A very old tradition—see Greek and Roman sling bullets.

Absolutely unsurprising that their autism recommendation [sic] is that women need to suffer more

11/22/63 The Talisman The Shining

"...the final arrangement of counters on the board was recorded as clusters of pen and ink dots." I don't know of any parallel in the Greek and Roman world, despite the prevalence of the abacus. Interesting.

"...the final arrangement of counters on the board was recorded as clusters of pen and ink dots." I don't know of any parallel in the Greek and Roman world, despite the prevalence of the abacus. Interesting.

Was looking at Robert Recorde this week, so good to see this post from the Folger www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

As first reported by @jackjenkins.me here is the wild video of Prestonwood Baptist Pastor Jack Graham playing an AI generated Charlie Kirk speech in which a fake Kirk says he knew he might be killed for "speaking up in this cultural moment, and I'd do it all over again."

How could they www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

This is much more work than just doing the grading.

my favorite robert redford story is that mike nichols considered him for dustin hoffman's part in THE GRADUATE. during their conversation nichols asked redford something like, "have you ever struck out with a girl?" and redford's response was basically, "i don't understand the question"

The Association of Ancient Historians meeting will be in Iowa City from April 16-18, 2026. For those new to the AAH, we have preset panel themes; you pick 1 to apply to. The theme overall is Ancient Exchanges in a Global Antiquity. See CFP: abstracts are due by December 1. aah.conference.uiowa.edu

“…to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”

New article! Stefan G. Holz on 'Innovative Accounting at the Exchequer and Wardrobe, c.1300: The Jornalia Bills, Books and Rolls under Edward I and Edward II' academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-... #medieval

Smallpox!

People are like, “Everyone has ALWAYS thought things were better when they were young” but I maintain that it was, in fact, better to live among humans

Looking up something in the Boston census of 1900, and these are just other families on the same pages. 2 children surviving out of 14 1 child surviving out of 5 0 children surviving out of 10 3 children surviving out of 4

Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships, built for a Roman emperor. In their first-century heyday they held gardens, palaces and baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever.

Spent countless hours of my childhood here.

We're experiencing an unbelievable deluge of submissions. At our journal we got ~200 per year in 2020. Last year it was 600. This year it's 800 with several months to go. So that's why we're slower to get stuff out for review.

I again can’t recommend enough “The Sad Irons” —about women in the pre-electricity Texas hill country—in Robert Caro’s “The Path to Power”

Importantly, these injuries to the bear had partially healed and it in fact died from infection. Coupled with the evidence for extensive chewing of bars over a long period, this suggests the bear took part in multiple spectacles at Viminacium 7/9

NEW What was life like for the animals that fought in the amphitheatres of the #Roman Empire? New research tells the story of a fighting bear from Roman Serbia. Strap in for a gladiatorial #AntiquityThread 1/9 🧵 🏺 #Archaeology

Entire fields of knowledge fading because fools couldn’t keep away from crypto

Entire fields of knowledge fading because fools couldn’t keep away from crypto

Of course, some collections are fairly benign. Like Tom Brown, an Appalachian man who collects rare apples.

Holy fucking shit

This was a real question. What do y'all think?

I wish universities would use some of the money spent on ed-tech stuff to subsidize physical course packs instead

Belatedly realized that Osirisnet is gone. What a huge loss. It was an incredible resource on Egyptian tombs.

That may be what they meant to say, but that is not what the prose actually says. I think universities should be held to high communication standards.

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

Brilliant essay

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

"People have died for the right to read and write. Think hard about giving that up." Too dramatic for an LLM syllabus policy?

Last year, I leaned hard on academic integrity re: LLM's. This year, my university is going all in ("a taskforce this fall that will explore the use and integration of AI across university operations, including academics"). I will still shape my classes to exclude AI (until they fire me?). But...

………

Fight for the Smithsonian as best you can, but also support the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (for victims of lynching), and the Legacy Museum (on slavery, lynching, segregation) in Montgomery, AL, which they cannot touch. Below is the block with lynchings from my home county.

Check out my new review of: Cultures of Computation and Quantification in the Ancient World: Numbers, Measurements, and Operations in Documents from Mesopotamia, China and South Asia (Chemla, Keller, Proust, eds.) authors.elsevier.com/a/1ldDc17f6k...

Pretty much all my love of & knowledge about movies started with Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies." I went through systematically and rented them from indie rental places (then, in its glory days, Netflix-by-mail, which had an enormous selection). The books still exist, but another Ebert never will.

Without disagreeing with much of what’s in this thread, I do not think this comes anywhere close to the cognitive demands & quality of thinking that go into writing assignments. We are losing something fundamentally important, not just a “token.”

just got word that my department's being shut down. two things: 1. no, i'm not okay. i've no words for how hard i've worked for this department and this institution. i feel betrayed, frankly, though i know it's not personal. 2. we rocked, y'all. i've no words for how hard we rocked, either.

Can’t recommend Spang’s “Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution” highly enough on this. Amazing book.

I actually find posts like this, which refuse to acknowledge what a sea change LLM’s are and how soul-crushing they have made the job, to be exhausting

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

Why would I want to create a stormtrooper that looks like a teapot

Amid everything going on in the world, spending hours immersed in the calculations in the Karanis tax rolls has been meditative, even restorative

Homes of ‘working-class Romans’ discovered during Rome metro dig | Italy | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

me at 14: lol the bible has a prohibition on necromancy. superstitious morons. i'm so glad i live in an enlightened age me at 37: shit i guess you actually gotta hand it to 'em on this one

Season 3 of My Brilliant Friend brings the beginning of this era (which I knew nothing about) powerfully alive. More powerfully than the book did, I think, which is rare. (I haven’t yet watched season 4). Anyway, read this thread.

Was unfamiliar with this symbol of equity in *number* of coins as opposed to scales for fair weights. The image on the Arch of Constantine in the link makes it clear there are depressions for each coin (though they'd have needed to be careful about depth to ensure no stacking?). I love this!