Weekly Varia no. 28, 05/27/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I spend altogether too much time thinking about how many books I will never read in my life.

Perhaps this is thought is bleak. I read as much as I can and consider myself fortunate to have made my way into a field where not only am I surrounded by books, but also I have to read as a professional obligation. Publishing and criticism seemed somewhat more unattainable, and my current job lets me engage other passions as well. Curating to-read lists is an process I find relaxing. But while I also enjoy looking back at all of the books I have read, these processes always remind me of all the books I haven’t.

Back in January I set an ambitious but not impossible reading target for this year: 100 books across the lists I keep. For context, this would mark a 10–15 book bump over each of the past two years. Certainly not impossible, but ambitious. As of this writing, I am more or less on pace. I have finished 37 books so far and will likely push that number over 40 before the end of the month, with all three of my biggest reading months (June, July, December) still to ahead of me in the year. But this target gives me flares of anxiety when I think about it because of how slowly I feel like I’m reading, especially since there are weeks when my “currently reading” section at the bottom of this post carries over from week to week. Most of the time I am able to remind myself that these things are immaterial. Getting worked up about listing the same book week after week when it is taking me longer than anticipated is a concern about how my appearance bleeding into whether I’m reading enough, whatever that might be, and books are meant to be savored, not rushed.

But this concern then cycles back into my existential concerns about books left unread. On my to-read shelf in my home office I have 40 academic books I have not yet read, with another three that I need to re-read in preparation to teach this year. I also have 40 books I’m looking to read out of interest, along with another 13 e-books in my Kindle library. Then there are the books in my campus office and hundreds more on various reading lists, to say nothing of the books being released every week and those yet unpublished. Put another way, I already have more books in my queue than I expect to be able to read this year, even if I were to not acquire a single additional book by either purchase or library. This is not necessarily a problem since I largely subscribe to the idea of an anti-library where unread books themselves have power and value, but the numbers add up. If I were to hit my target this year and then hit one hundred books every year until I hit the age of retirement in this country, I would read fewer than three thousand books in that span, while American publishers put out 304,912 new or re-issued books in 2013. I am not going to be the target audience for all of those books, but the sheer scale of the books left unread sometimes stops me in my tracks.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect features new volumes on diversifying Classics, along with an In Memoriam for Ray Stevenson by Monica Cyrino whose work focuses on the reception of the Ancient World in film. Stevenson died this week at 58. Salve atque vale, Titus Pullo.
  • Amber beads from the Ziggurat of Assur dated to c.1800 BCE have been identified as coming from near the Baltic or North Sea. We know about long-distance trade taking place in this period, but every new piece of evidence for identifying the networks is exciting.
  • Fecal analysis from ancient toilets in Jerusalem have identified a parasite that can cause dysentery, the earliest evidence for the disease.
  • Monica H. Green and André Filipe Oliveira da Silva lay out some evidence that the Black Death had arrived in Europe in the thirteenth century. The old hypothesis about the Siege of Kaffa in the 1340s being the plague vector is based on weak foundations that has been proven false in recent years through multiple different types of studies, and Green is one of the pioneering historians offering a new history of this disease.
  • This was a cool video of the Murud-Janjira fort in the Arabian Sea.
  • New scans by a company called Magellan Ltd has produced high-definition scans of the Titanic, which sank in 1912 after striking an iceberg. The pictures are quite remarkable.
  • John Warner makes a case against the techno-futurists (my term) who see potential in ChatGPT, stressing again that this should be an opportunity to revise our assignments toward meaningful learning experiences. You know, like thinking.
  • Michigan graduate students are on strike and have been for weeks while (largely bad faith) negotiations drag on. Now that the end of the semester has arrived, departments are complying with pressure to make up grades.
  • A Republican district chair in Georgia—one who challenged Kemp for the Republican gubernatorial nomination and then refused to concede defeat—gave an interview in which she declared that globes are everywhere in a conspiracy to brainwash people into thinking that the world is round.
  • Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed to cut about 13% of their water use from the Colorado River, in return for compensation from the federal government for about 2/3 of that allotment and at least a temporary end to the threat of unilateral water cuts by the federal government. This is still probably too little, too late, but every little bit helps.
  • In political news worthy of respect, here is a piece about how John Fetterman’s recent medical issues have followed a playbook for de-stigmatizing mental health. As someone who both struggles with mental health and struggles to talk about it, the article is worth thinking about and Fetterman’s actions worth applauding.
  • Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Proud Boys was sentenced to 18 years in prison this week for charges related to the events of January 6. Despite the sentence coming in short of the length sought by prosecutors, the judge in this case seems to be taking the threat posed by the Oath Keepers seriously, saying that he posed a peril to the country because he “wants democracy…to devolve into violence.”
  • The man who drove his truck into the White House security barrier has been identified as Sai Varshith Kandula, an Indian-American man, who is alleged to have stated that his goal was to kill the president and take over the country. Reminder that it one doesn’t need to be white to embrace nazism and India is one of multiple countries in the grips of an authoritarian ethno-nationalist movement.
  • House Republicans were joined by two Democrats in repealing President Biden’s partial student debt forgiveness plan under the Congressional Review Act—a measure that might also require borrowers to retroactively pay interest during the period when repayment was paused. The repayment plan is estimated to cost roughly 30 billion dollars per year for the next decade, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider that it is equivalent to roughly three percent of the budget for the defense department.
  • The Washington Post has a story about the recent wave of book bans that has a remarkable graphic: just 11 people accounted for more than 60% of all book challenges. This constitutes a tyranny of the minority where a tiny number of people can dictate what is and is not appropriate for everyone, with most of the complaints coming after the complainant heard about the book from media. One school district in Florida received a request to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb” because it was “not educational and have indirectly hate messages” and could cause “confusion and indoctrination.” One might note that the complaint came from someone confused since it identified the author as Oprah Winfrey. Or perhaps it is of note that the same person has subsequently apologized for sharing a summary of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on Facebook, claiming that her opposition is rooted in anti-communism, that English isn’t her primary language, and that she isn’t a book person. The last link is worth reading because it underscores a number of concurrent issues with the current political discourse.
  • Officials in Ron DeSantis’ administration seem to tracking which lobbyists are donating to his presidential campaign and soliciting donations from those who have not paid, in what appears to be a pretty clear, likely illegal, abuse of his office.
  • Mark Joseph Sterns has several pieces at Slate about the Supreme Court. In one, he talks about how media cycles tend to focus on a given case for only a short time when these decisions compound one another in terms of fundamentally reshaping society—away from justice, he says. In another, he addresses Neil Gorsuch’s facially absurd claims that Covid public health policies were “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime of this country.” Gorsuch’s decision simply ignores the long history of intrusions in this country and underscores that the court is political to its core.
  • The Albany Times Union has a story about how three men say they were recruited to come to a diner where they were to portray homeless veterans “displaced” by migrants. A gross political stunt on every level, and another example where people from talking heads to Kevin McCarthy picked up on the story generated by the stunt rather than the stunt itself.
  • A new story about scams that are using Trump’s name and his fanatical supporters to sell commemorative objects like “Trump Bucks.” These campaigns use AI voices to promise that these can be redeemed for value at banks and retailers, while the fine-print says that they are memorabilia. This story reminds me that I saw the most accursed book ever printed in Barnes and Noble yesterday: a collection of letters to and from Trump, along with “his” commentary.
  • During the evacuation of Khartoum, the US embassy shredded passports held there, trapping the holders of those passports in a war zone. This is standard operating procedure not exclusive to the United States, but it is also hard to ignore the people who are trapped by such a policy.

Album of the Week: Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, The Chicken Coop, vol. 1 (2023)

Currently Reading: Umberto Eco, Baudolino; Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews; Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt

Weekly Varia no. 27, 05/20/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

One of the most common escapist discussions I remember in graduate school is the idea of opening some sort of commune library-brewery-cafe-bakery-farm that would offer us an idyllic existence and also cater to people who needed the isolation to write their dissertations. I was always the bread guy in these schemes, for obvious reasons. At this point I probably have close to a dozen recipes that are both replicable and high enough quality that I would be willing to serve them at a bakery and, yet, I have never seriously entertained the idea of opening a business.

In part, I have had the distinct pleasure of managing every aspect of a restaurant from the HR side of the business to service to dealing with health inspectors. I can do the job, but it isn’t one I’m eager to return to. But this experience also taught me one of the key differences between food preparation at home and in a restaurant. In the former, where you are cooking for yourself and people you know well, there is considerable room for creativity. Maybe your ingredients are a little bit different today than what you had last week or you cooked an item a little differently or at a different temp. Or with different proportions. Most people aren’t going to care if two version of the same dish come out a bit different.

By contrast, when you’re cooking in a restaurant or bakery you need to provide your customers with the same experience each time they come in. Not only does this communicate to customers that your product is reliable, but it also helps keep your costs and prep process predictable. If, for instance, you advertise that you sell large pizzas at 14″ diameter, but those pizzas range in diameter from 12.5″ to 15,” you’re inviting both chaos and angry customers who rightfully believe that you have ripped them off. No two pizzas have to be identical, but two pizzas of the same size should, in theory, have the same amount of dough, sauce, cheese, and amount of pepperoni.

These were the things on my mind last night while I was preparing bread for a little celebration my wife and I are throwing today. She made cupcakes and cookies, while I made three freestanding loaves of bread, two sandwich loaves, flatbreads, and eighteen pizza crusts for baking in my fancy new Ooni pizza oven (see the picture below), all using sourdough. For a few hours I had my three largest bowls filled with large lumps of proofing dough before breaking the balls into the constituent pieces and refilling the largest with the last breads. Batch baking requires a little more arm-strength if, like me, you are without an electric mixer, but it is also the only way to produce recipes at any scale—not unlike a time last year when I helped Truman’s Jewish Student Union bake something like seventy loaves of challah in a little over four hours.

I rarely batch-bake because I want to make sure that the two of us don’t let the bread go to waste. More usually, I have to scale recipes down rather than up. And yet, the principle is the same, just requiring bigger spoons.

Anyway, that’s my weekend: making sure that I have enough carbs to feed a platoon or two.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect this week looks at a new fragment of On Nature by the fifth century BCE philosopher Empedocles, along with the usual roundup.
  • Modern Medieval remind us that cats (or the the execution of cats) did not cause the Black Death. Their post promotes another blog, by Eleanor Janega, that goes through the evidence and is definitely worth reading.
  • Archeologists working underwater in the Bay of Naples in Italy discovered a Nabataean altar from Pozzuoli. It is easy to say that the Roman Mediterranean was an interconnected web that facilitated population movement, but it is always nice to see examples like this of people from Southwest Asia setting up shop in Italy.
  • Nadira Goffe spoke to Denis McCoskey in Slate about the new Netflix Cleopatra docudrama and the case for making her Black. McCoskey talks about this Cleopatra as a translation in which it makes sense to present her as the Romans might, distinct from “Europeans.” In this sense I agree with McCoskey and while I haven’t (yet) watched the show, my philosophical objections are more to the assumptions baked into a docudrama than to a particular representation. From the comments of other ancient historians, the issues seem to run deeper than the casting choice.
  • In Salon, a rundown on authoritarianism in Florida and the path to fighting back. All signs point to DeSantis running for President. For all of the doom and gloom, there are signs of resistance, such as in the Jacksonville mayoral race that was won in an upset by the Democrat Donna Deegan this week. Until now, Jacksonville was the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor.
  • Influencer Caryn Marjorie is teaming with a new start-up that will allow her followers to interact with an AI program that replicates “her voice, mannerisms, and personality”—for the price of $1 per minute, which she estimates will earn $5 million per month. For some reason I found this to be the most depressing AI story I’ve read yet. Perhaps because its explicit goal is to have people trade the promise of “genuine” human interaction for the comfort of generative text.
  • Between an economy particularly dependent on tourism, policies to keep the state quaint, and an influx of out of state money, Vermont is suffering from an acute lack of affordable housing. The town of Woodstock is offering incentives to landlords in surrounding towns in return for price controls for Woodstock workers. This program, like tiny homes for Arizona teachers, is pitched as a benefit for workers, but it is also a gross manifestation of the current state of capitalism that makes workers all the more dependent on companies for basic necessities and widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
  • Diane Feinstein returned to congress last week. When reporters asked her about the return, she insisted that she had been in Washington voting on issues and refused to take additional questions. (Slate and LA Times) Politics in this country is far beyond parody at this point.
  • Elie Mystal writes about the Jeremy Neely killing, explaining why the charges being brought by the DA are probably the right ones and deconstructing the arguments of the people defending the killer. He also points to the disconcerting reality that an increasing number of people seem to actively want to live in a world filled with vigilante justice because they assume that people who think like them will be the only ones perpetrating it.
  • Elon Musk took to social media to declare that George Soros, whose name is the classic example of anti-semitic dogwhistles, “hates humanity” and that he wants to “erode the very fabric of civilization,” probably because Soros’ hedge fund sold its shares of Tesla. Along the way he compared Soros to Magneto, a character whose backstory makes him a Holocaust survivor. Meanwhile, an Israeli minister tasked with redefining anti-semitism as attacks on Israel fighting anti-semitism has defended Musk on the grounds that Soros funds organizations “hostile” to Israel.
  • Videos of Jack Texeira, the air national guard member behind the Discord leaks, along with chat logs and interviews with people who knew him reveal someone with fantasies of committing violence against liberals, Jews, lgbtq+, and Black people. He apparently fantasized about inciting a race war.
  • Back in December, a psychiatric ward for children staged “an active shooter drill” using a worker who did not feel that he could say no to his supervisor as “an assailant.” Only they didn’t tell either staff or the police, leading to officers from four departments showing up to the scene and holding one of the men at gunpoint for half an hour. Woodruff, that worker, is now suing the state. This story is almost unbelievable, and the people who set the drill are lucky that
  • War on the Rocks has an interesting analysis about the limits of a French strategic doctrine that relies on small numbers of high-quality forces over quantity, particularly with a focus on how French contributions to Ukraine’s war effort critically diminished its own equipment stockpiles. This particularly piqued my interest because of an IR simulation I participated in as an undergrad, playing the French Minister of the Armed Forces.
  • Orcas have sunk three boats off the coast of Europe and seem to be teaching others to imitate the behavior. The orca war is upon us.

Album of the Week: Jeremy Fisher, The Lemon Squeeze (2014)

Currently Reading: Umberto Eco, Baudolino

Weekly Varia no. 26, 05/13/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

One of my favorite things about my job is getting to spend so much time working with young people. My students are adults exploring the world on their own for the first time, and I get to help them grow in the process. Nor do I feel like a significantly different person than I was in college. More mature in important ways and with more aches and pains, but mostly a deeper, better realized version of the person I was at that time.

Experience of age is a funny thing. Like many professors, I have experience the shock of realizing that the cultural reference I’m making or a piece of media I’m showing dates to before my students were born, and thus now exists in their awareness of the world as a meme, if it does at all. Nor do I understand many of their pop-culture references, but, then, that was true when I was their age, too. If anything, I do slightly better these days.

Except with TikTok. I don’t understand what happens on TikTok. But I digress.

Teaching in higher education follows predictable patterns. The fall semester begins a process of renewal. The incoming first years arrive first, filled with youthful fear and excitement for this big adventure. Then they are joined by the returning students (hopefully) refreshed and bringing with them a bevy of new experiences after a summer away. Then the semester begins.

This time of year is the reverse. Most students have been racing to finish exams so that they can head home, leave for a study abroad program, or get started on a summer job. But the minority of students who have been around the longest are now the ones filled with fear and excitement as they prepare to leave this space they have made their home for the last few years, on to new and uncertain worlds. Some rush to finish, while others linger, not ready for this time to end. A celebration of their accomplishments and a period tinged with sadness.

What you don’t expect working around so many young people is for the experience to be colored by death, but that is just what happened this week.

On Thursday morning I received a message that the roommate of two of my students had died.

Truman is a small community, and these two students had been brought to the Jewish Student Union’s Passover Seder this year, so I immediately feared the worst. A few hours later those fears were confirmed Jehoshua Casey, the president of JSU had been killed in a car accident the night before while driving through a small town in Southern Iowa.

Josh was 20 years old, and preparing to study abroad in Indonesia.

Grief rippled through the Truman community. The Jewish Student Union organized a candlelight vigil that took place in a steady drizzle on Thursday night. By my estimate 150 people showed up, mostly students and some faculty, and more would have been there had they not already left campus for the term. People with no experience reading Hebrew stumbled through transliterated Hebrew prayers, followed by a more confident recitation of the English translation. Then people took turns offering remembrances of an impulsive and gregarious young man who was always looking to get people involved. An outgoing person who wanted nothing more than to be involved in whatever was happening. Someone who was president of Jewish Student Union, ran multiple events in track, played on the ultimate team, and was a member of Truman’s ROTC program—on top of being a full-time student. Who invited near-strangers to go on Spring Break trips and who spent the weekend before Finals going on a trip to the Kentucky Derby. I have no idea what he was doing in Iowa, but since there were no finals on Wednesday, I can imagine that he had been on some adventure and was on his way back to campus to finish off the semester.

As I sat there in the rain on Thursday night listening to friends and acquaintances talk about knowing Josh from parties or Jewish Student Union, or ultimate, or just seeing him around campus, I kept thinking about how young he was. How young they are. How fragile life can be. Someone commented that he lived a full life, and I couldn’t help but disagree. Josh filled his time with activity, but his life was cut short before it could blossom into fullness.

May his memory be a blessing for all who knew him.

This week’s varia:

  • In response to the NAEP Civics and US History report card, Matt Tyler reflects on how learning names and dates in history classes can help contextualize the bigger picture. These are not the “fun” parts of a history class, but I agree with the author that these things are necessary to creating meaning and therefore need to be a foundational part of the curriculum, which means that they have to be assessed somehow (I do open-book quizzes that allow retakes juxtaposed with more analytic assignments). However, it is easy to place too much emphasis on these basic facts and rote memorization, especially when trying to redefine what counts as civics.
  • David Perry and Matthew Gabriele at Modern Medieval comment favorably on the AHA’s Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship. They bring out a few highlights about how the document states the problem and establishes guidelines.
  • Pamela Paul, a New York Times opinion columnist and former editor of the Book Review, wrote a column decrying how the “liberal” academic apparatus is anti-merit because a prestigious journal refused to publish an “article” titled “In Defense of Merit,” even though that journal has a microscopic acceptance rate and the article did not fit either its remit or format. Tim Burke has a good discussion of the original article, which he refers to as “Baby’s First Attack on Postmodernism” by scientists who have not given the time or intellectual energy to engage with the material they are claiming to critique. But an article with thesis doesn’t have to be good to be picked up as a weapon in the culture war by people whose prior assumptions it confirms.
  • Katherine Sasser, a member of the Columbia (Missouri) School Board and mother of a trans child, announced that she is resigning her position. A bill banning transgender health care for minors (and limiting it for others) has made its way to the governor’s desk for his signature. She says that the state’s LGBTQ+ legislation makes it unsafe for her family to remain in the state. I am of the belief that it is important to stay and fight for a more equitable future since most people are not fortunate enough to be able to move, but it is also hard to blame people who can move from doing so.
  • The academic board of the Elsevier-owned journal Neuroimage has walked out over the “greedy” policies of the publishing company. I’m not getting my hopes up that this heralds a big change since one of these mass resignations happens every few years, but it is a good reminder that companies barricade research behind steep paywalls while the writing, reviews, and editorial work goes largely uncompensated. Like many scholars, I’m always happy to send people offprints for anyone interested in my articles.
  • Jonathan Eig found a complete transcript of Alex Haley’s 1965 interview with Martin Luther King Jr. for Playboy. This is the famous interview in which King laments X’s “fiery demagogic oratory,” but the full transcript reveals that Haley (or his editors) took the lines out of context to make King seem more critical of his Civil Right’s colleague. Eig argues that their goals were much more aligned than often portrayed.
  • Your content moderation, and attempts to “detoxify” ChatGPT is outsourced to poorly-paid workers in Africa. Those workers are currently trying to unionize for pay and working conditions.
  • Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell) writes in The Baffler about the current state of the McMansion, connecting it to the ethos of endless prosperity and consumption that, among other things, contributes to the environmental crisis.
  • Another day, another mass shooting in the United States, this time in Allen, Texas, where a gunman wearing a patch RWDS (“Right Wing Death Squad”) opened up at an outlet mall. He killed at least eight people. In Texas, the endemic school shootings have the legislature proposing that children as young as third graders receive training in how to use tourniquets and other tools used for battlefield trauma care.
  • Meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville gave comments in which he criticized a move to drive White Nationalists out of the military and said of White Nationalists “I call them Americans.” His clarification was to explain that when he talks about White Nationalists he’s thinking of MAGA-types and the people who stormed the Capitol. Tuberville is also complaining about low recruitment being a threat to military readiness, at the same time as he is holding up promotions over the military continuing to offer abortions and other medical treatments to service members.
  • Living in the United States makes it easy to get caught up in the horror of gun violence, but this car crash in Texas is a sobering reminder that guns are not the only weapon available to people in this country.
  • George Santos has been arraigned, pleading not guilty to fraud and money laundering charges. He has also confessed and agreed to pay restitution for charges in Brazil.
  • NPR has a piece on how Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidated power in Turkey over the last twenty years, and how some of the same factors that brought him to power now put him at risk of losing this weekend’s election.

Album of the Week: Barefoot Truth, “Threads” (2010)

Currently Reading: Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man; Martin Hallmannsecker, Roman Ionia: Constructions of Cultural Identity in Western Asia Minor

Weekly Varia no. 25, 05/06/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I never know quite what to do as a professor in the last week of the semester. When I was a teaching assistant in survey courses I dedicated this week to exam preparation, but my deep skepticism of that mode of assessment means that I almost requires students to sit final exams. I have students write papers instead, and, increasingly, I have moved key pieces of the assessment earlier in the semester so that the students are able to revise their work before the end of term. This change gives me more flexibility about what we cover later in the semester, but I go back and forth on what we should focus on given that the “new” content is not going to be assessed on a test. But neither do I want to leave a semester unfinished, so I have recently been doing two things to round out the semester.

First, I use the last couple of weeks of class to complete whatever thematic arcs we have followed from the start of the semester. I started thinking about my courses in these terms four or five years ago when I realized that doing so helped both me and my students approach the material as a discrete unit that layers and builds depth as the semester goes on. The last couple of weeks let us tie these themes together.

Second, I lean into reflection. For instance, in two of my classes this semester I showed the students their opening day Jamboard where I asked them to reflect on what they knew coming into the course. My Persian history class got a kick out of seeing how little they knew, while the Roman history course talked about how they had a lot of key terms or ideas, but as buzzwords absent context. In both classes, we then talked about what they learned and reinforced the themes for the semester. Predictably, my Persian history class ended up in a passionate discussion about the challenges of writing ancient history.

But when I step out of the classroom for the last time for the semester, whether tinged with sadness or relief that a particular class has concluded, I also feel like I’m stepping into an unsettling limbo. As much as I am often ready for a break at the end of a long semester, my work is not over. I will be meeting with students throughout the finals week and screening films for a couple of classes, and the “final” grading push has only just begun.

By next week, though, I might be ready to start looking ahead to the summer.

This week’s varia:

  • Paul Thomas has a good reflection on one of the core challenges of a good writing-intensive class: changing student perceptions about whose responsibility learning actually is. In his estimation, as it is mine, these challenges are systemic to American education, and COVID policies only exacerbated the issues where students often don’t avail themselves of the resources at their disposal and limit their revisions to the things specifically pointed out in the comments, even when those comments are representative of other issues. My hope is that because I’m doing this from my seat in a history department and frequently have the students in our major more than once I can help them break these habits even if it takes more than one iteration.
  • NAEP Civics and US History scores for eighth graders dropped last week, showing a modest drop from 2018 and 2014, but only back to the baseline for earlier years. There is some performative rending of clothes and tearing of hair about these scores (including on my campus), but these scores are deeply misleading. These are not good tests, to start with, and I could easily see how questions about “the rule of law” on a civics test might be shaped by the discourse filled with mass shootings, police violence, and attempts to overthrow the government. But even more damning is the data about social studies instruction that, even disregarding the frequently-true stereotype of the coach-teacher, the suggests that social studies education has lagged behind other disciplines in terms of time and resources. Unfortunately, this new data is being used to manufacture a crisis that can only have negative outcomes.
  • Stephen Chappell writes about his approach to digitally restoring the polychrome painting on the Apollo Belvedere for a French exhibition.
  • Pasts Imperfect highlights a history of philosophy podcast this week.
  • Modern Medieval features an article about a Carolingian coin bearing the name Fastrada, one of the wives of Charlemagne.
  • Baker Maurizio Leo, the author of The Perfect Loaf, asked ChatGPT to provide him a sourdough bread recipe. His assessment is that the AI produced a reasonable generic loaf, albeit with a particularly high baking temperature, but that the recipe lacked creativity. AI is a powerful tool and the pace of its development is truly impressive, but I also believe that even some of the “basic” tasks people are racing to offload onto the AI require more care, attention, and creativity to do well. In many ways, bread baking is a metaphor for life and “Great sourdough bread isn’t simply a pattern that can be detected and replicated; it requires a human touch to guide it in the right direction.”
  • AI machine learning translation tools that swapped singular for plural pronouns (and other little errors) put Afghan asylum claims at risk. I find these tools incredibly useful, but this sort of error underscores my primary concern with AI, namely that putting all your trust in the tools without any way to check or verify the accuracy will cause innumerable problems that will only be caught when it is too late if they’re caught at all.
  • The “Godfather” of AI left his job at Google and raised warnings about the future of the technology. His concerns are about ethics and bad actors, while mine lie more in the likelihood that most people are going to assume that AI can do more than it can in a way that is going to cause enormous disruption while eroding the imperative to learn the underlying skills and putting significantly more noise and misinformation out into the world.
  • Missouri’s Senate passed a proposal to raise the threshold for statewide constitutional amendments to 57% of voters (from the 50%+1 that in recent years rejected right to work, legalized marijuana, and approved medicare expansion, among others) or a simple majority in five out of eight heavily gerrymandered districts. The combination seems designed to curtail the power of voters unless they’re likely to vote the way that the Republicans want. His concerns seem rooted in
  • New reporting at ProPublica has revealed still more financial ties between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, including more than $6,000 a month(!) in boarding school tuition for a grandnephew over whom Thomas had legal custody. Thomas did not report this financial relationship. At the same time, the Washington Post has a report about money that Leonard Leo funneled to Ginni Thomas the same year that the court was hearing Shelby County v. Holder, all the while directing her name be left off the receipts. There is not much more to say about this deep level of corruption in the Supreme Court, but it seems bad when ProPublica has a section dedicated to this series of stories. Sheldon Whitehouse is spearheading efforts to create accountability, so, naturally, Senators like Josh Hawley claim they are designed to intimidate justices.
  • Herschel Walker’s campaign appears to have violated campaign finance laws by acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars for his private business.
  • This week in “there are too many guns,” a baseball player for Texas A&M-Texarkana was hit in the chest by a stray bullet while he was in a game.
  • Greg Abbott described five victims of a shooting last week as “illegal immigrants” alongside a reward for the shooter in a bit of casual cruelty. At least one of the victims appears to have been a legal resident, as though the residency status matters.
  • A passenger on a New York City subway killed Jeremy Neely after putting him in a choke hold. I almost didn’t include this story in this list I had a hard time bringing myself to read about it and, especially, the discourse around whether killing someone was somehow justified. These posts are a curated rundown of things I read about during the week, usually that I have some sort editorial comment about. When one topic seems to have captured a particular zeitgeist I have nothing of particular substance to add, except to note that the grotesque discourse about under what circumstances it is acceptable to murder people in public absolutely terrifies me.
  • The story that made me think about the gun violence epidemic in the United States was when I heard the BBC World Service do a feature on two mass shootings in Serbia this week, with the rarity of the violence making international news. The level of gun violence in the United States is not normal.
  • Belgian customs officials zealously enforced the complaint from the Comité Champagne by destroying a shipment of Miller High Life after the trade group objected to the slogan “the champagne of beers” on the grounds that it infringed on the designated place of origin label.
  • Astronomers observed a gas giant being eaten by a star for the first time, doing it in one big gulp. Pretty cool.
  • Tucker Carlson has thoughts about how white men fight (McSweeney’s).
  • McSweeney’s has an imagined short monologue: “If elected president, I promise to slaughter Mickey Mouse.”

Album of the week: Justin Townes Earl, The Saint of Lost Causes (2019)

Currently Reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time; Martin Hallmannsecker, Roman Ionia: Constructions of Cultural Identity in Western Asia Minor

Weekly Varia no. 24, 04/29/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The penultimate week of classes at Truman State passed with a significant amount of chaos stemming from the system outage that I wrote about last week. IT actually restored services pretty quickly, all things considered, but the outage came at a particularly bad point in the semester calendar and thus landed like a bomb among already deeply stressed students and ambiguous messaging from administration about expectations for extensions and reduced workload made things significantly worse.

I scaled back expectations for a couple of my classes to account for the lack of access to resources and functionally waived late penalties between now and the end of the semester. I understand that not everyone has these options, but I have been leaning into flexibility and optionality in my courses by default over the past few years, which helped make these changes without compromising any of my learning outcomes. Moreover, while I have been second-guessing my specifications grading system in that it requires a significant amount of work for me to help students meet the higher standards in their writing, it has come in handy here because some number of students have already completed their major assignments for the course.

Perhaps most surreal for me is that at a time when so many people seemed to be panicking, I felt the most relaxed. When students asked how they should submit work, I told them to wait until Blackboard was back. Several times I joked I might just pretend that my email is still out even once it comes back. My consistent message to my students echoed what I said when COVID hit: we’re all in this together and I’ll do everything in my power to help you succeed in my course.

The week reminded me of a story my mother told me about an experience as a student teacher. The primary teacher was struggling to manage a particularly rambunctious class that pulled out the straws they were using to shoot spitwads when they were introduced to my mother. The teacher was furious. My mom laughed, and went on to have a great relationship with the class. Expectations and standards are not bad and there is plenty of reason to stress, but sometimes the most important thing you can do is to laugh at the absurdity.

This week’s varia:

  • A statuette of the Buddha carved from Anatolian stone been found at a Sanctuary of Isis in Berenike, Egypt. We have other textual evidence for these trade connections, but seeing its material culture is always exciting.
  • Neville Morley writes about his research trajectory through the lens of the Oxford vs Cambridge rivalry at a time when every university had a unique tradition for how to do ancient history, and how a globalized academic world has flattened and erased a lot of these differences.
  • At his blog, Bret Devereaux has a good primer on academic ranks and some of the sleights of hand that universities use to obscure who does what work. In my experience there is even more fuzziness to these terms and I know of a few more people who moved from teaching stream to tenure stream than Bret does, but the broad strokes of what he writes in terms of categories and consequences is spot on.
  • Texas is pushing the ten commandments into school classrooms as early as next fall. This is the latest effort to push a watered-down version of generic Christianity into the world that should worry not just non-Christians, but also the devout because such symbols can be weaponized against people of different denominations just as easily as they can be used to proselytize to the non-believers. As Kevin Kruse, the author of One Nation Under God pointed out on Twitter, similar attempts in the 1950s received the most pushback from Christians who had no interest in the state getting decide for their children what type of Christian they should be. One of the groups in Texas already raising concerns is the Texas Baptists Christian Life Commission.
  • Graduate student workers at the University of Minnesota voted to unionize, with more than 2500 out of 4,165 workers voting and only 72 rejecting the measure. Graduate employee unions can be fraught given the revolving door of members and frequent uncertainty about who is eligible—when I was at Mizzou I couldn’t participate in the drive because it happened the year when I was on fellowship and thus paid through financial aid and didn’t receive a w2, which was part of the argument to administration, even though I was just as negatively affected by the administration’s decision to cancel our expected health insurance with less than 24-hour’s notice—but this is a field that desperately needs overhaul around both working conditions and pay. Meanwhile, Michigan GEO Union is striking for better conditions and being met with a university negotiating in bad faith.
  • In the Washington Post, David Perry reviews Short Changed: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. Consider this added to my to-read list.
  • Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusations led to the brutal lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, has died. The last time I taught US History she had just returned to the news with a Grand Jury investigation and the discovery of an unserved arrest warrant. Moments like are a powerful reminder that 1955 isn’t all that long ago, historically speaking.
  • Today in “there are too many guns,” a man in Texas executed five people in a neighbor’s house after they asked him to stop shooting his AR-15 in the middle of the night because their baby was trying to sleep.
  • The Washington Post has a story about a county board of commissioners in Michigan that saw its new Board of Commissioners dismantle its structures from the inside, including targeting the county’s vision statement “you belong,” which they claim “has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement.” Centered in their crosshairs is the new health officer Adeline Hambley who they needed to manufacture a reason to fire.
  • Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, altered the findings on a COVID-19 study to show that the vaccines posed a health risk to young men.
  • The current Roberts Supreme Court is in a race to strip legal protections from millions of Americans. The other horse in this race are the revelations about how deeply it is compromised, from the Clarence Thomas reports to Gorsuch’s sale of a ranch, to Roberts’ wife receiving a handsome salary to serve as a recruiter for law firms with business before the court, to Alito’s rants, to a story this week about omissions in the Senate report that cleared Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. But Roberts is refusing either to testify before Congress or to adopt a formal code of conduct. To his credit, every justice is doing their part to avoid more formal oversight—which is as good a reason as any to need it in my book. But, sure, it’s politically-motivated attacks that are discrediting the Court.
  • Montana follows in the path of Tennessee and voted to expel their only transgender lawmaker Zooey Zephyr for breaching decorum (read: representing positions they disagree with). In Nebraska, a democratic lawmaker is being investigated on an ethics complaint regarding an act that would prohibit puberty blockers because she has a trans son. Great. Now do wealthy lawmakers and tax cuts, Republican lawmakers and gun control, and evangelical lawmakers and putting prayer in schools.
  • The FBI has arrested thirty people who applied for work at Rentahitman.com, including a member of Tennessee Air National Guard. The story turns more than a little disturbing at the price ($5,000 dollars) he accepted the job for and the lengths he seemed willing to go. But I also can’t help but see this as a worrying sign about economic instability.
  • There are allegations against the West Virginia State Police Academy, including video tapes in the women’s locker room and a hostile, sexist environment that also led to improper relationships and assaults.
  • In San Francisco, a former fire commissioner was beaten with a metal rod by a homeless person, leading to charges against the person. And then video footage started to come out that seems to show the man using bear spray on homeless people while they sleep.
  • This week in the ongoing tragi-comedy that is monarchy, The Proclaimers have been removed from King Charles III’s coronation playlist because the Scottish brothers have expressed Republican political views.

Album of the week: Johnny Clegg and Savuka, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World (1989)

Currently Reading: Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Weekly Varia no. 23, 04/22/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The antepenultimate week of classes this semester passed in something of a blur, and I found myself working late into Thursday night grading and prepping for Friday’s class as the semester rushes toward its grand finale. I thus went to bed Thursday night suspecting that this intro would be another meditation on the rhythm of academic life.

On Friday morning I woke up early, planning to sit down at my computer, finish the last couple of essays, put the final touches on the slide deck for my afternoon class, and start sending my usual slate of reminders that I send to my students heading into the weekend.

Only I couldn’t log into Blackboard. Or email.

Both were annoying, but I could still access the slide deck, so continued working on the presentation and went to campus…where Blackboard and email were still out. I taught my first class, which went well enough for a Friday morning. By the time my morning office hours were set to start the presentation was done, but Blackboard and email were still out. Then a staff member stopped by my office to tell me that there was a cybersecurity issue and all computers on the school network had to be shut down. Which meant that the class slides I had stayed up putting together were totally useless, on top of still being unable to grade anything.

So I took office hours to a bench on a quad, leaving a note on my door about where I could be found.

Nothing had changed by the start of my afternoon class. Not only could I not use the slides that double as the outline for my presentation (I don’t script my lectures), but also the activities I had come up with for today required access to the readings distributed through Blackboard that, even had my students diligently read them before today, they could no longer access. And on a day when I was already short of sleep. Now, there are topics about which I can give a reasonably coherent presentation without visual aids, and I once did 75 minutes on the Persian Wars as an emergency fill-in with only about an hour’s notice. I even probably could have offered a reasonable approximation of today’s presentation despite not being one of my stronger topics, but it would have been harder to follow and I wouldn’t have been able to do one of my staple activities in class where I put evidence on the board and solicit interpretations.

Walking toward class, I thought about which parts of today’s discussion needed to stand alone and which parts I could distribute and repurpose for next week’s classes—both and easier and harder because conceive of my classes in terms of narrative arcs on the level of the week, unit. By the time I started talking today, I had a good sense of today’s talking points and where they fit into the larger trajectory of the course, which allowed me to release my students for the weekend after only about 20 minutes.

At the time I’m writing this on Friday night, the university system is still out and I don’t know when it is going to come back online. The whole day left me reflecting on the centrality of devices to our workflows. I use these tools because they are convenient and offer an enormous amount of flexibility for when students can turn in their work, but I don’t need them to teach. However, they they have also become such default expectations that suddenly losing access creates a serious disruption. Ditto for communication. Leaving a note on my office door announcing that all work due today has received an automatic extension until Sunday or whenever Blackboard is back (whichever is later) is a poor substitute for direct communication, but it is also what I had at my disposal without access to email or Blackboard. I might have found this disruption annoying and mildly inconvenient because it creates a backlog that still needs, but it also meant a day or more when I could not grade. By contrast, I found myself trying to give reassuring answers to students trying to turn in assignments to other professors who weren’t in the office and couldn’t be reached by email. The students were quite anxious, understandably at this time of the semester.

This week’s varia:

  • Excavations south of Rome have revealed a large, luxurious winery that included dining rooms with a view of fountains that gushed with the recently-pressed wine. The story in The Guardian is reporting on a new open-access article by Emlyn Dodd and others.
  • Excavations in France have revealed a Roman temple that might have been dedicated to Mars.
  • In addition to the usual roundup this week in Pasts Imperfect, Shelley Haley writes about her experience working on the Netflix DocuSeries Queen Cleopatra. I have primarily followed news around this series through people on social media complaining that the series conflates African with Subsaharan African in the casting, but I appreciated Haley’s comments about what she hoped to achieve with her involvement and would recommend also Katherine Blouin’s comments on this (and past) decisions on how to represent Cleopatra on the screen.
  • Carlos Noreña has a long essay in Aeon on the work of French historian Paul Veyne, focusing on how Veyne’s commitment to the alienness of the ancient world led to inventive arguments. The piece reminds me that I should read more of Veyne’s oeuvre.
  • Dimitri Nakassis has some worthwhile notes on a state of the field conference on Mediterranean Archaeology.
  • Modern Medieval has a piece debunking the dishy historical claim recently in the news that Leonardo Da Vinci was Jewish.
  • The University of Michigan is planning to withhold pay from striking graduate students after a judge sided with the school. The graduate students are striking for livable wages, and arguing that the university is negotiating in bad faith. The union has created a strike fund.
  • BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its staff and shut down BuzzFeed News in a pivot to AI. Again for everyone in the back: AI isn’t actually replacing human workers, but it is being used as a reason to fire them. Count me among the chorus who think that this will have a profound negative effect on society.
  • Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg write in The New Republic about meat as a front in the Culture War, despite the numerous ways that the industrial meat industry does demonstrable harm to the very communities buying into the rhetoric. They write: “People once wondered whether an openly gay Republican could ever win major office; today the better question is whether an openly vegan Republican could.”
  • From Vox, another piece on the Colorado River water crisis, with infographics that show where most of the water goes. Spoiler: most of it goes to crop irrigation, and most of that crop irrigation goes to alfalfa to feed livestock, especially beef.
  • A reporter in Southeast Oklahoma left a recording device in the room of a county commissioner’s meeting because he suspected that business continued after the formal end, in violation of Oklahoma law. On the recording, the sheriff and other people present talk about killing journalists (including the man who left the device and his son) and lament that they can’t hang black people who now “got more rights than we got.” The sheriff’s department made a statement in which they claim the recording was made illegally and that felony charges will be filed. The Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, has called on the county officials to resign, though a cynical reading of this might be that this is yet another instance where actions wholly in keeping with the direction of the Republican party have become so extreme that they are detrimental to electoral politics.
  • Kids asking for a society that doesn’t shoot them seems like a reasonable ask, and yet. In Kansas City, 16-year old Ralph Yarl was shot by an 84 year old white man after he rang the doorbell of the wrong house when picking up his siblings; in Texas, two cheerleaders were shot by a man in an HEB parking lot when one of them went to the wrong car after practice; in North Carolina a man shot a six-year old girl and her parents because a basketball rolled into his yard; and in rural New York, in a part of the state I have driven through on a number of occasions to and from Vermont, a man shot and killed a teen who drove down the wrong driveway to turn around. The trigger-happy paranoia is really jarring to see, and lethality of modern firearms make it all the easier for the paranoia to turn into homicide.
  • A bystander tried to get a passing Chicago police car to stop and intervene in a violent assault taking place over the weekend. The police did not stop and the bystander says that a desk sergeant told her that it was because Brandon Johnson (the leftist candidate) was elected mayor. Actions like this and the unaccountability of law enforcement are among the strongest arguments in favor of defunding law enforcement.
  • As Supreme Court watchers anticipated, the justices voted to stay the ban on Mifepristone, with dissents coming from (at least) Alito and Thomas. Elie Mystal with an analysis of the decision, as well as the Alito dissent that criticizes the other justices for making this decision using the shadow docket…by citing their opposition to his use of the same procedure.
  • Donald Trump, the twice-impeached ex-president and likely Republican nominee for 2024, is back on the campaign trail and is touting an ever-more dystopian and authoritarian vision for his second term, including using the military for police action, patriotic education, and planned “freedom cities.” This sort of rhetoric makes for a bleak-looking future.
  • Missouri’s Attorney General’s office launched a tip-line for “transgender concerns” this week, but the site lacked a CAPTCHA, which allowed internet users to use bots to spam the portal with nonsense submissions until they took it offline.
  • David Choe, the star of the Netflix show Beef, appears to be using copyright law to suppress people talking about an episode his podcast in which he talked about coercing a masseuse into sexual activity and, when the porn actress on the podcast with him called him out for raping the woman, acknowledged it as “rapey behavior.” Choe is attempting to do damage control.

Album of the week: Brett Dennen, Smoke and Mirrors (2013)

Currently reading: Robert Graves, I, Claudius; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

Weekly Varia no. 22, 04/15/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Spring arrived in force in Northeast Missouri this week. The world is starting to turn green, but the leaves around town have largely been preceded by an explosion of flowering things. I can’t complain about the views and the rising temperatures have drawn students out into the quad outside my office, making campus generally feel more alive than it does throughout the winter.

However, spring also comes at a cost. I have never been one to suffer from allergies in the past, but one of these flowering things causes my sinuses to go haywire each spring in Kirksville, which has made teaching classes a bit of an adventure this week. This phase only lasts a couple of weeks, fortunately, and the nice weather almost cancels out the temporary pain. Besides, I’ll be complaining about the heat again soon enough.

This week’s varia:

Album of the Week: Counting Crows, August and Everything After (2007)

Currently Reading: Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement, Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

Weekly Varia no. 21, 04/08/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am not a particularly religious individual, but I have a soft spot for the traditions and rituals that accompany holidays. Passover, which started this past week is one that I find fascinating, but I have to confess that it is not my favorite holiday.

Passover ostensibly celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt as told in Exodus and literally drips with symbolism (pun intended, if you’re familiar with the seder plate). But these traditions are perpetually changing such that a festival that blends elements of a Greek symposium with Jewish ritual and an invented history with a flexible ritual manual (the Haggadah) that can either can freeze the tradition at a point of imagined purity or be updated to address the concerns of contemporary participants, if often in ways that are dissonant with the modern political climate—especially with the traditionally invocation of “next year in Jerusalem.”

Last night while attending a seder I found myself thinking about what a “historically accurate Haggadah” might look like. No references to Pharaoh’s pyramids, if for no other reason than that the chronology is wrong—Khufu’s pyramid was built more than thousand years before the Exodus was supposed to happen. Perhaps, I thought, the Haggadah stories become framed as the product of an oral storyteller balanced against the commentary of a contemporary archaeologist and context can be added to the traditions of reclining for the meal by pointing to the myriad of influences that make up modern Judaism. Precision gets added to the invocations of freedom to condemn those of every background who threaten it. Of course, I quickly snapped back to the present because the purpose of a seder is to invoke and create community rather than to quibble about the nature of labor in ancient Egypt.

But my actual beef with Passover isn’t the service, it’s the food. As much as homemade matzah is a pretty good flatbread, I have been known to joke that I should be able to use a dollop of my starter so long as the baking is complete in the requisite time because you wouldn’t want to leave a carefully curated starter behind in Egypt. (This is not usually how leavening worked in the ancient world. Like I said, a joke.) Nevertheless, I used the seder as an excuse to try a new dessert recipe, producing a delicious and decadent dairy-free flourless chocolate cake, topped with a chocolate ganache.

Since this weekend is also Easter, I get an extra day off, which I’m going to use to sleep, read, and catch up on grading. Whether your holiday of choice this weekend is Ramadan, Passover, Easter, the arrival of spring, or just the regular end of the week, may you find it restful and rewarding.

This week’s varia:

  • Bret Devereaux placed an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing for the importance of the Liberal Arts for a functioning, free, democratic society. His argument here, in effect, is that public and political discourse are strangling these programs, despite both practical and philosophical importance of what students learn in these programs. Bret is an adjunct professor and an excellent historian who has quite a large following on his blog ACOUP, which is an enviable model for public engagement.
  • The lead story of Pasts Imperfects this week looks at recovering the lives of ancient artisans, exploring what the physical objects can tell us about the people who made them.
  • I read three pieces this week on “active learning” that spoke to each other:
    • A couple weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Sarabeth Grant talked about how “active classrooms” can be one too many things for overwhelmed students to handle. She points out that many students are unprepared for active classrooms, and relates an anecdote about a particularly negative experience. I find that the preparation varies by discipline and institution, but very much find that all active, all the time has to be handled with extreme care.
    • Jonathan Wilson comments on the “recipe” as a metaphor for teaching, pointing out that simply reproducing the latest buzz of pedagogy discourse is not going to work for every teacher or every classroom. In the middle of the piece he reiterates that lectures and other forms of “transmission” teaching is necessary to facilitate active learning. He describes learning to teach as “learning to cook” as opposed to following the recipe.
    • David Labaree published an essay from his new book in which he makes a case that college teaching is both better than you might think and that it is better than the institutional structure of higher education requires it to be. This is a bit of a contrarian argument, comparing professors to a competitive street gang competing for popularity among the students, but I think he’s got a legitimate point. Professors might have different criteria for success and have different levels of creativity or attention to the craft, but most professors take this part of the job seriously.
  • Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira makes a case for what he calls “epistemic Luddism” against the encroachment of AI on education. Basically, he says the same thing that I have been on about with AI, which is that its proponents largely misunderstand the purpose of essay assignments.
  • LSU played a great game to beat Iowa in the Women’s Final Four earlier this week, though the game was marred by bad officiating. Iowa’s star, Caitlin Clark plays a game like Steph Curry that is a lot of fun to watch, but she is also a trash talker. Angel Reese of LSU, a black player, used a similar gesture to Clark at the end of the game, which caused (mostly white) people online to become outraged and Dr. Jill Biden gave a comment that she’d like to invite Iowa to the White House, as well as LSU. The commentary is mostly not worth reading, but I wanted to highlight that Clark, for her part, seems to have her head on straight and rejected both the criticism of Reese and the invitation to the White House. I also liked Paul Thomas’ reflection on his experience with race on the basketball court.
  • Paul Thomas observes that the laments of conservative academics are performative, just as much as most academics perform progressive social politics in an institution that rewards conservatism.
  • Israeli police raided al-Aqsa Mosque, beating worshippers and arresting more than 350 people. This during Ramadan, which happens to coincide with Passover (and Easter) this year. Israeli police seem to need no excuse for this behavior, but I can’t help but wonder if the convergence of holidays is connected given the desires of religious zealots of both Christian and Jewish traditions who are more aggressively than ever working to define Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.
  • Last week there was quite a buzz about a story from California based on a lawsuit filed against the Shasta County Fair and law enforcement. In short, fair officials decided to teach a young girl a lesson after she bonded with a goat that she owned and was raising for an auction. The girl didn’t want to have the goat slaughtered and refused to turn it over, which prompted the fair to file a criminal grand theft complaint and deputies drove 500 miles with a search warrant to seize the goat, leading to it being slaughtered. Everything about the story is excessive, and in Vox Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz explore how the story is reflective of a larger ideology around 4-H and the inhumane nature of the meat industry.
  • Tennessee’s legislature and its Republican supermajority voted to expel two young black men for their participation in a peaceful protest against gun violence, while narrowly voting to keep the white woman who also participated. This is the sort of action used during the early period of Reconstruction as Black legislators started to be voted into state congresses. This gross, reactionary vote puts the GOP priorities on display, even if it will likely result in a fundraising windfall for both men since nothing prohibits their district boards from simply appointing them as interim legislators or for them to run (and very likely win) the special election. By contrast, one of those Republican legislators rhetorically asked protestors what gun they’d like to be shot with (if not the AR-15).
  • Bolts Magazine shed light on an election loophole in Georgia where an official (in this case judges) who announces their resignation within six months of a scheduled election allows the governor to appoint a replacement and delay the election of a replacement to the next full election cycle, thereby circumventing the democratic process and dissuading candidates from running lest the rug get swept out from under them.
  • Pro Publica has an investigation into the relationship between the billionaire Harlan Crow and Justice Clarence Thomas, including the wide range of gifts that Crow has bestowed on Thomas over the years that the latter has never disclosed. Naturally. Crow has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia in his home and a statue garden with (apparently genuine) statues of 20th century dictators, but he apparently is more comfortable discussing his other collections.
  • The British Museum changes tune on repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles and is now offering Greece an “exclusive NFT.” The rare good April Fools piece.

Album of the Week: The Barefoot Movement, Figures of the Year (2013)

Currently Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity

A plump cat in a sunbeam

Weekly Varia no. 20, 04/01/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Today is the day we ponder that existential question: are you even a historian if you don’t like baseball?

~Me, on Twitter in 2021

Baseball is back this week, which was a bright spot in what was otherwise an exhausting week. Nothing particularly bad happened other than a couple nights of poor sleep, too many commitments, and a weather front that played havoc with my sinuses, all of which conspired to have me dragging through Friday. But, on Thursday night, I tuned into ESPN for the opening night game between the Houston Astros and the Chicago White Sox. Other than a mild rooting interest in the players on my fantasy teams and a long-time distaste of the White Sox based on a division rivalry with my team (the Minnesota Twins), I didn’t have a strong rooting interest in the game.

And yet, I loved the broadcast. Some of the things I enjoyed, like the incorporation of analytics into the broadcast and little gimmicks like having a player mic’d up so that he can answer questions while on the field were nice touches that the broadcast had begun incorporating over the past few years, to great effect, but I thought that these elements blended perfectly with the pace of the game that noticeably picked up because of the rule changes new this year, like the addition of a pitch clock. The feel of the game was the same–the game still lasts the same number of outs that it always has, and each pitch is still punctuated with a reset from the fielders that allowed the crew to carry a conversation with Alex Bregman that would be unthinkable in any other sport, but the pitch clock cut the dead space that announcers often feel compelled to fill with inane small talk. The extra half an hour can help kill a long July afternoon, but it drags excessively over 162 games.

Over the past few years I have allowed my sports attention to wander toward basketball and football, but, even with the final four upon us and the NBA playoffs just around the corner, opening day reminded me why baseball was my first love.

This week’s varia:

  • Neville Morley has a nice reflection on academic overwork and the ways in which academic community can both exacerbate and ameliorate aspects of it. Echoing something Jonathan Malesic talks about in The End of Burnout, Morley suggests that looking to the Rule of St. Benedict might offer a route forward inasmuch as the rule is designed to create community. This post resonated with me because I’ve been thinking about issues of academic work and legacy (again) these past few weeks. My first book came out earlier this month along with the near-simultaneous publication of my latest article, both during one of the busiest academic years I can recall in my teaching-first job, and, yet, I’m already feeling the pull toward other publications that are often used as markers of academic worth—three new article-length pieces and the next of the three additional monographs I have in mind. I can’t imagine anything will happen if I never finish this work. I am not George RR Martin with a legion of fans impatiently waiting for my next intervention, after all. But the combination of personality and conditioning make the feelings hard to resist. In my case, I am trying to remind myself of the lessons I try to instill in my students: center yourself in the process and the product will follow, and a healthy community is more important than any individual accolade.
  • NPR has a piece on UnGrading, a pedagogical model where students don’t receive grades in a traditional sense for their assignments. The piece casts a skeptical eye at the practice, pointing to evidence that students often feel that they do their best work when being graded. I am of two minds about this because, yes, I think that there are some number of students who are conditioned to believe that “not being graded” means that they don’t have to work hard and there are some ways of implementing such a system as one might on a broad scale that will lead to professors not giving the extensive feedback that UnGrading and other alternative grading models require. However, I also think that giving students at least some agency over their grades can be empowering, and I have started taking an ungraded approach to participation grades where the students write a metacognitive reflection of their engagement with the class that I plug into a formula based on things like attendance. Some students invariably overrate their performance, but I find that with a little guidance most students offer sincere reflection.
  • GPT-4 learning language model managed to hire a person online to complete a CAPTCHA, pretending to be blind.
  • Joe Biden wants unionized campaign staff. Even as a PR stunt, I find this development interesting because it is the latest move to unionize workplaces that have historically not been unionized—you know, as someone who works in another such field.
  • The Daily Kos has a rundown of states where Republican-led legislatures are curbing ballot initiatives because the voters keep passing things like Medicare expansion, marijuana legalization, voting measures, and rejecting right to work laws. My state of Missouri, which makes this list, did each of those things since 2016, despite voting for Trump with 57% of the vote.
  • Missouri’s legislature passed a budget that eliminated all funding for public libraries, in retaliation for a lawsuit from two library groups challenging a new state law that bans some library materials, as well as banning the state from contracting with any company with a diversity statement, which very well might include companies like Coca Cola.
  • Missouri’s lawmakers are overturning local ordinances in the name of preventing communities from interfering with the relationship between a patient and their doctor. What’s that, you say? This is above overturning local bans on declawing cats and not about protecting patients? Of course it is.
  • Speaking of local ordinances: the board Ron DeSantis appointed to oversee the special district by Disney Properties discovered upon taking office that the outgoing board signed a restrictive covenant with Disney giving the company power that becomes void “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England, living as of the date of this declaration.” On the one hand, I dislike giving any one company this much power. On the other, DeSantis’ actions are downright authoritarian.
  • A New York State Grand Jury voted to indict Donald Trump on business fraud charges related to his paying off Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. This has predictably resulted in a storm of outraged hysteria from Republican politicians, which mostly reminds me of two things. First, no politician should be above the law, and the people who reduce this piece of news to “the politics”—whether in the business of stoking outrage or looking to the horserace of the 2024 election—infuriate me. Second, I find these outrage cycles utterly exhausting.
  • NBC News has a piece on Heather McDonald whose collapse is featured in the anti-vaxx film Died Suddenly…even though she’s obviously not dead. The piece is prompted by a bill in Idaho that would make administering an mRNA vaccine a crime.
  • Atmos has a good piece on the environmental toll of Mezcal production, which can be sustainable—except that the agave plant takes years to mature, meaning that booming demand for the liquor is leading to clear-cutting forests and farmers turning to espadín, a variety of agave that matures two to four times faster than other varieties.
  • There were massive protests and a general strike in Israel this week in response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempted judicial overhaul, which would insulate him from future corruption charges and serve the interests of the super-religious members of his coalition in their efforts to codify Israel as a fundamentalist Jewish state. The Washington Post has a piece about the Kohelet Policy Forum, a secretive think tank, that lay behind the attempt.

Album of the Week: Turnpike Troubadours, A Long Way From Your Heart (2017)

Currently Reading: S.A. Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Michael Kulikowski, The Triumph of Empire

Weekly Varia no. 18, 03/18/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This week was Spring Break. I have never been one for “spring break” trips, both because of personal inclination and financial considerations. But, this year, we used the break for the second trip to bring wedding festivities to our family. Members of both of our families met up in Las Cruses, New Mexico, which we used as a base for exploring the Organ Mountains, White Sands, Mesilla, and other local attractions. I would particularly recommend the Zuhl Collection at New Mexico State University, which contained just a spectacular collection of petrified wood and fossils.

The combination of travel and family meant that my break hasn’t been as restful as I had hoped, but it was restorative in other ways. One of my brothers made it to this trip and I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic started because the last two planned attempts were both disrupted by COVID. Likewise, we were able to visit friends in El Paso and see their first child who was born last year. Despite having every intention of maintaining a modestly productive routine I mostly spent my downtime at our AirBnB reading such that I finished three books and part of a fourth within the week. I can feel the words starting to burble beneath the surface again, but they’re not ready to burst forth just yet.

Now I’m back in chilly Kirksville. Yesterday I finished grading my outstanding assignments and this weekend I will be spending the time between naps putting the rest of my course materials in order for the coming week. In other words, a pretty normal weekend.

This week’s varia:

  • Judge Kyle Duncan spoke at Stanford where, conservative commentators claim, he was “cancelled” by student protests. Students did protest at the event by asking him pointed questions, but they also settled in to allow him to deliver his prepared responses when he decided to pivot to question and answer and proceeded to berate the students who asked questions. Mark Joseph Stern suggests that this was Duncan’s intent all along, as an audition that would raise his profile onto a short list for the Supreme Court under the next Republican administration. Ken White (Popehat) is disgusted with everyone involved in the incident. I’m inclined to side with him in the sense that responding in kind to deliberate provocation is entirely counter-productive, which is why I have been developing a non-engagement policy on social media.
  • Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame has a design column at The Nation. The first installment explores the rise of what she calls “griege” (gray + beige) aesthetic. She argues that it has become the dominant mode because of a confluence of factors, most notably the digital unreality of online realty and that many buyers are looking for an investment and thus are thinking about resale before ever completing the purchase.
  • A home Zillow valued at $417,000 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina fell into the sea last week, leaving a 21-mile long debris trail. This marks the fourth such home in the last 13 months. The effects of climate change are already here.
  • The Biden Administration is pushing for TikTok to be sold or else face a ban in the United states because of its link to the Chinese Government. This story follows the comments from a TikTok spokesperson, but it also came out this week that the company had used the location data of US journalists to try to determine who had been talking to them.
  • Pro Publica has video and a story about the rise of Teneo, a conservative influence group funded by Leonard Leo. I am always struck by the conspiracy-minded nature of these groups, where they justify their own conspiracy by claiming the existence of a preexisting structure among their perceived enemies. Of course their examples rely on faceless archetypes rather than concrete examples because such a conspiracy doesn’t exist.
  • Police departments have not been defunded, but, like in many other sectors, large departments are suffering from staffing shortages. This is leading to departments like that of New Orleans to realize that they need to re-tool their mandate so that they can focus on the worst types of crime and other, less dangerous, responsibilities can be passed to non-police agencies.
  • Federal regulators saw problem after problem at Silicon Valley Bank more than a year ago, but acted too slowly to correct the problems. Embedded in that same story is a note about how SVB grew expansively after the rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations. Correlation is not necessarily causation, though, and this story implies that existing regulations should have caught the problem. I am still inclined to believe that there were overlapping causes of SVB’s collapse, including regulatory failure, the particular spending practices of venture-capital funded startups, a sudden tightening of the bond market, and the particular makeup of SVB’s depositors that had an unusually-high percentage of very large accounts that made the bank vulnerable to runs.
  • Former President Trump took to social media to say that he expects to be notified of an indictment next week, including in the statement comments to his supports akin to the ones he said on January 6, 2021. The little commentary I’ve seen indicates that this stems from a probe into the Stormy Daniels payoff, but this could well be rampant speculation at this point.
  • The city of Newark performed a ceremony to inaugurate a sister city arrangement with the Hindu nation Kailasa, which doesn’t exist. Kailasa was invented by Swami Nithyananda, an Indian scam artist on the run from rape charges.
  • A Maine resident is appealing a rejected vanity licence plate “LUVTOFU,” saying that he’s a vegan.
  • ChatGPT Starting To Think Journalist Could One Day Be Capable Of Independent Thought (The Onion).

Album of the Week: Jukebox the Ghost, I Got a Girl EP (2022)

Currently Reading: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives

White Sands National Park
Organ Mountains National Monument
Compressed Iron, from the Zuhl Collection
Pyritized sea life from the Mesozoic era