Over the weekend, Agniezka Holland's "Franz K" made its case for dethroning the 2024 (but made it to cinemas in 2025) "Master and Margarita" as the best film I've seen in 2025. It demands a lot of its audience (esp. quite a bit of familiarity with Kafka and his work), but really rewards your effort.

Buried the lede: "(Premium users can also converse with Satan.)"

Auburn University expresses what every university is feeling, it seems...

That sounds like fun!

I love this.

🤯😡 Seriously, we're getting emojis in file names before computers can reliably handle umlauts?

#CFP online seminar series: Strong Women of the Ancient Mediterranean World and their Reception - September-December 2026 - Organisers: Anastasia Bakogianni (Massey), Martina Treu (Milan) sponsored by EuGeStA Network, AWAWS, The Imagines Project - Due by Jan 6

Today I learned that the grand staircase of the Bavarian State Library in Munich originally had supposedly Pompeii-inspired frescoes decorating it. You can get a sense of it below (they were Pompeian red + white). The paint job wasn’t reproduced when they rebuilt the library post WW II.

Look… a special issue on divine intervention!

No, Apple Mail, I do not need a summary of a 4-line email, thanks!

MA/ New England ancient historians: an international boarding school in Braintree is seeking a long term substitute teacher for high school world history, starting ASAP until mid March. Emphasis on ancient and medieval history. DM me if interested! (Sharing this on behalf of a friend)

Still haven’t seen the movie, but this does indeed raise many questions.

I got to play with a simulation of a Korean divination technique that is based on the first animal sound you hear (in the new year, technically). The dog bark got me “Many thieves for the year,” so I’d like to remind everyone that the temple robbers are happy to go on tour for a book talk.

I just took a photo of this yesterday!

One for your epigraphy goal list: Xi’an’s absolutely incredible Forest of Steles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele_F... (which will also be happy to answer with a demo any questions you might have about stele rubbings)

Attention, classics and translation people! Scott McGill and I are organizing a panel for SCS 2027 called "The Indirect Method: Translations as Sources." Please read, share, and/or submit! www.classicalstudies.org/annual-meeti...

The first author copy has arrived!! The official publication date is Jan. 7th (and the open access— i.e., free— electronic version will become available on that date as well). I’m planning to be at the SCS in San Francisco to hold Mr. Murder Mittens’s paw. press.umich.edu/Books/S/Stea...

One of my favorite paintings.

I was never into ringtones, but I miss AIM and Livejournal.

I’m currently ignoring instructions for an author photo to promote my new book…

if you’re curious about what i’m up to, OUP has unlocked the introduction until 11/24. you can read that here:

#CFP Mediterranean Antiquity in the Work of H. P. #Lovecraft - online (Zoom) - April 10-11, 2026 www.carmanromanophd.com/lovecraftcon... Due by Nov 26

ㅤ — Kazuaki Horitomo ㅤ

“[O]utputs may be inaccurate, unexpected, or offensive.” As someone who’s recently had ample occasion to snort at translation app vs Chinese, this is iconic.

China inscriptions folks, can you help me make sense of what I saw in the National Art Museum of China? The translation app would make these squeezes. Is that correct and if so, how are they made? They look incredible, and I am very jealous.

I recently gave a talk on the professionalism of burglars vs the utter lack of professionalism of temple robbers in Roman literature. Turns out I gave the burglars way too much credit…

When you're cursing the Online Jacoby (why is that interface? Just why?) and Brill decides to send you a "satisfaction survey."

Nope, those “sit all day to get a footnote out of it” days are still not my favorite even if it’s a pretty footnote.

Interesting new, open access article in Greece & Rome blends epigraphy, poetry on stone (Greek epigrams), and tracing ethnicity: “Dying Greek in Rome: Greek Funerary Epigrams from Imperial Rome” www.cambridge.org/core/journal... I love this: ‘κάλλος δ’ αὖ μετὰ μοῖραν Ἀμαζόνος ἔσχεν ἄπιστον’

Oh look, it's academic busy season and Goodreads decides to treat us to a list of 141 dark academia titles...

CAMWS put Mobile on the itinerary for 2026, so better start collecting... (this seems like too much of a hike from the city proper, but looks amazing)

No, I do not want a “reimagined Goodnotes” to “elevate [my] notes” with “exciting AI features” so it’s the most “intelligent place” for my notes. Reimagined app has crashed 2x in the past hour, btw.

Today I learned that the French equivalent of German’s eierlegende Wollmilchsau (lit. egg-laying wool-milk-sow,” your special unicorn all-in-one solution) is the mouton à cinq pattes (the 5-legged sheep). I love languages.

Oh, and, happy 2-year anniversary to the best email I've ever gotten from a bookseller as part of a rather complex effort to get a copy of Francesca Stavrakopoulou's "God: An Anatomy"

"Today, Americans have a very clear idea about what it means to be a mother." Krishni Burns, author of the upcoming book "Bringing Their Mother Home" wrote a blog post on the archetype of Mother Goddesses at press.umich.edu/Blog/2025/10...

Fresh Caesar Loeb just dropped (ok, a month ago, but…). And I bet the Latin text is also better than the Oxford text of great antiquity!

Today's research rabbit hole is called Sarmizegetusa, a Romanian site that has a baby stonehenge, 7 Roman temples (1 of them got me into this rabbit hole), an amphitheater etc. And, according to the Romanian tourist board, it is "rich in healing energies." I'm sold. How do I go to there?

Learning about book marketing today, which is all well and good, but talk about "sentiment scores" gives me uncomfortable flashbacks to a brief experiment by a classics journal to have reviewers (optionally!) assign an emoji to an article. Yes, the options ranged from Grinny to Frowny.

That’s Herr Professor von AI-Hallucination to you. Anyway, as someone occasionally quite taken by steam punk, I hope an author or several runs with this.

That’s one impressive “you may wonder how I ended up here…”

At the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies we are offering 10 fellowships for scholars at any stage in their careers to stay with us for up to 6 months (PhD candidates and senior academics) or 12 months (postdocs) to complete a research project: www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/images/pdf-f...

The what now? That’s some serious emperor kitsch…

Well, that’ll be one to look at before the next medicine week in Roman gender comes around… (I took it from a day to a week on the second to last iteration due to popular demand for horrors from the annals of medicine)

I sent a friend stuff from the 1st advanced Latin class I ever took and realized that the course was a horrifying 23 years ago. But that also means that I (a college starter) have been doing this classics thing for over half my life, which is a nice feeling. Plus, Cicero is still older (and deader).

Call For Papers: Teaching With Ovid. Any aspect of teaching Ovid in the classroom, for a 2-day symposium on 12-13 June 2026. Classicist teaching Ovid? Medievalist teaching the Ovide moralise? Librarian/archivist with historic copies of Ovid to share? Take a look: shorturl.at/RiviU Deadline 16 Jan.

New issue of Illinois Classical Studies Vol. 50, No. 1, Spring 2025 muse.jhu.edu/issue/55694 @projectmuse.bsky.social @illinoispress.bsky.social Fake News is or as Invective in Ancient Texts

Ah, the “eduroam couldn’t be joined” box. Is it just napping or are there indeed new authentication protocols as a Tuesday morning treat?

I'm trying (+ failing) to understand how ResearchGate works. But it is amusing to know that since I published a paper on flamingo sacrifice that cited a couple of science articles on flamingos, there were apparently several bio profs waiting with baited breath for me to finally hop on this thing.