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

The Calm: Weekly Varia, 12/10/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The first day after the end of classes is always a little bit surreal. After however many weeks of steady churn driven forward by the structure of regularly-scheduled classes, all of that drops away. At the same time, that day can’t kick off a period of rest and planning for the next semester in full. Rather, it is a deceptive calm. This day inaugurates a period of limbo where both I and my students have a significant amount of work to do without the same structure for our time. I am looking forward to powering down for a few days soon, by which I mean spending more time reading and writing some of the posts I talked about last week, but first I need to grade all the papers.

This week’s varia:

  • A follow-up about the “new” Roman Emperor from a few weeks ago, on the American Numismatic Society blog, Alice Sharpless evaluates some the issues with considering these coins genuine and concludes that they should still be considered forgeries.
  • This week saw discussion of ChatGPT-3, an AI that can produce text-based on answers. Earlier this year, Mike Sharples produced a “graduate level” essay using this algorithm (though it only has one citation, to a non-existent article) as part of a call to rethink assessment, which prompted Stephen Marche to declare in the Atlantic that this technology threatens to be yet another example of humanists committing soft suicide, though the evidence he offers for this speak more to social pressures and costs of educations than to the interest of students, at least in my experience. This might be the topic for a longer post, but I am closer to Daniel Lametti in Slate on the issue: Sharples’ essay isn’t satisfactory for a graduate course or even Marche’s assessment of it as a B+ undergrad paper. Without factoring in the mistaken citation it might warrant a B-, in some class. With that factored in, it should be an F. Lametti argues that this could be a tool, but it won’t kill the college essay. John Warner used this to repeat his call for overhauling assessment without accepting Sharples’ claim that the AI had produced graduate level work. By contrast, the tool seems to do a pretty good job of summarizing nonfiction text, which does have value so long as it is a starting point for engagement rather than the end.
  • Mark Joseph Stern explains in Slate how the Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments on a non-case wherein a website designer wants to discriminate against LGBTQ couples who come to purchase a website template that she has never even designed. The gambit by the plaintiff is that this sort of case will be easier to side with their arguments since there is no customer trying to buy the product. Elie Mystal in The Nation particularly takes aim at the nonsense argument about what counts as speech. Since the conservative justices attempted to make the race analogy, Mystal, a black man, goes there, saying of the difference between speech and accommodations: “To put it plainly, a diner owner can absolutely tell me “I don’t like n******” when serving me lunch, but he still has to serve me lunch. He doesn’t have a free-speech objection to providing me a service that I am willing to pay for, no matter how deeply he hates me. He can be a jerk about it. He can name his business “Raisins In Potato Salad”; he can dedicate all of the sandwiches on his menu to Confederate generals and serve me on a plate emblazoned with a swastika. But he has to serve me.”
  • Of course, at least four justices are fully prepared to endorse the historically-nonsensical and extremely dangerous Independent State Legislature Theory in Moore v. Harper, as Mark Joseph Stern explains (Slate, again).
  • Missouri, like many other states, is taking steps to censor material that goes into public libraries. Aisha Sultan, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, points out the sad irony that right-wing politicians are bypassing serious concerns about misinformation online (you know, where children and every one else get most of their information), to brand libraries “as the biggest informational threat to children.”
  • A certain former president of the United States called for terminating the constitution of the United States just as, he says, the founders would have wanted. Several Republican lawmakers have criticized the language, but Republican leadership declined to comment (Washington Post). Just another day in the Republic.
  • Brevard County in Florida has a new superintendent of schools, and a new sheriff in town. This week he gave a press conference in front of the county jail in which he explained that “They know they’re not going to be given after-school detention, they’re not going to be suspended, they’re not going to be expelled, or like in the old days, they’re not going to have the cheeks of their a– torn off for not doing right in class.” This appears to be a reaction to allegations of severe disciplinary problems in the district that is causing teachers to quit. No mention of any of the other reasons a Florida schoolteacher might want to quit their job or the social issues in the community that are playing out in the schools.
  • I have been avoiding the World Cup this year in protest of Qatar’s hosting. Now one of the journalists covering the event has died under unclear circumstances (NPR). Grant Wahl was briefly detained for wearing a rainbow shirt and has talked both about death threats he received this year and the illness that came on before his death. I have not seen any evidence of foul play yet, but the circumstances are suspicious.
  • Age is just a number, but there are multiple ways to calculate it. South Korea’s parliament voted to tally age by birthday starting at zero when you’re born (NPR) rather than starting with one and adding a year each New Year (which would mean someone born one day before the New Year would turn two on their second day of life. I see all of the reasons to fall in line with the rest of the world, but part of me is sad when this sort of cultural idiosyncrasy goes away.

Album of the week: The Chicks, Fly

Currently reading: Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers; Emma Dench, Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World

My Information Age: weekly varia 11/20/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about as Twitter lists toward the waterline is how I receive my information about the world. For better and for worse, tapping into Twitter feels like connecting into a larger hive mind and thus has become my primary source of information about any number of topics. What I see is absolutely filtered through a particular information bubble because I aggressively mute both topics and accounts that I believe are not worth my attention, but the accounts I follow do a much better job of curating information for me than I could ever do for myself. Sometimes this information came because I was able to lurk in conversations I would otherwise never have been in a position to hear, as David Perry recently wrote on CNN. Sometimes it was in long threads by a single author. Frequently, though, Twitter was a platform where people would link to and discuss stories from a whole range of outlets.

I have other sources of information, of course. Several places in my RSS feed bring me a healthy dose of information and commentary, including three (Keith Law, Bill Caraher, and Joy the Baker) that do weekly roundups up things that they read, for instance, and I am in several Discord groups that share links. Nor am I opposed to trekking into the wilds of the internet to hunt down my own stories. What Twitter offered was the convenience of having a diverse selection of information brought into one place. Finding stories of note from a range of outlets represents a significant time commitment that I rarely feel that I have these days, even when those stories are not found behind a paywall (I understand the need for paywalls as a business model, but I can only subscribe to so many things).

The question I have is not whether this is a habit I need to develop, but whether I should commit to doing some sort of weekly roundup of essays and articles that I discover in the process. In some ways this would mark a return to my roots, since, years ago I did regular roundups in this sort. The last of those posts went up nearly a decade ago, with links to five stories about topics that ranged from the diary of Franz Ferdinand to a profile of King Abdullah of Jordan to an Onion story that I found amusing. I stopped writing these posts for a few reasons, including that they didn’t get a lot of traction, which made writing them seem like a futile exercise, and that Twitter had come to fill that role in my media engagement. It doesn’t help, that I tend to skim this sort of post that other blogs put out.

And yet, thinking out loud here, I am warming to the idea of a weekly wrap of some sort with a short reflection, links to stories worth reading from the week and a short-form update on articles and books that I’ve read. Such a post would give me motivation to read more widely to curate my list and provide another low-stakes chance to talk about things that I have been reading even when I won’t be writing a full review. In fact, my primary hesitation is over whether writing this post will be something that gets lost in the wash of the other things I have going on.

But there is only one way to find out. For now I’m going to mimic Bill Caraher in calling these posts “weekly varia” that go up either Saturday or Sunday, but I also expect the format, content, and timing of these posts will evolve as I find my groove.

Without further ado, here are the varia for 11/20/2022.

  • Climate change has been a significant factor behind the malaise I have felt this year and, despite the general advice to PhDs in my position to apply for every opportunity, there are jobs I have opted not to apply to for environmental reasons. Reuters published a lengthy piece (with pictures) about how one of the cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, is drying up. Climate change in this case is being compounded by water usage upriver.
  • From NPR, the FDA approved a safety study from Upside Foods for no-kill meat—that is, meat grown in vats and a feature of speculative fiction stories like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. I am skeptical that this innovation will save humanity, but it is absolutely necessary. This week an Environmental Science professor shared an infographic on Twitter about the distribution of mammalian biomass on earth. Wild animals represent 4%, compared to 34% for humans and 35% for cows.
  • The Guardian has a long read about infrastructure challenges of coastal West Africa, where a booming population is leading to a boom of urbanization. I find it hard to read stories like this and not think about climate change.
  • The New York Times has an article about the minister Rob Schenck, who alleges that the leaked draft of Justice Alito’s decision in the Dobbs decision from earlier this year is not the first time that the outcome of contentious cases were leaked to allow Christian groups to prepare their messaging campaign. He goes further, too, claiming that he had exploited access to influence justices during his time as an anti-abortion activist. The Times says that they found gaps in his story, but also a trail of corroborating evidence. For a branch of government whose authority rests almost entirely on the perceived legitimacy of precedent, the current conservative majority seems hellbent on burning the entire institution to the ground. The only question seems to be how much damage will they do before that process is complete?
  • NPR had a story about how culture war issues are creating a teacher shortage. The article correctly identifies the rise in harassment of teachers and points to the numerous bills that have been introduced to punish them for addressing current issues, but it does not identify any of the other issues behind the teacher shortage (e.g. pay, burnout). I also hate that there is a cursory attempt at making this a “both sides” issue when only one ideological position is misrepresenting what happens in a classroom and introducing bills that criminalize teaching.
  • Jonathan Malesic writes in the Atlantic ($) about how employers moving from “sick” days to “wellness” days is a good thing, but that “mental-health days” are no substitute for changing the structures of work that actually cause burnout. This piece is an addendum to his excellent book that I reviewed earlier this year. I have found mental-health days hard to justify, despite an encouraging email from my employer at the start of the semester. Taking a day simply puts me one day further behind on grading and cancelling class periods creates work of reorganizing schedules and coordinating with the students that takes nearly as much time as the cancellations save. Then again, I have also been dragging myself to the finish line. Suffice to say, I am quite persuaded by Malesic’s arguments.
  • The Dig podcast from Jacobin Magazine has been running a very long listen five-part series on the history of modern Iran with Eskandar Sadeghi and Golnar Nikpour. I am an intermittent listener to this podcast, but this series has been a can’t-miss for me these past few weeks.
  • Another podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra has one final episode to go. The series is a dive back into the archival footage of 1940 that explores the plots to overthrow the US government and establish a fascist regime in its place, and how sitting members of congress working with German agents were complicit in these conspiracies. These agents were particularly effective at finding the preexisting fault lines in this country and fanning the flames.
  • The French Olympic Committee has chosen the bonnet rouge for the Olympic mascot in 2024. The brand director offered some platitudes about the power of sport to change the world before saying “The mascot must embody the French spirit, which is something very fine to grasp. It’s an ideal, a kind of conviction that carries the values of our country, and which has been built up over time, over history.” Which political cartoonist will be first with a smiling Phryges operating a guillotine? Then again, Gritty seems to make it work.

Album of the week: Justin Townes Earle, The Saint of Lost Causes.

Currently reading: Fonda Lee, Jade City; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire.