative structure.

2. Two recent pieces from the LRB blog for you to compare and contrast:

a) In Tehran by Raha Nik-Andish https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/january/in-tehran

b) In South Minneapolis by Amna A. Akbar https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/february/in-south-minneapolis

Which of the two pieces does this extract come from?

Across from us stood riot police in full gear, twenty or thirty of them, along with armed plainclothes agents. I looked at the protesters around me. Most of them were very young, perhaps twenty years old: girls and boys dressed in dark clothes, their faces covered by masks. ‘Don’t go into side alleys,’ people warned. ‘You’ll get trapped.’ The police fired tear gas. The chants continued. ‘They’re shooting!’ someone shouted. We all ran. A young woman asked me to look at the back of her neck. She had been hit by pellets. The sound of gunfire intensified. I could see flashes in the darkness and didn’t understand what they were.

3. Here’s a recording of a recent Cambridge University webinar, Why is Greenland so important? https://youtu.be/OvGmdZHXC2o

Greenland sits at the frontline of global change. Its vast ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate, with profound consequences for global sea level and for the communities who live alongside it. Beneath the ice, Greenland’s rocky landscape preserves a rich record of Earth’s geological history and contains critical mineral resources essential to the global energy transition. At the same time, the peoples of Greenland and the wider Arctic are among the first to experience these rapid environmental changes.

And here’s an earlier webinar from the same Cambridge team, Melting Ice and Rising Seas https://youtu.be/l3eLsUt5aUk

4. The February issue of Humanising Language Teaching (HLT) has just come out with its usual rich selection from all round the world, including Oman, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Canada & Serbia – even the UK! https://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb26/

If you’ve got good eyesight, you’ll notice here https://www.hltmag.co.uk/feb26/using-ai that if you’d like to attend what looks like a very interesting event at 14:00 UK time on Saturday 21^st February, Using AI in the Humanistic Language Classroom, you need to send an e-mail to info@pilgrims.co.uk.

5. And, finally and (for me at least) very depressingly, from Der Spiegel, The New Religion of Beauty by Carola Padtberg https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/injections-makeup-stress-the-new-religion-of-beauty-a-37cdcea5-d847-44f2-aa49-847e10c2c1d0