1. If you follow Geoff Jordan on LinkedIn, you’ll know that he’s a man of strong views https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-jordan-0a7658219/

Courtesy of Geoff, here’s a whole book of strong opinions to start with tonight, English Language Teaching Now and How It Could Be, which he co-wrote with Mike Long. PDF below.

In 2016, I started a blog aimed at criticizing coursebook-driven English Language Teaching (ELT). My main argument was that the increasingly pervasive use of General English coursebooks, plus all the supplementary materials that now go with them, means that millions of teachers today are forced to teach English as a second language in a way that contradicts robust findings in second language acquisition (SLA) research. I later started another blog where I applied this argument especially to those responsible for second language teacher education, accusing leading figures in this area of largely ignoring SLA research, and of misrepresenting its findings on the few occasions when they referred to it. Mike Long, already a good friend, told me how much he liked many (but not all!) of the posts, and in 2018, he proposed that we write a book together, giving an up-to-date summary of SLA research and its implications for ELT, a critical review of current ELT practice, and suggestions for how it might be improved. Of course, I was delighted and honoured to accept. Since we were both anarchists, we agreed that the book should reflect our view that education is a political act; that current ELT reflects the ideology and economic consequences of neoliberal state capitalism; and that radical reform is necessary.

2. We’ve heard a great deal in the UK about Professor Jason Arday over the last two weeks. Here’s a gift article in similar vein from The Atlantic, Why I Quit the Tenure Track: the insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia, by Tyler Austin Harper https://tinyurl.com/3pjw994d

It had been obvious to me since my arrival at Bates that I was what conservatives like to call a “DEI hire” – that is, I likely wouldn’t have gotten the job were it not for the color of my skin. True, I’d gone to a top Ph.D. program, had prominent advisers, scraped together an above-average amount of teaching experience, and graduated with distinction. I was more than qualified for the job I was hired to do. But was I more qualified than every other candidate who’d applied? Probably not.

And just in case you’ve not been able to keep up to speed on the Arday affair, here’s a thoughtful piece from Joseph Harker in The Guardian, The Jason Arday affair must not spell the end for diversity. Here’s how – and why – we should defend it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/13/jason-arday-diversity-how-and-why-we-should-defend

Last month Arday faced allegations of plagiarism over his PhD thesis, and amid massive scrutiny he resigned last week. Cambridge University has now announced an independent inquiry into its appointment procedures, but many academics already believe that Arday was given the job more for his remarkable backstory than for his academic ability. Arday was, they felt, not at the level you would expect for a professorial chair at such an elite institution. But he was the man who said he couldn’t talk till he was 11, and couldn’t read till he was 18; who had run 30 marathons in 35 days, the last third of them with a leg fracture. What an amazing story. Arday gathered headlines and media appearances. He became a walking advert for how an institution with such a poor record on diversity had progressed so far. Or had it?

3. Beware the power of prediction is a TED talk by Carissa Véliz https://www.ted.com/talks/carissa_veliz_beware_the_power_of_prediction

What do the story of Oedipus and your insurance premiums have in common? They are both driven by self-fulfilling prophecies. Philosopher and TED Fellow Carissa Véliz traces the hidden power of prediction, from Roman emperors who banned prophets to the AI algorithms quietly making decisions about your life right now. We tend to associate predictions with knowledge, she says, but they’re actually attempts to grab power. So the next time someone tells you a specific outcome is inevitable, remember: they aren’t describing the future — they’re selling it.

4. From ArtReview by Jenny Wu, The Digital Jungle: On Datacentres and Slaughterhouses https://artreview.com/the-digital-jungle-on-datacenters-and-slaughterhouses-jenny-wu/ The two are more similar than you might think, she suggests!

Datacentres are at once, as architecture critic Niklas Maak wrote in 2022, ‘the most important new building typology of the twenty-first century’ and ‘meant to be the opposite of architecture: saying nothing, betraying nothing’. The ones in the countryside are bland and seemingly ahistorical shells tasked with encasing and temperature-controlling what we assume are more interesting government secrets and salacious personal emails. One can compare the edifices of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta et al to warehouses and hangars, or the US National Security Agency’s sprawling, white-walled data-storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, photographed by Trevor Paglen in 2012, to a remote airfield. But we call interconnected computers ‘server farms’, Maak points out, ‘as if a server rack were something like a digital cow’. Unconsciously, then, these structures point to another, bygone typology: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial slaughterhouse.

5. And, finally, a little Schiller from JSTOR Daily. The Case for Aesthetic Education by  Marco Elvis Joven Domínguez https://daily.jstor.org/the-case-for-aesthetic-education/

Why Friedrich Schiller believed art belongs at the heart of education—and why it matters for equal opportunity today.

Those last three all from Maja Mandekić – thank you, Maja! I’ve been a little preoccupied with NILE’s Erasmus+ courses for next summer!