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. 13, 02/11/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Week four of the semester passed in a blur this week. At the risk of projecting my mental state onto my students, I think many of my students felt similarly, as evidenced by some struggles by the end of the week.

I started paying attention to the ebbs and flows of energy levels of the semester years ago as a TA at Mizzou where we routinely went from Labor Day to Thanksgiving Break (sometimes twelve weeks of a fifteen or sixteen week semester) without a break, followed by just one week and then finals. There are ways to make this schedule manageable, but I found that I and my students were so worn down from the breakneck pace of the semester that the week or so before Thanksgiving was a struggle.

The semester schedule at my current job is not as much of a structural challenge, but I still try to be attentive to fluctuating energy levels. The issues I am facing in my Roman History course are myriad and varied, and those issues go far beyond this issue of energy levels. However, the place where I am mulling over these bigger-picture issues is in the first-year seminar that I’m teaching for the first time. The course ticks a number of boxes of things that the students are supposed to have done, but I’m treating it as primarily an introduction to college that can talk to the students about building community and developing resilience that will carry them through the rest of their career. The content will help promote critical thinking, but it is a vehicle for these much more important skills. At this point in the semester, though, they’re hitting a wall in the adjustment to the college semester.

This week’s varia:

  • An earthquake with a magnitude 7.8 hit Türkiye and Syria on the morning of February 6, with at least 55 aftershocks. As of writing this on Saturday, the estimated death toll has risen to more than 23,000, with the ongoing civil war in northern Syria complicating relief efforts and probably understating the casualties. The pictures from the disaster are devastating, but it is important in this instance not to fixate on the lost antiquities in the face of such a catastrophic humanitarian crisis that struck a region already straining under a refugee crisis. The latest reports are saying that the people left homeless have been unable to get food for days.
  • AI is helping to decipher a papyrus that may contain a lost history of Alexander the Great and the early Hellenistic period. The papyrus was found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
  • Patrice Rankine takes the help of Pasts Imperfects this week for a discussion of Classics during Reconstruction.
  • Joel Christensen asks whether ChatGPT dreams of electric heroes, engaging with the question of AI art and narrative. I particularly like this line, which eloquently states one of the reasons I want to treat AI as an information literacy problem: “The meaning is not intrinsic to the words themselves and the reader/viewer creates a meaning based on their own experience. When we read a ChatGPT composition, it has been created by human beings to predict human-like articulations, but we create the meaning through our own interpretation. Our embodied experience provides nuance to what we do with texts and what they do to us in turn.”
  • According to the Vermont Digger, when Vermont State University launches in July (Johnson and Lyndon merged into Northern Vermont University in 2018 and the new change merges NVU with Castleton and Vermont Technical College) it will do so with an “all-digital academic library,” with a plan to transform the spaces into community commons and student services. If you look at this from a purely logistical perspective, centralizing all resources in a single digital repository for five campuses makes some degree of sense. But I also hate the decision. Transitioning to digital makes the services that much more impersonal and library websites are not the most user-friendly unless you already know what you’re looking for. Moreover, there are resources that are virtually impossible to get online (or whose UI is likewise so off-putting that they might as well be), to say nothing about the serendipity of what you can find in a library. Above all, though, you can brand those buildings as community centers and study space, but libraries already provide those services and I strongly suspect that study spaces in libraries receive more use than designated study spaces elsewhere. Sometimes, a little bit of inefficiency in the system can actually be productive.
  • Graduate students at Temple University are striking, which follows in the wake of other graduate student labor activism over the past few years. What makes this strike notable is that the university has acted on its threats to withhold tuition waivers and health benefits to force the students to capitulate. In at least one instance (seen on Twitter) the University also simply took the tuition money paid by an outside grant.
  • The Washington Post has a piece on the rise of school voucher systems that allow parents to send their children to private religious school. These programs are part of two concurrent feedback loops: the one defunding public school so that parents want alternatives that further defund schools; the other heightened partisanship that prompts parents to insulate their children from the rest of society by sending them to private schools that shapes their education around narrow religious and ideological values that further heightens partisanship.
  • Chick-fil-A is debuting a cauliflower sandwich with no chicken in response to customer demand for more vegetables. Critics are blasting the company for “going woke.” It is hard to tell whether the outrage is sincere, feigned, or parodied, but does it even matter? We’re increasingly living in a media environment where each of the three feeds and strengthens the other two.
  • Iowa is considering a bill that would change child labor laws to extend the list of permissible jobs for teenagers and to extend the hours that they are allowed to work later in the evening, while also shielding the companies from liability and giving special licenses to allow 14 years-olds to drive themselves to work. The bill is designed to address worker shortages and to give teens on-the-job training, but it is also a depressing reflection of the backsliding of labor protections in this country.
  • The latest attempts to scuttle Twitter include limits on the number of accounts one can follow and the number of messages that people can send, likely in a two-pronged attempt to reduce strain on the servers and encourage people to sign up for Blue. This is at the same time that Twitter is rolling out 4,000 character Tweets, which I have already said are the surest way to cause me to disengage with the platform.
  • Speaking of Musk, he seems to have fired one of the two remaining top engineers after he dared tell Musk that his engagement was down because people are choosing not to engage with either Musk or his site, rather than because the algorithm was suppressing engagement. When the emperor has no clothes, do you dare tell him that he’s naked?
  • George Santos had a warrant out for his arrest on the charge of stealing puppies from Pennsylvania in 2017. Because of course he did.
  • The Boston Review has a good piece on rare earth mining. The article is a nice complement to an episode of Fresh Air last week about cobalt mining in the Congo.
  • US officials are saying that the balloon that caused a stir last week was part of a program that flew balloons over countries on five continents and that those balloons had technology to monitor communications. The week ended with US warplanes shooting down a second object, this time over Alaska.
  • CNN has a piece on the looming ecological and health crisis that is the evaporation of the Great Salt Lake.
  • To close with a fun story: a woodpecker in California stashed more than 700 pounds of acorns in the walls of a person’s home.

Album of the week: Great Big Sea, Play (1997)

Currently reading: Fonda Lee, Jade War, Matthew Canepa, The Iranian Expanse (still, since I didn’t finish either last week)

Weekly Varia no. 11, 01/28/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

This was one of those weeks when it felt as though I got nothing done. Everything takes too much time, and then I am pulled in too many directions at once. This is the story of most semesters, if I’m being honest. So I didn’t manage to finish either my academic book for the week or any of the four draft posts in various stages of completion for this site, and I am trying to resist adding anything else to my plate. At this point I would like to focus on making more time for the things that I’m already doing. After all, as Oliver Burkemann argued in Six Thousand Weeks and the late Randy Pausch talks about in his time management lecture, our time is finite so we should pay more attention to how we spend it. Squeezing every last ounce of efficiency or sacrificing sleep (as I have done in the past) on the altar of rat race culture is both not sustainable and means enjoying life less in the meantime.

Admittedly, I am very bad at this. I have too many interests and a bad habit of saying yes to things before considering how much time they will take, but I now recognize this as an issue. I have more thoughts on these issues and their intersection with academic hobbies and living to work, but I’ll save them for a subsequent post. For now, just a range of links from the week.

This week’s varia:

Album of the week: Amanda Shires, My Piece of Land

Currently Reading: Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea; Rabun Taylor, Roman Builders

Weekly Varia no. 7, 12/31/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I write enough about myself this time of year through my end-of year reflections (writing and books are up, with a general meditation and resolutions to come) that I don’t feel the need for short essay about whatever I’m thinking about on a Saturday morning this week.

Happy New Year.

This week’s varia:

  • Peter Kidd documents manuscript provenance on his own blog. I’m not a regular reader, but his post this week caught my attention. For his tenth anniversary post, Kidd relates his exchange with the secretary of an author whose recent book appears to plagiarize his blog. The conversation includes denial, threats of lawyers (not on his part), and the claim that since his blog isn’t significant enough to warrant citation because it is just a blog. The last is particularly galling. Blogs might not pass through peer review and come out through academic publishers, but that doesn’t mean that they are always inconsequential. To paraphrase something that Dr. Sarah Bond has been saying for a number of years now: writing in academic blogs is an exercise in public scholarship that can help ensure the vitality of a field, but they will only be considered legitimate if people cite them. At the same time, plagiarism is still plagiarism. If you use an idea, cite it.
    • Since the original post went up, the publisher appears to have made the PDF of the book in question unavailable, digitally altered a bunch of the online material, and questions have emerged about both the staff and the physical office of the publisher. People associated with RECEPTIO responded aggressively with reverse accusations, threats to involve the police, and attempts to “anonymously” harass and dox Kidd in an attempt to preserve what increasingly appears to be a scam to funnel grant money through and convince people to spend fees for workshops at this “research institute.” Kidd has written several additional blog posts that address specific parts of her responses. I have seen more than one academic demand a movie about one of the most flagrant cases of scholarly malpractice that I can recall and how the whole thing unraveled in just under a week as researchers trained in the very particular skills of identifying how manuscripts influence one another and in spotting misinformation turned their attentions to RECEPTIO.
  • A great piece about Sudanese archaeologists doing work that has traditionally been done by Western expeditions that used local labor and expertise, but erased them from the process of interpreting the past and receiving credit for the work.
  • Hamline University has non-renewed the contract of a contingent professor of religion who offered a lesson in an online class about historical Muslim representations of the Prophet Muhammad after a student complained. The Hamline Oracle has the fullest description of the incident and points out the steps that the professor took to offer content warnings and to allow observant Muslims to opt out of seeing the images. The administration is alleging that the lesson constitutes Islamophobia Rather than standing behind the subject matter expert, or, you know, historical reality, the administration chose to cut ties with the faculty member and could do so with no repercussion because the person in question had no job security. This is one of the major issues with contingent contracts in higher education right now. I also recommend Amna Khalid’s essay explaining why the administration’s actions offend her both as a professor and as a muslim.
  • A court has ruled that the Marine Corps cannot reject Sikh men who refuse to shave their beards based on their religious beliefs. The Marines claimed that these rules were a matter of national security, but the court sided with the plaintiffs who alleged that the policy reflects “stereotypes about what Americans should look like.”
  • George Santos has admitted to “embellishing” key parts of his biography, but insists that he is neither a fraud nor a criminal (CNN). I’m not comfortable about how people are questioning his sexuality given that he was previously married to a woman, but the rest of these are serious issues.
  • Stefan Passantino, the lawyer representing Cassidy Hutchinson during the January 6 probe encouraged her to lie about the events of that day and obfuscated when she inquired who was paying his fees, probably because the funding appears to have passed through a Trump-connected PAC, creating a conflict of interest that he did not disclose.
  • There are currently five transgender athletes competing according to their gender identity in Missouri high school sports, but ten bills to limit their participation in high school athletics pre-filed with the Missouri legislature. Because, of course there are (Missouri Independent).
  • Southwest Airlines cancelled thousands of flights this week. Weather is partly to blame, but people in the know are saying that Southwest’s antiquated scheduling system and staffing problems bear more responsibility. Pete Buttigieg had asserted that conditions were getting better, but 34 state attorneys general had written to him urging him to impose fines for airlines with avoidable cancellations and delays, something he has not done. Naturally, money that could have gone toward modernizing their systems has been spent on executive bonuses, dividends, stock buybacks, and lobbying.
  • Andrew Tate has been detained in Romania on charges of human trafficking…because the video he recorded responding to Greta Thunberg online retort displayed a pizza box that allowed authorities to confirm his whereabouts. Romanian officials are claiming that the timing is coincidental, but it makes for a better story.
  • Dinosaur skeletons rarely preserve their last meal, but a researcher named Hans Larsson recently identified such a find and discovered that the microraptor (a 3-foot tall dinosaur) had eaten a small mammal. Dinosaurs remain very cool.

Album of the week: Johnny Clegg and Savuka, “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World”

Currently reading: Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser, Mary Boatwright, Peoples of the Roman World