The closest thing we have to ‘a local’, The Queen’s Head in Newton, which we visited at the weekend, and which I first visited fifty years ago when the landlord was the grandfather of the current landlord. The Adnams bitter is as good as ever!
1. The week before last I posted Anne Applebaum’s article, MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption. In this video, she discusses it with Timothy Snyder https://snyder.substack.com/p/regime-change-and-corruption-with
Tim and Anne had an extremely enlightening conversation that focused on a question Anne wrote about in her article: What does it mean to say the United States is undergoing a genuine regime change, and what does that change look like when it is exported abroad? Tim opened by asking whether the article was really describing regime change at home, with a state refreshed by elections and guided by some notion of national interest giving way to overlapping oligarchical and ideological clans. Anne described a coalition of actors who have never before controlled the federal government: those bent on destroying the administrative state, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and tech and crypto oligarchs. While they have different agendas, they share one project, which she called a revolution.
The four key themes of the discussion were:
- extraction as the organizing idea
- Canada as a case study
- who resists, and why they’re resented
- civilizations, not countries
And here’s the link to that original article again https://tinyurl.com/v5u784py
2. This month’s free webinar from IATEFL this Saturday, 3rd October, at 15:00 UK time, When Students Have Ideas, Language Follows: Rethinking Speaking in ELT https://www.iatefl.org/event-details/#/?id=869, which Noelia Graziano is delivering, is congruent with the thinking in last Thursday’s piece on silence in the classroom.
In many ELT classrooms, limited student participation in speaking tasks is often interpreted as a language problem, leading teachers to focus primarily on vocabulary, grammar, or fluency practice. This webinar challenges that assumption by exploring the idea that learners sometimes struggle not because they lack language, but because they have not had enough opportunities to think before speaking.
3. Two gift articles from The Times before my subscription expires:
a) Described as a guide to help you get through a dinner party, What is a frontier lab? A guide to AI terms for confused humans https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/what-is-agi-ai-explained-27zc6t9q0
On Tuesday President Trump told the UN general assembly that artificial intelligence was to be “officially called super intelligence”. American diplomats will talk about SI, not AI, and all documents will adopt the new name. Inadvertently, the president touched on an aspect of the AI race that is evolving as quickly as the technology: the language. “LLMs”, “tokens” and “frontier labs” are terms thrown around every day, but for many of us they remain so abstract as to be meaningless. So here is your AI glossary, for the next time someone asks you if you think the Hugging Face incident really does signal the coming of the singularity or if it’s just the doomers getting carried away …
b) Too much screen time harms children’s development, study finds https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/excessive-screen-time-development-language-health-8w2dxpvps
One of the largest ever studies on screen time use has found that higher use of screens can affect academic achievement, language development, and emotional regulation. A research team from the University of Calgary in Canada found that the impacts of screen time on development were “similar in magnitude or larger” than factors like wealth, parenting behaviour and whether they were born preterm.
Plus, the ‘key points’ from the JAMA Pediatrics article discussed in The Times article, Screen Use and Child and Adolescent Development and Mental Health Outcomes (A Quantitative Umbrella Review), which I doubt many of us are able to access https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2854067
- Question What are the meta-analytic associations between children’s screen use and academic, cognitive, mental health, and socioemotional outcomes among individuals aged 18 years or younger, and what factors moderate these associations?
- Findings In this meta-analysis, screen-based media exposure was associated with lower overall academic achievement and language development and with higher internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, emotional problems, and peer problems. Social media use was associated with higher internalizing problems, and associations varied by screen type, publication year, and child age.
- Meaning Screen-based media exposure was associated with poorer outcomes for many developmental and mental health domains and may represent a potentially modifiable factor relevant for children’s well-being.
4. A forthright piece on The London Review of Books blog from Lorna Finlayson, Public Positions, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/september/public-positions
‘Is it for people who are singers, songwriters, artists to be taking public positions on very, very controversial, difficult, complicated issues?’ Laura Kuenssberg asked the panel on her Sunday morning politics show, after the pop star Ed Sheeran was criticised for capitulating to pressure to drop his support act, the rapper Macklemore, for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments. There was plenty wrong with Kuenssberg’s question …
Worth reading the comments, too.
5. And, finally, open to readers anywhere in the world, five chances to win the Booker Prize shortlist and a fancy notebook from Fortnum & Mason https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/win-the-booker-prize-2026-shortlist-plus-a-stylish-notebook-from-fortnum-and-mason
CLAUDE CONFESSION, SUGGESTED BY CLAUDE AND FINE BY ME
“Claude proofread this issue. It found a truncated bullet, two missing links, a missing comma and an unwanted apostrophe in the Adnams, and made some suggestions on the wording of item 1.”
Blog version: https://roycross.blog/
LinkedIn newsletter version: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tuesday-29th-september-cambridge-roy-cross-f2vhe/
