Weekly Varia no. 29, 06/03/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

My summer began in earnest this week. I am writing this from a hotel room in Kansas City where I am spending the next week rating AP exams, hanging out with a few people I know, and fitting some writing and reading in around the margins. I have a lot of thoughts about AP tests and the current state of pedagogy based on my experience at these events, but the week itself is almost mind-numbingly dull. Nine hours, less an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks reading answers to the same question over and over again. Some answers are insightful, some are clever, but most just blur together. And then you do it again the next day, until however many thousand exams have been scored. I find that it is useful to remind myself that I’m not grading this as I would my class: these are neither my tests nor my students.

This schedule also makes it the least interesting among the next six week stretch, of which I’ll be living out of a suitcase for five. I have once again managed to fill my summer schedule this year, but I am exciting that I’ll be getting to do more travel than I have in some time. And it all begins this week. At least Kansas City has some great food.

This week’s varia:

  • Archaeologists discovered two Ming-era shipwrecks beneath the South China Sea that were traveling in opposite directions when they sank. I will reiterate my stance that maritime archaeology is just the coolest.
  • The Senate voted to block President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. I understand the politics behind Democratic Senators voting for the block and it is tempting to reduce everything to the political horse race whether arguing for or against the program, but when the discussion of the systems being broken fall out of the conversation and the bill includes provisions to retroactively assess the interest during the period of a freeze during the latest economic crisis, it often seems that the point is more cruelty than political calculus.
  • In Esquire, Rainseford Stauffer explores the tension a lot of writers feel, whether their writing is part of a larger career or merely a hobby. Her question is a little bit different than the question “am I writer” because the question to that is undoubtedly “yes.” Rather, I think it is interesting because it speaks to how people in the United States, at least, are often led to conflate their adult identity with their career and their career with whatever job(s) allow them to pay their bills.
  • DC has a plan to cancel millions of dollars of medical debt. This story reminds me of what I see as one of the most damning features of modern capitalism: that debt itself is a commodity that can often be purchased for cents on the dollar, just not by the person who owes it.
  • A lawyer in New York is facing discipline because he used ChatGPT to produce an affidavit. Naturally, ChatGPT produced six fictional cases, complete with quotes and internal citations. The lawyer apologized, saying that he had never used the the tool before and was “unaware” that it could produce false information. I’ll just reiterate that my biggest problem is that there is a wide gulf between what it can do, and what people think it can do. The latter is where most of the non-ethical (read: non-environmental, labor, or intellectual property) problems lie, whether the eye of the beholder belongs to students, workers, or management.
  • Tim Boucher wrote 97 books in nine months with the help of AI. Boucher has also been commenting on the story and social media backlash on his blog, pointing out, for instance, that he has never claimed that these are “novels,” as some stories have claimed since each one is only between 2,000 and 5,000 words, which is to say not an impossibly large number of words for an author. Nothing he has written on the blog has made me any more inclined to read these books, and my initial level of interest was approximately zero, but the project does make more sense with the context.
  • President Biden struck a deal with Speaker McCarthy to raise the debt ceiling. The deal seems to me to be in keeping with Biden: always putting things I think he needs to do more to defend up for negotiation (here, e.g.: food assistance) while also taking a stand for things I’d rather he not (increased military funding; oil pipelines), but also significantly more effective than I dare hope.
  • A Washington Post investigation looks at hiring patterns that point to “red” states hiring more quickly on average than “blue” states. They found that the hiring gap didn’t lead to a difference in job growth, but instead correlated to “quits,” suggesting that people in those states bounce from job to job more frequently, both because of the types of industries in those states and because of structural factors like right to work laws.
  • This essay at Sapiens about an anthropologist who took a job at an Amazon warehouse so that he could study it actually is less horrific than some of the social media commentary made it out to be—even while the author uses Amazon as a window into the gruesome exploitation that leads to soaring corporate profits.
  • Slate has a report from the Car Dealer trade group’s annual convention that explores both their resistance to Tesla and other EVs and how the group has become a bastion of the conservative movement.
  • Our collective obsession with beef is destroying the planet, or at least the Amazon where 800 million trees were cut down to make way for grazing land in the last six years.
  • Padma Lakshmi is leaving Top Chef. Despite some issues with the show, it has become one of my go-to favorites in the last few years, in large part because of the vibe that Padma helps create.
  • A bear in Connecticut broke into a bakery and ate sixty cupcakes. The potential danger of bear-human interactions is no laughing matter, but this makes for a cute headline.
  • It isn’t really summer until you’ve had your first creemee, at least in Vermont. For the uninitiated, creemees are a special type of soft serve ice cream made with at least 15% butter fat. Good thing that the Vermont Digger has a database to find your favorite. Personally, I’d recommend the maple-vanilla twist at Bragg Farm in East Montpelier.

Album of the Week: Allison Krauss and Union Station, New Favorite (2001)

Currently Reading: Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom; Traci Chee, A Thousand Steps into Night

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. 22, 04/15/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

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

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

This week’s varia:

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

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

Weekly Varia no. 20, 04/01/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

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

~Me, on Twitter in 2021

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

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

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

This week’s varia:

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

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

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

Weekly Varia no. 16, 03/04/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Every semester in an academic calendar has its own rhythms. Fall starts with energy and excitement created by a lengthier summer hiatus before usually turning into a race to Thanksgiving and a coda that is the final few weeks. Summer is both more frenetic thanks for the shorter terms and more laid back because everyone is working on a smaller number of courses at a time. Spring, by contrast, starts with everyone still not quite recovered from the fall, but is also divided more neatly into two separate arcs, one leading up to the spring break, and one from there to the end of the semester.

I like the shorter arcs of the spring semester in theory. But I have also been reminded again this week, the penultimate before break, that so much of exhaustion, stress, and burnout are bigger systemic problems, which has prompted me to dramatically overhaul the schedule for one of my classes in particular in order to align my expectations, what my students can handle, and the course outcomes. Fortunately, I overbuilt the latter, so I can do almost anything in the back half of the course and still meet every objective.

At the same time, though, I don’t relish the thought of adding this to my to-do list. While I don’t have an obscene number of students this semester (despite two of my classes being mildly over-enrolled), I am already teaching three new courses, with the one that I am now retrofitting mid-flight being the one I had expected to be able to leave on autopilot while I tended to the others. Naturally.

At the same time, I discovered just how many groups I’m involved in decided that we need to squeeze whatever we’re doing in before break, leading to quite a crunch on my time.

Reader, I am tired.

I’ll make it through this week and through the rest of the semester after that, but the feeling of exhaustion that swept over me when I resolved to make these changes reminded me of this piece about John Fetterman, depression, and the requirement for politicians to always be “on.” Despite the reputation that professors are callous, impatient, and disinterested in engaging with students, or perhaps because of it, I saw a parallel in always being on. I might be a dozen anxieties in a trench coat making things up as I go along (an exaggeration on all fronts, but with a hint of truth), but I am supposed to be approachable and welcoming to students, timely in my feedback on student work, prepared with my class material, and present in my classes (though I had a…memorable…professor in undergrad who was frequently absent with no notification), on top of being an expert in the content and a responsible colleague to my coworkers.

This week’s varia:

  • Hannah Čulík-Baird returns to blogging with a post that consists of two fragments, one on fragments as nodes of interconnection both horizontally and vertically and about academic voice. Full disclosure: I get a shout-out in the post as an inspiration for the return based on intermittent, ongoing conversations Hannah and I have had about academic writing and academic voice across multiple social media platforms.
  • Charles Roberts has a blog post pointing out that the issues of student engagement are the consequence of larger structural factors that professors are now being asked to solve without the training or support to do so. He has a note about how dispiriting it is to hear an accreditor devalue the teaching that professors do, which, yes. as I keep saying about ChatGPT, this sort of language is toxic and sets establishes dangerous misunderstandings that I think set students up to fail in the long run.
  • The International Baccalaureate program in the UK is going to allow students to use AI programs if they cite e.g. ChatGPT as a source. This is an unbelievably dumb policy that completely misunderstands what ChatGPT is. The director claims that they created the policy because he thinks it is more valuable for students to learn to critique essays that to learn to do it themselves, which I find is an absurd premise given that doing one at least to a certain level is required to do the other. I’m dreading how decisions like this are going to create headaches for me down the road.
  • Jonathan Wilson writes about the challenges of creating a one-size-fits-all (students and teachers) model for flexible deadlines. I also share his concern about the frequency of students using avoidance as the primary coping strategy for students in distress. In addition to avoidance leading to more avoidance, I often find that it causes work to pile up to the point that it is unmanageable and students will further avoid me because they’re convinced that they have to turn all back work in at once in order to participate in the class and earn my respect—no matter how many times I tell them otherwise and try to help create manageable timelines for getting their missing work in.
  • Given a new round of commentary about campus cancel culture, I saw circulating a Teen Vogue op-ed from 2021 that I missed at the time arguing that colleges and universities are conservative institutions—for many reasons, not the least of which is that the existing fiscal structure of the universities often demands a conservative approach to budgeting and, the larger the endowment, the more the entity functions like a hedge-fund with a vestigial educational institution attached. As a complete tangent, my favorite part of this article is not the content, but the form. This opening paragraph is exactly what I want to see in an introduction. It has a hook, context, and concludes with a clear, coherent thesis that organizes the rest of the piece. A+.
  • From the Vermont Digger: the girl’s basketball team from Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited their game in the state D4 basketball tournament rather than play against Long Trail because the latter team had a trans player. The school also applied to the state to be able to receive public tuition money while being exempted from anti-discrimination regulations. This is an abominable position, but one that is all too common these days. To receive public money, you should have to be in compliance with state rules on issues of discrimination.
  • The Montana state legislature is debating a bill that would ban anyone who received a COVID vaccine from giving blood. Opponents of this bill say that it will lead to an 80% drop in blood donations, thus creating a new public health crisis.
  • A Republican lawmaker in Florida introduced a bill requiring that any blogger or other writer who does stories about the Governor or other executive officials register with the state or face a fine. Just the latest proposal to curtail civil liberties in the name of strangling political opposition coming out of that state.
  • A white-supremacist Lutheran who believes that Hitler went to heaven and views the world in Manichean terms where either you believe in White supremacy and Fascism or you believe in Marxism is trying to gain control of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. This synod is already an extremely conservative denomination, but he wants to turn it into an alt-right organization. I hate it here.
  • Bari Weiss “reported” last month about a whistleblower at a clinic in St. Louis that offers care to transgender teens, ginning up an enormous amount of outrage and potential political action against the clinic. Parents of the patients, the patients themselves, and the clinic are speaking out against the allegations, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After the previous four links, adding this one runs the risk of seeming like I’m beating a dead horse, but…
  • Two trains collided in northern Thessaly (Greece), killing more than 40 people. This is an awful tragedy and critics are pointing out that like the aging infrastructure that caused the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, the train network in Greece is in need of overhaul, even if some of the blame here falls on human error.
  • Pizza acrobatics are a sport. There are competitions, and the Washington Post profiled the 13-time world champion, Tony Gemignani. I’d personally rather eat the pizza.

Album of the week: The Barefoot Movement, “Pressing Onward” (2021)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/27/mid-vermont-christian-school-girls-basketball-forfeits-playoff-game-rather-than-compete-against-team-with-transgender-player/

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. 10, 01/21/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The first week of the semester is in the books. All three of my classes have gotten off to pretty good starts, but I always forget how exhausting the first week of the semester can be. My to-do list has bloomed (more algae than roses, though) heading into this weekend, so this weekend will be spent slowly working through tasks that range from some administrative upkeep to shorting up soft spots in my reading lists to the first round of grading, lest the semester snowball out of control.

This week’s varia:

  • Daniel Bessner has a good opinion piece in the Times about the perilous state of history. He points out that “deprofessionalization” of the field creates the breeding grounds for ” the ahistoric ignorance upon which reaction relies” because so much “history” is placed in the hands of social media influencers and influential partisan actors like Bill O’Reilly.
  • ChatGPT roundups are just a thing, I guess.
  • The Missouri legislature is currently debating a bunch of CRT-in-education bills. One proposed bill ensures that nobody will be offering kindergartners classes in CRT, a field of study usually reserved for law schools and advanced sociology degrees. I say, why are parents trying to stop their kids from being pushed ahead? More seriously, this is a continuation of last year’s cultural war du jour that treats any sort of training on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion as nefarious CRT and legislates feelings in a way that puts teachers in an impossible position, which is why one proponent of the bill simply refused to define what he meant by it. These sorts of debates only hurt education, but what bothers me most about the committee meeting is the hostility toward education and educators. When a poll revealed that only one school district claimed they taught a class on these issues, the committee chair’s response was “at least one school district was honest.”
  • The Washington Post has a profile of Matt Yglesias, looking at his career as a disrupter, contrarian, and public thinker. Personally, I find Yglesias to be a problematic figure whose primary claim as someone who can spin a plausible argument out of minimal evidence is as symptomatic of where we are as a society as is Donald Trump. Every once in a while he makes a worthwhile point, but, most of the time, he’s functionally firing hot takes that get treated as something more substantial.
  • The re-election campaign for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who appoints the Chicago school superintendent, sent email to schoolteachers asking that they encourage students to work for the campaign in exchange for school credit. This very likely violates ethics rules—especially since there credible (it’s Chicago) accusations of retaliation from the mayor. Students volunteering for campaigns for credit is nothing new, but teachers are not supposed to encourage participation in specific campaigns.
  • The Oversight Board at Meta, which oversees content decisions for both Facebook and Instagram, has told the company that it should “free the nipple” (so to speak). What this will look like is yet to be determined since the company is still likely to want to keep pornography off the platforms, which was the genesis of the policy.
  • A Republican candidate for office in New Mexico has been arrested as the mastermind of a string of shootings that targeted Democratic politicians in the state. The man had to overcome a legal challenge to even stay in the election given his prior felony conviction and, unsurprisingly, he claims that the election was stolen from him.
  • An Indiana woman repeatedly stabbed an 18-year-old student in Indiana University of Asian heritage. The suspect told police that it “would be one less person to blow up our country.”
  • The Kansas City Defender, a black news outlet, reported on the abduction of black women in Kansas City, but the KC police department dismissed the allegations. Then, in December, a woman escaped captivity. Capital B News has an interview with Ryan Sorrell, the founder of the KC Defender, about the story and his efforts to create a crowd-sourced Black missing persons database.
  • Ohio officially declared natural gas “green energy.” The Washington Post has an article on how the campaign ran on Dark Money. Because, of course it did.
  • Americans might be done with the pandemic, but the pandemic is not done with us. Also from the Washington Post, winter COVID surges are a new normal, adding to the typical surges in other respiratory illnesses.
  • Jacinda Ardern is stepping down as Prime Minister of New Zealand, saying that she doesn’t have “enough in the tank” to do the job any longer. While this decision coincides with an uptick in threats against her, I am struck by a politician having the unusual level of self-awareness to know when enough is enough and the combination of humility and privilege to be able to act on that knowledge.
  • Vulture has a good piece on the labor conditions in Hollywood’s VFX studios where the industry standards were developed before the current age of enormous amounts of work after filming, which is leading to systemic understaffing and underpaying made worse by Marvel being a Goliath in the industry.
  • “Marge vs the Monorail” aired thirty years ago this month. Alan Siegel at The Ringer got Conan O’Brien to talk about his idea for the episode as a cross between The Music Man and an Irwin Allen disaster film.

Album of the Week: Counting Crows, This Desert Life

Currently Reading: Marissa R. Moss, Her Country; Rabun M. Taylor, Roman Builders

Weekly Varia no. 9, 01/14/23

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The last few days before the start of a semester exist in a strange state of limbo. On the one hand, these are days free from the rat race of the semester. On the other, they are also the last opportunity to prepare syllabuses and other course materials that brim with an exhilarating cocktail of potential and uncertainty.

I am feeling this state more than usual this semester because of how the last semester ended. I have been thinking about my course policies since in the middle of last semester and pecking away at my syllabuses for weeks, but these documents were nowhere near ready for distribution. Then, on Monday, we learned that one of my colleagues won’t be able to teach this semester. This development had little bearing on my classes other than to fill up my last few open seats, but there was also a suggestion that I might be asked to pick up an online US history survey either in the place of or on top of my other courses. More than the challenge of planning and deploying an online asynchronous class in a week, what I struggled with this week was the uncertainty around which courses I needed to be preparing.

My course list did not change, in the end, and I returned to the syllabuses I had at various states of completion. And to the more usual types of uncertainty: whether the course schedule will prove manageable, whether the readings I assigned will elicit the response I’m hoping for, and whether the tweaks to my course policies will work. Adding to this uncertainty is that I have an entirely new slate of courses, which offers both the struggle and the thrill of invention.

I don’t teach until Wednesday, though, so I’m spending this weekend and the first few days of next week putting all my ducks in a row.

This week’s varia:

Album of the week: Garth Brooks, “Ultimate Hits”

Currently Reading: Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath; Uwe Ellerbrock, The Parthians

Facing an Avalanche: Weekly Varia, 12/3/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The fall semester is rapidly drawing to a close and, despite some effort this semester to change the schedule on which students submit their assignments, I am finding myself staring down an avalanche of grading. Under the best of conditions I am deeply ambivalent about this time of year because it generally does not allow students to do their best work, and, this year, I already feel worn down from a semester that has been nothing but an endless cycle of grading.

There will be time for a semester debrief once it has ended. Not for the first time I have been reflecting this week on how much time it takes to grade the way I think grading ought to be done. There are, of course, grading systems that take little or no time on the part of the professor, but these are generally a concession to volume in large classes for what I am teaching rather than an ideal substitute for more labor intensive pedagogies. However, this also means that I have had less time to write, to say nothing to the knock-on effects of this grading like the reading and types of writing I do to find my writing voice again after reading student writing and the time it takes to switch modes. Some days recently I just haven’t had the brain space to make that transition and only one of these activities pays my bills.

This also means that I have a backlog of things I want to write about. Setting aside my academic writing, to which this also applies, I started writing a post about phantom time conspiracies this week, have been compiling my thoughts about both Andor and Rings of Power, and intend to write about at least three books I finished this semester and the one I am currently reading. Then there is a recap of #AcWriMo and a semester reflection. By a quick count, that is nine posts without including weekly varia, my annual end of year series, or any topics that might move me to write before the end of the year. Now, I wouldn’t expect to publish all of these posts before the end of the year even without the avalanche of grading, but simply having these things on the docket means that I feel the lack of time all the more acutely.

This week’s varia:

  • In September James Sweet, the president of AHA, published “Is History History?,” in the professional organization’s Perspectives magazine. The essay prompted an enormous amount of push-back online, leading David Frum to write favorably about Sweet’s position in The Atlantic. This week, Jonathan Wilson published a sensitive rebuttal to both in Clio and the Contemporary.
  • The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is the preeminent book review outfit for Classics, both for good and for ill. It is open-access and prestigious, but the place it holds in these systems also leads to controversy over its impact, what styles it allows (and who gets to write in what register), and editorial choices. I have volunteered to review books a half dozen or so times over the years and been turned down every time, but I nevertheless found of interest Clifford Ando’s reflection on process.
  • There is apparently a deal in the works to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece (BBC). These are friezes taken from Greece in the 19th century and Britain has refused to return them for decades on a variety of excuses and their return would be a welcome development.
  • Paul Campos at LGM Blog responds to the president of the United States asserting on Twitter that the Holocaust happened, as though this were legitimately in question. One critical point he makes: the problem with Hitler is not that he was possessed by demonic powers, which simultaneously makes him remarkable and takes him off the hook for his crimes. The Holocaust is what happens when the worst impulses and desires of people are heightened, enabled, and then realized.
  • A Florida school district tried to block a parent from doing a presentation to her child’s class about Channukah on the basis of the new Parent’s Bill of Rights, but they relented when the parent threatened to make an issue out of the school claiming that Christmas decorations were generically “holiday-themed” rather than an endorsement of Christmas.
  • Related, Paul Bowers writes in “Notes from a School Board Takeover” about how national rhetoric plays out in local communities when conservatives seize control of a school board and warp policy to reflect their political agenda. One of his most important observations: the people enacting these policies are immune to shame and don’t care about lost teachers. This is about the exercise of power.
  • San Francisco’s board of supervisors gave permission for police to arm potentially-lethal robots. Police assure the public that they have no plans to put guns on the robots, just explosives, as though that is much better.
  • A Qatari official put the body count of workers killed in stadium construction (ESPN) between 400 and 500, which is significantly higher than the official line of three dead in work related incidents and 37 others outside of the job.
  • College football is a deeply corrupt sport. All aspects of this corruption is currently on display at Auburn University, which just hired Hugh Freeze as its head coach. Freeze was fired from his job at Mississippi amid scandal and hasn’t done much better at Liberty. He also has a history of harassing critics and worse, while hiding behind bible verses, as Jason Kirk details in his latest newsletter. The latest Split Zone Duo podcast (with host Steven Godfrey who created the Foul Play docuseries about Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss) had, I thought, a compelling discussion of how sports media is allowing Auburn to rehabilitate Freeze’s image.

Album of the Week: Trampled by Turtles, “Alpenglow”

Currently Reading: Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark; Emma Dench, Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World

The Game: Weekly Varia 11/26/22

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The Game kicks off in Columbus in about an hour. For those who don’t follow college football, The Game is the annual showdown between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Michigan leads the all-time series 59-51-6, but the rivalry has been lopsided in the other direction for the better part of two decades. Going into The Game last year, Ohio State had only lost twice since 2001 when Jim Tressel took over as coach. Ohio State was rarely ranked outside of the top ten in the sport when the teams met during that period. Michigan put up a fight in a lot of years, but, outside of an excellent Michigan team in 2003 and an anomalous Ohio State year in 2011 between the end of Tressel and the start of Urban Meyer’s tenure, Michigan could not seem to win and often lost in heartbreaking fashion. Last year I left the TV off and played Civilization VI until a friend texted me in the fourth quarter telling me that I probably needed to tune in.

Sports fandom, and sports hatred in particular, are strange, tribal phenomena. I have hated many teams in my life, sometimes as specific iterations of a team and sometimes simply for the laundry. Sometimes I hate how a team or player plays their sport. Other times it is because my team can’t seem to ever win. However, I increasingly find myself without the emotional energy for hatred. I still don’t like teams and root for the teams that I’m a fan of, but full-on hatred both takes more energy and is best curated in groups. When it comes to a game like this one, where my fandom collides with the deep, simmering dislike of the other team, though, all bets are off.

I went back and forth a half dozen times this week on whether to tape The Game or watch it live this year. Ohio State is ranked #2 in college football, while Michigan is #3. Both teams are undefeated and the winner will likely end up with a bid to the college football playoff while the loser will “only” play in the Rose Bowl. The lure of live sports is proving too strong to resist, so I’ll be tuning in while also preparing myself for what I think will be a likely Michigan defeat. Go Blue.

This week’s varia:

  • A new study claims to have authenticated a coin found in 1713 long considered a possible forgery because it names an otherwise unknown Emperor Sponsian (the research is available on PlosOne). The researchers suggest it dates to c.260 CE when Dacia might have been cut off from the rest of the Roman Empire and thus minted coins under the name of a local military commander. There are, of course, skeptics. Numismatists, specialists in ancient coins, are suggesting that this study fails to account for numerous tenets of the discipline in their haste to scientifically authenticate the coin. To my mind, this study is a useful reminder about the fragmentary nature of evidence from the ancient world.
  • Graham Hancock’s show Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix is a “documentary” that offers “evidence” of a an advanced ice-age civilization was wiped out by a flood sometime in the dim past. This is pseudoarchaeology with racist bones (it denies the achievements of indigenous communities), so, of course, it is one of the most popular shows on Netflix. The Guardian calls it “the most dangerous show on Netflix,” while Bill Caraher has a more nuanced piece about the impossibility of debunk ing this sort of conspiracy theory and some suggesting for how to productively counteract their influence.
  • Corey Booker is introducing the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act (Vox), which proposes to reform how the meat industry handles disaster. The bill includes requiring the industry to pay annual fees that would work as insurance in cases of disaster, mandating disaster preparedness plans, and putting companies on the hook for costs like cleaning up the after disasters and paying workers severance afterward. It also would ban the most inhumane culling methods and close some loopholes in American slaughter rules. I have disagreed with a number of Booker’s positions over the past few years, but his consistency in attempting to change one of the American industries most in need of reform is admirable.
  • Investigators are leveling accusations that some Russian military commanders encouraged their soldiers to commit sexual violence in Ukraine (Reuters). This investigation is part of the broader inquiry into Russian war crimes and, while it is too early to say how widespread the practice was, the implication that this violence was in some instances coordinated makes it all the more harrowing.
  • In the Washington Post’s “Made by History” column, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd explores how Ron DeSantis is the latest in a lineage of conservative political actors to make schools their chosen battleground to instill their vision of “America.” The hook here is that Florida recently became the fifth state to make students recognize a federal holiday that I missed when President Trump established it in 2017: Victims of Communism Memorial Day. Lassabe Shepherd is the author of a forthcoming book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.
  • John Warner, the author of Why They Can’t Write, remains my favorite commentator about the state of higher education. In his column at Inside Higher Education this week, he writes about why nostalgia is such a dangerous sentiment for colleges.
  • Rebecca Jennings at Vox argues that we should stop taking billionaires at their word when they say that they are “doing good” in the world. This argument is hardly new (cf. Winners Take All) and matches what I already believe, but American society remains easily seduced by a class of people who confidently assert vague platitudes while proudly refusing to engage with history or the humanities. But they’re rich, so they must know what they’re talking about, right?
  • In the realm of the silly, the New York Times Pitchbot is consistently the best satirist on Twitter: “This morning while we were listening to The Daily, my four year-old turned to me gravely and asked “Daddy, why are there no pictures of Naomi Biden’s wedding in the Times?” When I told him “because Vogue got an exclusive”, he started crying.”

Album of the week: Gin Blossoms, New Miserable Experience (Deluxe Edition).

Currently reading: Susanna Carlsson, Hellenistic Democracies; Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built.