1. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its fifth year today. It seems that very few people believed that Putin was going to invade Ukraine, not even Volodymyr Zelenskyy https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia

(This) is the story of a spectacular intelligence success, but also one of several intelligence failures. First, for the CIA and MI6, who got the invasion scenario right but failed to accurately predict the outcome, assuming a swift Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for European services, who refused to believe a full-scale war in Europe was possible in the 21st century. They remembered the dubious intelligence case presented to justify the invasion of Iraq two decades previously and were wary of trusting the Americans on what seemed like a fantastical prediction.

2. The first of two thoughtful pieces on teaching and learning gleaned from Substack, this first one by Michael McCreary on the Engaged Learning Collective blog, A practical guide to modern teaching evaluation https://engagedlearningcollective.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-modern-teaching-evaluation

A new consensus is beginning to emerge on how to evaluate college teaching. Research has consistently shown that traditional methods, which rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching, do not accurately measure teaching effectiveness. An AAUP survey of 9,314 faculty found that less than half believed in the validity of student evaluations, and an influential 2020 paper found that even validated survey instruments can lead to unfair outcomes. And yet, the lack of a widely accepted alternative has left many higher ed institutions assessing instruction in ways that are both deeply unpopular and methodologically unsound.

3. The second Substack piece comes from Barbara Oakley, The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail https://barbaraoakley.substack.com/p/the-teaching-method-that-cant-fail

There’s something strange going on in education. We have more research than ever on how the brain actually learns. And yet, in country after country, the teaching methods being promoted are the ones that research says work least well for beginners. How is that possible?

4. A good twenty-minute listen from Engelsberg Ideas, When Edo became Tokyo by Christopher Harding https://audioboom.com/posts/8862642-when-edo-became-tokyo You can read the piece if you’d prefer here https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/when-edo-became-tokyo/

A first wave of excitable western tourists began pouring into Japan 150 years ago. Among them was the English explorer Isabella Bird, who, in the late 1870s, journeyed through a country going through a profound and fascinating period of change. Nowhere was it more pronounced than in a city torn between a glorious past and an uncertain future. It even had two names, depending on whether a person preferred to look backwards or forwards. The old name was Edo; the new one, ‘Tokyo’: ‘Eastern Capital’. Following a brief and chaotic civil war in 1868-9, a new generation of modernising leaders had thrown open Japan’s doors to the world, and the country had embarked upon one of history’s most ambitious processes of national renewal.

5. And, finally, a little more Thai cooking, 6 Salty Sauces in Thai Cooking  https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/salty-sauces/