Weekly Varia no. 15, 02/25/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I looked at my course evaluations again this week. Week six of the semester is a strange time to check evaluations, but I had to compile summary evaluations as part of my annual review. Now, the utility of evaluations are deeply mixed in that they often reflect a combination of what the students believed that they should have earned and how much work they believe that they should have put in to earn whatever grade they did receive. I also find that any course policy that deviates from whatever normative practice the students are familiar with is liable to be met with polarizing opinions, which results in some combination of angry and enthusiastic comments.

My favorite ever comment was from a student who said that they should give me a raise.

Polarizing is how I’d characterize the response to Specifications Grading. A lot of students reported that it was challenging, but in a way that was both fair allowed them to do their best work in learning the material, which is exactly the intent. Others found it grossly unfair, either because they had to put in more work to earn the high grade they wanted or because it “prevented” them from receiving their high grade (presumably because they didn’t want to complete optional revisions).

This has led me to mull over whether Specifications Grading is the best match for any class with papers. I am committed to the system at least for this semester and it undoubtedly results in the students honing their skills. But it also requires me to give copious feedback if I want the students to be able to meet the higher standards in their revisions, and this is hard to do at scale. However, I also don’t want to give back either the expectations for what students should be able to achieve by the end of the course or the flexibility that students unused to my teaching style sometimes find disorienting (yes, the extension is free, there is no trick involved). At the same time, even while acknowledging that no one professor can resolve the deep structural issues that lie behind the student mental health crisis, I hate to feel like I’m contributing to making the problem worse.

Then again, I had a handful of comments that explicitly commented about how I made things better in this respect so I must have done something right.

This week’s varia:

  • Javal Coleman writes in the SCS Blog about being the only Black person in a Classics Department and how that isolation makes one question their belonging.
  • This week in Pasts Imperfect, Matthew Canepa writes about the god Mithra, who will be the subject of an upcoming conference on the deity, along with the usual roundup of projects (including a very exciting mapping project on Cahokia). This conference looks excellent, particularly in its focus on undoing the damage done to our understanding of the god through obsession with identifying a “pure” tradition or conviction about unchanging religions. This was also the focus of Canepa’s excellent monograph, The Iranian Expanse (2018).
  • Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes a letter about the devastation at Antakya. He reports a particularly powerful opinion that the Turkish government will likely rebuild some of the antiquities to demonstrate its diversity and sophistication even while allowing the people to suffer.
  • Another earthquake struck Hatay province, already devastated by the earthquake that killed tens of thousands several weeks ago. I have no words.
  • A school resource officer found a loaded gun in a fourth-grader’s backpack after it was reported by other students, to whom the student was showing the gun.
  • Florida is considering a “Classical” Christian alternative to the SAT, in the latest of DeSantis’ aggressive attacks on education. My worry about this sort of thing isn’t so much that it will work—as long as parents are looking to send their kids to top schools elsewhere in the country, they’ll continue to take whatever tests those schools require, and whether the tests are worthwhile is a separate question—but that the actions of DeSantis and the people around him are rapidly pushing the Overton Window about education in a way that empowers people not just in Florida, but around the country, to indoctrinate and bully students.
  • Roald Dahl’s publisher is aiming to release revised editions of classic books that sand away the rough, insensitive edges to the man’s writing. The move is an entirely absurd reaction to the so-called culture wars, in my view, and disingenuous. Give context to the text as was if you want to account for changes in culture, but moderating everything to obscure an author’s politics and make a cash grab at making a sanitized version for use in school does a service to exactly nobody.
  • The office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College used ChatGPT to produce an email sent to students about the Michigan State shooting last week. The message was predictably cold and lacking in any specific guidance on resources to help the students who, unsurprisingly, are not amused. I’m not at all surprised that university departments are using AI this way, given the widespread misconception that AI text generation can replace actual writing even as many of these same schools are considering draconian consequences for students who submit AI-generated work. We’re way past irony on this topic already.
  • The Science Fiction magazine Clarkesworld has been overwhelmed by AI-generated short story submissions—all unpublishably bad. The magazine’s editor Neil Clarke speculates on the reasons for this trend in a blog post that also points out in an update that he suspended accepting submissions while working on a solution since the first three weeks of February saw nearly five times the submissions of January, which itself was twice the volume of December and that had been the highest on record to that point. John Scalzi also points out that SFF magazines are vulnerable because they still pay authors.
  • NPR is the latest journalism platform to announce layoffs, noting a 20 million dollar drop-off in sponsorship revenue and pessimistic outlooks for a bounce-back in funding levels. I have my issues with some of how NPR chooses to cover politics in particular, but it is an absolutely essential part of the journalism apparatus given its mandate to cover events in every state. The erosion of journalism in this country is a disturbing (and accelerating) trend that is already showing consequences in the likes of George Santos.
  • The New Yorker Profiles Itamar Ben-Gvir, the poster-child for Israel’s recent swerve to the hard, hard right and an activist for Jewish extremism. Worrying stuff.
  • After the bizarre saga that is Twitter Blue, Zuckerberg has decided to one-up Elon Musk with a paid subscription plan for Meta platforms for the low, low price of $11.99 a month. Unless you are using Facebook on an iPhone, in which case it’ll be $14.99. This is under the guise of ID-verification systems to help people build their brands. This latest move makes me glad that I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago. I still use Instagram, probably more than I should and would miss some interactions if I were forced away but let’s be real: the Instagram timeline is practically useless already. I assume this decision counts on Facebook being indispensable for millions of people, and a go-to platform for many types of interactions—as I have been annoyed by on more than one occasion. At least Meta is actually going to verify identifications.
  • The “He Gets Us” series of commercials touting Jesus’ humble humanity is bankrolled by a right-wing evangelical organization that has donors from the likes of the owner of Hobby Lobby. Unsurprising, but wiping away the patina of respectability and inviting questions about motive.

Album of the Week: Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park (2013)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction (2021)

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)

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.

The Muskening

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I will admit that I am watching the mess that is Elon Musk’s early tenure at Twitter with a certain amount of perverse joy, as a long time critic of the man. And yet, I also regret that this is the public forum where all of my prior assumptions and criticisms once again get confirmed because it comes at the expense of both the employees at Twitter and a larger number of people who were able to exploit its potential for virality to build a public following and, from that, economic opportunities.

My own relationship with Twitter has been decidedly mixed. I am an active user, and my follower count topped out at just over 1700 on the same day that the company’s purchase was finalized, but I have done precious little to cultivate that list. I tweet a little bit, retweet a little bit more, and try to interact with interesting accounts, but I actually think that the greatest key to reaching that number is that I have just always been there.

That is, I created my Twitter account in 2008, before hashtags were an official part of the Twitter functionality and before it was possible to create threads. I don’t even know how many accounts existed back then because a quick internet search only returned data going back to 2010, which also happens to be when the new owner created his account. This was also before I went to graduate school. I was managing a Quiznos in Boston at the time, waiting to hear back about graduate school applications, and trying to keep my Greek fresh in case I got in. I also had no plans to make this a professional “historian” Twitter account because, well, I wasn’t a professional historian when I started the account and I only had the loosest idea of what that would even look like. By the time that #twitterstorians and #classicstwitter, I was already here and so became absorbed into those movements. My Twitter usage has evolved over the years, especially because I prefer interacting with people to generating original content. I still sometimes find the juxtaposition of academic and non-academic activities somewhat awkward, even as I deeply appreciate its democratizing effect on knowledge creation and how it shows that (most) professors have interests beyond their immediate research subjects.

Frankly, the histrionic meta-commentary about whether to stay on Twitter or to find a new platform that has unfolded in the days since the purchase annoys me more than does the leadership transfer of one billionaire to another. I shared a lot of people’s concerns about being able to promote my writing and with the likely proliferation of hate speech even beyond what is currently tolerated. However, my Twitter experience is generally tolerable because I make frequent use of the mute features aggressively curate my experience there. Nobody online is entitled to my attention. I expected that the Twitter experience would degrade over the coming months and years, but I would be fine so long as those pieces of functionality continued to exist.

The first week of the Musk experience is beyond anything I could have predicted, starting with the new owner boosting a vile conspiracy that excused an act of political violence against the Pelosi family and then blaming the loss in advertising revenue on activists, when, in fact, the advertisers froze their buys over other fears that were exacerbated by Musk having fired the people they coordinated with at the company and then Musk’s performance on a conference call with them. The advertising fracas took place against the backdrop of obvious attempts to monetize a site that has never turned a profit because Musk had been locked into a mindbogglingly stupid offer to purchase Twitter for vastly more than it was worth. Thus his attention turned to the blue check mark, which is nothing more than an emoji that “verifies” that “an account of public interest” is who they say they are. Or at least it did. Musk first proposed a $20 dollar per month fee for verification, which led to him publicly bartering, perhaps in jest on his part, with both Stephen King and Garfield the cat. King adamantly refused to pay a dime, to which supporters of Musk asked how Stephen King would stay relevant without that blue check.

Twitter’s greatest success is in persuading a lot of people that what happens there is real life.

All of which brings me to the roll-out of the new Twitter Blue. For $7.99 a month, users will receive perks like a blue check mark “just like celebrities, companies and politicians,” as well as an edit function (just learn to accept typos, it’s fine), and a promise to show only half the number of ads, which strikes me as only meaningful if there is transparency about the number of ads one sees now and could easily be construed as a threat to drown free accounts in a torrent of ads. While I am inclined not to believe Musk’s claims that this paid service will reduce the number of bot accounts, the more pressing question for how I use Twitter is what this will do to the content on my feed. Twitter has had an algorithmic timeline for a number of years now, but I refuse to use it because whether I am interacting with friends and colleagues or following an event live, I want to be able to see Tweets as they happened. So long as that function continues to exist I can tolerate the other changes, but Musk’s vision of “free speech” seems to include a demand that other people listen to you and he is willing to offer you that function for a moderate monthly fee. In particular, Twitter Blue will offer paid users algorithmic priority for their Tweets. If this means that option for a chronological timeline goes away, then it might well render the site unusable for me.

However, the proof is going to be in the pudding. If the site becomes unusable for me or no longer serves my needs I will stop using it in the same way that I stopped using Facebook a decade ago. I will continue to trundle along there in the meantime, and I also keep a list of the other places where I can be found online.

The most common destination for people I follow leaving Twitter right now is Mastodon, which has many of the same Twitter functions. I created an account back in April, if for no other reason than to have a presence there. My initial impressions of the site are mixed. For one thing, rather than simply making a Twitter account, you join one of the many Mastodon instances, each of which has its own code of conduct. This fragmentation creates a local timeline populated by “toots” from the people in your little interest group, but then also you have a home timeline created by the people you follow who can be from any instance. These and other differences have taken some getting used to, but I would describe them as different rather than either good or bad.

My other observation about Mastodon is that writing there feels to me much more like micro-blogging than Twitter ever did. Where Twitter allowed 140 characters and then expanded out to 280, Mastodon allows 500. Critics of Twitter’s brevity argue that the limits killed nuance and encouraged flippancy, I appreciated the challenge of expressing ideas concisely. I find that 500 characters is just enough that I can slip back toward being long-winded and that is giving me pause on how I want to use the site.

Ultimately, the experience on Mastodon is going to be determined by the people on it. The instance I joined at first and the fact that my early activity on the platform has been academic means that Mastodon feels a bit like an academic conference to me right now. I can talk about things that are not academic, but more than a few people will probably give me the side eye for doing so. I certainly don’t mind academic conferences and will be happy to stay on Mastodon, perhaps on this server, perhaps migrating to another one when I have some time to explore my options, even if it never evolves past this, but it does mean that my relationship to the platform will be different than was my relationship to Twitter.

Then again, a lot has changed in the last fourteen years so perhaps these changes should be expected.

What the $@*! am I doing with social media?

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I recently took an impromptu hiatus from Twitter. My account still posted links to the posts that went up here and I periodically dropped in, looked at a few things, retweeted something I liked, and then disappeared again.

This hiatus went on for about a month and a half until I started dipping my toes back into the Twitter stream about a week ago. During that time, the only social media I checked with any regularity was Instagram.

It is hard to pinpoint a single reason why I took this hiatus. This was around the time that Elon Musk made waves by claiming that he wanted to buy Twitter, but, in retrospect, I think something like this had been coming for a while. As I wore down last semester, I found myself spending progressively more time just idly staring as the world seemed to float by on Twitter. Around the same time, the Musk news broke and there were several rounds of outrage and anger that resulted in a lot of people I follow directly yelling or indirectly sniping at each other, all of which was just too much for me to engage with. So I stopped.

Stepping away from Twitter like this was both a relief and disorienting. For a few years now I have gotten a lot of my news from Twitter, which collates articles from far more sources than I otherwise would seek out. At its best, the site functions like an RSS feed curated and commented upon by people I know or would like to know. Not checking Twitter, therefore felt like reducing my awareness of what is happening in the world from a torrent to a trickle.

Of course, that was also why it was a relief. For a few weeks I just let my primary attention be on whatever was going on in the world around me.

However this hiatus also left me reflecting on how I use social media.

These sites allow people to present a curated version of themselves to the world. Some people, I find, do that very well. There are all sorts of people who use Twitter to great effect to share information and articulate points based on their particular areas of expertise–be it academia, politics, journalism, sports, or comedy. While I have certainly done this from time to time, I am generally reticent to assert my expertise in a space where I always feel that there are people who are more qualified on most of what I would want to say, so I usually don’t put myself in this lane. In an earlier phase of my Twitter evolution I used it as an aggregator for interesting articles I would read, but I gave that up both because a lot of the quick share links didn’t work well and because I felt that I wasn’t adding anything by doing this. In recent years I have also noticed that I largely stay away from commenting about things I am watching or (heaven forfend) sports because those things are not sufficiently “intellectual” and “academic.” After all, Twitter is a space that blurs the lines between the personal and the professional and I’m ostensibly on the job market. Should I not curate my persona accordingly?

This leaves me is with an account where I do a lot of retweeting, a decent amount of holding what might be termed water-cooler talk with people in the replies, but comparatively less tweeting of my own.

This is not the case with other sites. On Instagram, the only other site that I use regularly, by contrast, I post pictures of cats, baking experiments, books I’m reading, flowers, and travel (which happens much less frequently than I would like), while I use Instagram stories for memes, jokes, and ephemeral commentary about everything from how starting to run again feels like a psyop against my own body (tricking it into realizing that it can run that distance or speed) to whatever the latest political travesty is unfolding to minor gripes and insecurities about writing. Here, I find the ephemerality of stories, combined with the much smaller audience (I have maybe 6x the number of people who follow my Twitter account, many fewer of whom I know in person) liberating to be more polemical and sarcastic.

Every so often I think about bringing my social media presences into more alignment, which mostly means being more random and less deliberate with what I tweet. What holds me back is the sense that I ought to be curating a persona. Tweeting about all of those other things might be more authentically me, but is it good for my brand? To which the obvious answer is that I’m a person, not a brand—and, ironically, that doing more to cultivate my persona as a baker might actually be good for me down the road.

But for all of this hand-wringing about personal brands, I don’t actually know what mine is. I hope that it includes at least ancient history, books, writing, pedagogy, and bread, but is that a coherent brand? Does it need to be? Do people follow me for a particular type of my posts?

There is a reason I don’t have aspirations to pivot my career to social media management. I even have some choice words for this idea in an upcoming review of The Immortal King Rao.

I want to continue spending less time on social media in aggregate because it is not great for my anxiety and has a way of filling time that I could spend reading, but I am also toying with ways that I might be able to be a little more present on these sites, whether by employing an app that automatically deletes my old Tweets or by managing to convince myself that it is acceptable for academics to acknowledge their “uncouth” interests without losing face. If anyone has suggestions on these issues, I’m open to ideas.

In all likelihood, I will continue to trundle along much as I have, with perhaps a quicker trigger on the mute button to preserve my state of mind. But, then again, there are so many things about the world, both good and ill, that I want to talk about that the answer might be just to do it.

Anyway, have a cat picture.

AIA-SCS San Diego: A Reflection

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I spent the last weekend at the annual meeting for the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego, CA. I composed this post to reflect on my experience at the conference, almost entirely in two airplanes and the San Diego and Denver airports. The bulk of this post follows the jump, since I ran long and I doubt most people reading this are interested in the proceedings of an academic professional society.

For those who are interested: this is a birds-eye reflection rather than a blow-by-blow recap. See my Twitter feed for specific comments about papers.

Continue reading AIA-SCS San Diego: A Reflection

Calcification of opinion

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I am hardly alone when I say that recent politics has been a major drag on my mental and emotional energy. I don’t know what is going to happen in the near future, but the current direction scares me in more ways than I care to mention. Still, I find myself thinking a lot about politics and doing my best to stay informed because, as difficult as it might be, that remains a civic duty. I also remain problematically addicted to checking my Twitter feed, albeit recently in shorter and less-comprehensive bursts.

These moments of checking Twitter have led me to a realization about the current superficial maelstrom, as epitomized and led by the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That realization is this:

There is nothing that President Trump could post to his Twitter account that would change my opinion of him.

Sure, there are things that he could post that would change the trajectory of the country and do good in the world, but that would mean one of three things: 1) the account was hacked; 2) someone else was managing the account; or 3) that President Trump decided to make an about-face in order to be more popular. None of those three options would change my opinion of him, while what he does post simply digs deeper. I still see people retweeting (usually with sarcastic comment) what he says or dredging up past posts looking for inconsistency. Neither genre of tweet does much for me and in many cases both distract from the substance of issues—not to mention that feeding the ego of someone who fundamentally wants to be the center of attention, whose interests run toward habitual misinformation and complaining about media coverage.

I could never bring myself to follow Trump’s twitter account, but, for months, I would regularly check in, caught up in whatever the latest utterance was. No longer. The campaign is over and I don’t need to actually see the latest bout of internet logorrhea in order to know what he said, at least in reasonable facsimile. I can’t live isolated from the news, but that doesn’t mean that I have to partake in online farce.

2016 CAMWS Meeting: Storify

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Via Storify, here my Tweets from this past weekend’s CAMWS meeting. In the next few days I will have a post working through various issues concerning social media that came up at the meeting–or, particularly the discussion that took place on Twitter with people who were following along from afar.

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Live-Tweet The New Life

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The collected quotations from Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life, which I reviewed here.

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Previously in this series, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

“Live Tweet” Dracula

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Following in the footsteps of my friend Will Mountz, I have started tweeting some quotes from books as I read them. To some extent I have always done this, but I’m now doing it in a more organized way. These are not meant to be a review of the book, but rather things that stood out as I read. Excepting the occasional typo, the only curation of the quotes is for length. These posts (since I suspect this is going to turn into series) are meant to collect what I tweeted out in one place, starting from the beginning of the book.

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