photo (c) Riverford Organic Farmers
1. We get a vegetable box from Riverford most weeks, maybe not quite as overflowingly full as the one in the photo from their website above! (In case you were wondering, which you may not have been, our box tomorrow should contain potatoes, carrots, onions, leeks, butternut squash, curly kale & chestnut mushrooms.) Which is a slightly clunky intro to the film that Riverford are hosting online at 14:00 UK time a week tomorrow (Friday, November 6th), The People’s Emergency Briefing, which is presented by Chris Packham and brings together ten leading UK experts to explain the science, the risks to our lives and livelihoods, and the opportunities for a safer, healthier future. Registration and more info here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/riverford-presents-the-peoples-emergency-briefing-tickets-2003349123156.
Riverford founder Guy Singh-Watson and Mike Berners-Lee, brother of the even more famous Tim (who gets a mention in item 5 below) and author of ‘How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything’, will be discussing the film after the showing.
What do we really need to know about the climate and nature crisis? What does the latest science tell us about the risks we face, and what can we do about them? We’ll also hear about Riverford’s own response to the crisis, before opening up to audience questions. We’ll finish by exploring practical ways to get involved, including how to bring the film to your own community or workplace.
2. Another one courtesy of Ben Knight, The Oxford Principles of Language Learning https://oxpoll.elt.edu.oup.com/ which, in OUP’s words,
provide a comprehensive pedagogical framework for English language teaching. Click on any principle to explore its sub‑principles, key concepts, and practical teaching applications.
The ten principles, which each have two or three sub-principles, are focus, meaning, cognitive load, application, memory, automaticity, motivation, engagement, confidence and self-regulation.
Automaticity was a new one on me: its sub-principles are a) teach predictable clusters and exchanges; b) build up fluency through deliberate practice.
3. The most recent issue of IATEFL Voices included a thoughtful piece by Margit Szesztay, Reclaiming Our Attention in a Digital Age, which Margit has kindly made available to readers of this newsletter here https://roycross.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/reclaiming-our-attention-in-a-digital-age-mszesztay.pdf.
Nicholas Carr warns that one of the biggest risks we are facing today is losing control over our attention. He claims that the digital tools we use in our day-to-day lives compete for our attention – and increasingly they shape and regulate the way we think and relate to one another, as well (Carr, 2010). While this might sound dystopian, it is something that some of us involved in education are starting to worry about. As a teacher educator, the shifting trends in the way our learners pay attention has been a nagging concern for me and for many of my colleagues in higher education. Conversations with fellow professionals in Hungary and abroad working in both primary and secondary schools have reinforced that my concerns are shared by teachers in a wide range of contexts.
4. Two gift articles about very large amounts of money from The New York Times, both worrying in their different ways:
A Damning Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit by Fintan O’Toole https://tinyurl.com/3bcuz6uu, a review of Matthew Cole’s book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East.
It is hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates. If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Anthropic Reveals Skyrocketing Growth and Spending Plans in I.P.O. Filing by Mike Isaac, Erin Griffith, Lauren Hirsch & Sri Muppidi https://tinyurl.com/4px6a58t.
Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of the year and its net loss was $80.7 billion, driven largely by a one-time charge. Stunningly, the company has committed up to $807 billion in contracts for data centers, chips and computing power, many of which cannot be canceled, over the next 10 years, according to a tally by The New York Times. Many of the contracts span different lengths of time, and the terms have yet to be finalized for some.
5. And, finally and simply, I noticed that the Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt website where I found Tuesday’s Kugelschreiber piece provides much of its content in Leichte Sprache, ‘simple language’, as is required by law in Germany and the principles of which are outlined in this Wikipedia piece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache. One English equivalent is Easy-to-Read, which is explained here https://www.inclusion-europe.eu/easy-to-read/. You can find a PDF of the Easy-to-Read guidelines here https://roycross.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/easy-to-read-checklist-inclusion-europe.pdf. I’m pretty sure, however, that it’s not a legal requirement in the UK to offer a ‘simple language’ version of website content. (That may be something that Claude can check for me!)
Which Claude helpfully did and put me right on my ‘legal requirement in Germany’ claim:
Your question in item 5. You’re right: there’s no general legal requirement in the UK to offer simple-language versions of web content. Public sector websites must meet WCAG 2.2 AA under the 2018 accessibility regulations. The reading-level criterion, which Easy Read would satisfy, sits at the stricter AAA level, so it’s recommended rather than required. Two partial exceptions are worth knowing. The Equality Act’s reasonable-adjustments duty could, in an individual case, mean providing Easy Read on request. And as far as I know, NHS and adult social care bodies in England have a legal duty under the Accessible Information Standard to meet individual patients’ communication needs, which can include Easy Read. Both are about particular people’s needs, not website content generally.
The German law works similarly. My understanding is that it obliges federal bodies to provide certain information in Leichte Sprache, such as what the site offers and how to navigate it, rather than most of their content. So “provides much of its content in Leichte Sprache, as is required by law” may slightly overstate it.
Claude glossed WCAG as follows: WCAG – the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – grades its requirements A, AA and AAA, with AA stricter than A and AAA strictest of all. The law generally asks for AA, and plain-language versions only come in at AAA. Version 2.2 was published in 2023 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) …
… which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994!
CLAUDE CONFESSION VERBATIM
Claude spotted the ‘next Friday’ ambiguity, a Word file masquerading as a PDF and a hyphen missing from Easy-to-Read, and checked the UK position on simple language. In the interests of full disclosure, it had no say in which article about its makers made the cut.
And Claude also suggested an elegant solution to my PDF hosting problem in the newsletter version of this post!
