So admittedly I think some folks might need to remember that for a lot of academics the first real interaction we directly have had with "AI" writ broadly was either a) our laziest students trying to cheat or b) whole swathes of our profession being gutted by these kids who don't know anything.

A brief preview of my #AAH talk on the value of combining Roman history, women's history, LARPing, & criticual fabulation: 1/3rd of my historical women likely present at Hortensia's speech would have lived through ~6 civil wars; most >4. No wonder they asked why this 1 was special. So much PTSD.

Another little moment I loved came from the chapter before: "[Sam] wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace."

Faramir is such a great character in The Two Towers (book): "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

Weekly Varia no. 172, 03/08/26 New varia post: a few thoughts on this moment as I head into spring break, along with this week's links and media roundup.

Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.

My great mistake in life has been operating under the delusion that it is good to know things.

The war hawks scoff at the mention of dialogue and diplomacy, but it's what takes the greater skill and effort. Blowing up things and terrorizing people is easy.

It's very Hayekian that it seems like many Americans care little about what's going on in the rest of the world except for any information which can be signaled through dramatic changes in the price of gas.

February Reading Notes Notes on every book I finished in February 2026.

Have we made contact with the Medes or the Sarmatians or maybe the Elamites or Parthians to see if they're willing to help? Is there an Achaemenid or three floating around to prop up as a figurehead?

Most people also won’t finish your 500-word article. So write at whatever length is appropriate for the subject.

How much do you REALLY read, and how much of those reading materials are online and what's the proportion online/offline? My hunch is that we are now reading A LOT of very short form material (tweets, skeets), very little in the way of articles, and books, much less in print. This is worrisome.

'Executive summaries' are intrinsically problematic. They assume that the article being summarized contains a perfect alignment of evidence, reasoning, and conclusions. In fact, most reports don't (otherwise, all truths would have been revealed long ago). Learning comes from id-ing the mismatches.

So, I have just learned about this prosciutto sundial (or HAM CLOCK as I will be calling it) and I am truly obsessed with this little guy! "The prosciutto has proved easier to describe than to explain" 😂 😂 perfect, no notes

One thing we should be taking away from the fascist crisis is that careful research on the real world is extremely fucking important. Bare minimum that work needs to be funded & expanded for us to have the information & tools necessary to cast off this regime & create a livable world from its ashes.

There is something existentially empty about the pressure to integrate AI into every knowledge field.

My university received a few years ago the promise of the largest single gift to a public university in U.S. history. It was equivalent to 12 hours of bombing Iran.

I guess I didn’t wake up thinking I needed to know the names of the 279 named triremes ⛵️in the 4th century BCE Athenian navy, but it appears we all do. link.springer.com/article/10.1... I do like that 3.58% had animal names like Λεοντῆ (lion skin) and Λέαινα (lioness). Greek epigraphy is fun! 🪦

I think AI bros maybe need to start taking some classes in Medieval philosophy. Because they are making the same arguments for the consciousness of AI as Anselm and Abelard made for the existence of God.

very aspect of life in this country is designed so that people do not form bonds or relationships with other people, it's wild to watch in action. Never seen divide and conquer applied this rigorously to a domestic population that is not under foreign occupation

>indefinitely at war with Persia Yeah that checks out

Publishing WTF moment: I get a pitch for a book that's pro-AI pedagogy, asking me which proposal guidelines to use, as we have 2 files on our website. We only have 1 file on our website. The second file is 8 years old and not publicly available. I ask where they got it. /1

When I was in grad school, one of the most powerful people on campus was the "Ruler Lady." At a time when we could only submit complete dissertations as hard copy, this lady would check if the margins/formatting were correct & acceptable. Today, the room availability booking person is powerful.

Polymarket for the length of department meetings (and how much of the agenda gets completed), when?

Reading someone else's text is sometimes hard. But reading LLM-text is actively adversarial. It is imposing cognitive work on me. I have to impute meaning where it either never existed, or where it has been obscured by numerous layers of matrix multiplication.

If writing is thinking and reading is thinking, then transitively reading should be writing, no? ... Wait, you mean actually no?

Doomscrolling is the weaponization of literacy

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

A little on the nose. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/athenian

“Compiling” is also integral training for life as a teacher and syllabus-builder. There is no shortcut to doing hard things; you just have to do them, and then keep doing them until you get better at doing them.

We cannot have a substantive conversation about the use of LLMs in education without addressing the material and political conditions of their development and embedding in our institutions. Which is why every new main character who engagement farms with LLM bait makes it about cheating or neo-Sokol.

I've reached the point of the semester where I keep fantasizing about all the books I'll get to read once the semester ends, in part because textbook adoptions are due soon. Only two more months until I may be able to make good on those fantasies!

This game is about to release into Early Access TODAY and I have a spare giveaway key. I'll post it into the replies for anyone to grab once this post reaches 500 reposts

The most dangerous thing about AI chat bots is how many men with political power treat them *exactly* and unquestioningly like actual Ancient Greek oracles.

One of the many weird about current academic "I handed over most of my research to Claude and triplemaxxed my productivity" discourse is the focus on time-saving rather than quality. It's not about producing better research, but about producing three times as much just-about-good-enough research.

footnote: what i'm troubled by is not the interest or curiosity wrt AI. to the contrary, the whole content betrays an utmost lack of curiosity and depth. no one seems to wanna understand what it is, whether or how institutions need it. they just wanna have a share of it. FOMO as higher ed strategy.

If someone is going to bring me back as an AI construct to comment on the work of random students, it had better be as the full package: impatient with sloppy argument structure, sarcastic, obsessed with correct apostrophe use. thesphinxblog.com/2026/03/03/n...

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

Good thing some US colleges are closing their Religious Studies departments—definitively not “useful” at all or an area of expertise that might be relevant for understanding our present…

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

Using Grammarly for the first time in forever ... WHAT? As a non-native speaker writing primarily in English, I used to use it to check prepositions, point out too long/convoluted sentences etc. It now offers to summon colleagues both living and dead to "expert review" the piece??? What?

Tax cuts destroy society

I can appreciate wanting to save specific reveals for an audience, but, in general, if something is worth engaging with, then "spoilers" won't change that.

"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – ['existential threat'] – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy." George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

For all that we can talk about the value of medieval literature for the present and the space it creates to think about issues at a bit of a remove, I’m finding it awfully hard to concentrate on 12th-century Neoplatonism with my country unsystematically destabilizing the entire globe.

They all do this. And it feels like a reflection on the humans behind them, whose inflated careers are built on never admitting they don’t know the answer. The ‘smartest people in the room’ if ‘smart’ just means glib and facile, turning out lies with complete conviction.