Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler in Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, 2026). Image © MUBI, used for the purpose of review
1. We saw another film about recent German history on Sunday, Fatherland, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. It’s a broadly factually accurate account of the writer Thomas Mann’s first return to Germany since he went into exile in 1933. Here’s a review of the film by Katja Hoyer on her blog Zeitgeist, which usefully puts it in its historical context https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/fatherland-a-journey-through-postwar.
Here’s an excellent official clip from the film https://youtu.be/Ik6W8-d-A14 and here’s the trailer https://youtu.be/4pGI64qP0Bw.
I thought it was great.
2. I’m making sure I post this in good time: Macmillan’s 7th Global Teachers’ Festival runs from the 2nd to the 13th of November https://www.macmillanenglish.com/gtf2026.
Here’s the blurb:
Join a global community of educators for two weeks dedicated to the ideas, trends, and innovations transforming English language teaching. From 2nd to 13th November 2026, hear from 24 education experts across 20 inspiring sessions covering topics such as student empathy, inclusion, intentional use of AI, offering choice, creating a sense of belonging, and many, many more. Packed with practical takeaways, classroom-ready strategies, and fresh perspectives from around the world, this festival is designed to support teachers at every stage of their professional journey.
And here’s the programme (copy on the blog only) https://www.macmillanenglish.com/api/fileadmin/uploads/Global_Teachers_Festival_2026_2/Global_Teachers__Festival_2026_Full_Programme.pdf.
3. More on maths from The Atlantic (a follow-up to the piece by Konstantin Kakaes that I posted two weeks back), A Mathematician Reads the AI Future, by Steven Strogatz https://tinyurl.com/yc8jkv8f.
I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one. I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?
Here’s the link to that earlier Kakaes piece, OpenAI Just Carpet-Bombed Mathematics https://tinyurl.com/ymytv982.
4. This is trivial – and great fun! The Real Kevin Bacon by Owen Lacey https://pudding.cool/2026/10/kevin-bacon/.
And I’m very proud indeed to say that I guessed correctly who the real Kevin Bacon is!
5. And, finally, a first (and possibly a last) for me, a piece from the Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt (the German Patent and Trade Mark Office) on the Kugelschreiber – in English! https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/milestones/inventionsthatmadehistory/kugelschreiber/index.html.
CLAUDE’S CONFESSION (VERBATIM AND SLIGHTLY PROLIX!)
Over the evening, I was wrong, or less than sure-footed, on four counts:
The phantom bold. I told you the bold on the second “many” was yours. It wasn’t; it was introduced by the way your file reached me. I then compounded it by advising you to add “(emphasis mine)” to emphasis that didn’t exist.
“Trivial”. I missed the pun and tried to tidy it into “trivia”, which flattened your joke into a fact.
Owen Lacey. I asked you to check a byline that was correct. That’s not wrong as such, since I couldn’t see it, but it was unnecessary fuss.
The Pudding’s table. I flagged their prediction table as out of order. After the phantom bold, I’m less confident that wasn’t also how the page came through to me rather than their error. If you mention it to anyone, check it on screen first.
In my defence, the “Deutsche/Deutsches” point and the Global Teachers’ Festival name were both real. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s a fair trade.
