Highlighted: the universality of declines: "Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down [...in 83%] of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70[%]. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.

A general, a historian, and an economist are discussing Iran: General: Overwhelming military force is the only way to break the stalemate! Historian: Iran is extremely unlikely to relinquish the leverage which this threat gives them. Economist: Let us assume that the Strait of Hormuz is open...

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

I'm always a bit astonished when reminded how *recent* this drop-off is. Most chatter about crisis in the humanities does not seem to take into account enough that this is a story of the last 15 years or so.

Mrs. Gaskell: radical, rabble-rouser, trade union suggester, social agitator and writer of works "too exciting for children."

I always have a few students who, in their annotation assignment, basically highlight the whole article. (I do give them instructions, but somehow it happens anyway). Maybe I will assign the Borges map story next year...

Canvas, the Strait of Hormuz for American education

There is no political party willing to imagine a public education system oriented around equipping people & society with the freedom to think, rather than be a good worker - and for both Ds and Rs, these are mutually exclusive ends.

more experiments with gold pics and old style image transfer! the texture it gives is really interesting.

📰 Evidence for valuable purple-dyed textiles in infant burials from Roman York indicates elite families invested heavily in funerary rituals for children. 🏺 #ArchaeologyNews via @archaeologynews.bsky.social archaeologymag.com/2026/05/roma...

This is Walsh, Dane, Sweetpea, and Wiley. They are all service dog dropouts. Together they have successfully completed one single task. 13/10 for all (IG: dogtor.walsh)

— Fashion is a feminine coded interest and thus considered frivolous, whereas masculine-coded interests, such as architecture, are considered "serious." Doesn't matter if a tremendous amount of skilled labor or creativity went into making something, such as the handmade lace or shoulder line below.

IMO, there are two reasons: — Western societies have a long history of discounting clothing, partly because it's associated with the body and partly because it's considered too mercantile. Everyone from Shakespeare to Marx has used "fashions" as a pejorative.

All of those events involve spectacles, celebrities, and obscene amounts of money. Notably, the Met Gala is the only one that's a charity for a public institution. What upsets people isn't the actual money or celebrities, but the notion of fashion. The more unusual the outfits, the more outrage.

— Fashion houses then use this opportunity to create fantastical designs, partly to show their creativity and craftsmanship. — Events like this provide work for countless artisans. These people often work on other types of cultural productions, such as the costuming for films, TV shows, and theatre

I get a lot of AI slop book marketing emails, but this is the first time I have ever been . . . mistaken for Jane Austen.

still reading Bleak House, very funny to me that there's a bunch of shit clearly Going On but it all keeps getting pushed to the side every twenty pages so Charles Dickens can be like, attention reader: I have developed a New Buffoon

The Met Gala funds the Costume Institute. The study of historical fashion, textiles, and costumes is worthwhile and valuable. Textiles are incredibly fragile and difficult to preserve, and the Costume Institute doesn’t share in the Met’s other funding. I’m glad the gala exists.

Linh Mai greets fans at the National Zoo in Washington D.C.

What the hell www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

I'm just not satisfied with any of the readings of this line from Tab.Vindol. 596...not Bowman & Thomas, nor Grassl's re-reading (shared by De Bree). But can't so far suggest a satisfying reading of my own. How do some of you do this all the time.

Count of Monte Cristo night! If you’re not watching it (PBS), do yourself a favor and start.

"the singularity is real and it happened two hundred years ago" is really a key thing to understanding how i think about the world

Finished it and turns out there is a SECOND Bleak House, also really nice

✉️ Explore 145,000 medieval merchant letters as a live map: the correspondence network of Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1363–1412), spanning Florence to Barcelona to North Africa. Visualise routes, travel times & seasonality. docuracy.github.io/datini/ #DigitalHumanities #MedievalHistory

Paperback of my book on the Polis is now out. Link in next post.

A part of me is glad I was taught that way, and a part of me wishes I had been taught instead that we were still in the middle of a *very* recent fight-- that, as John Roberts has shown, there were people born under Jim Crow making it their life's work to bring it back.

A #Roman tombstone dedicated to a former gladiator named Lycus, who fought just four times in the arena before winning his freedom. He was a heavy armed murmillo gladiator, & also fought left-handed - unusual enough that it was recorded on his tombstone #AncientBlueSky

The thing about picturing Vesuvius from the perspective of the victims is that Pliny says it was dark. "Not the darkness of a moonless or cloudy night, but the darkness of a closed room when the light has gone out." This AI image, like most movies and images... www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/04/a...

The thing about picturing Vesuvius from the perspective of the victims is that Pliny says it was dark. "Not the darkness of a moonless or cloudy night, but the darkness of a closed room when the light has gone out." This AI image, like most movies and images... www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/04/a...

Count of Monte Cristo night! If you’re not watching it (PBS), do yourself a favor and start.

Did this in small classes and it’s great. Seems more difficult to do it in big classes, but maybe should?

Reading this dang book and discovering that even the sayings I didn't think were from ships are, in fact, from ships. My entire language is boat.

Had time to read this in full and it was just as cool as I thought it would be

Every time Matt Damon takes on a period role he ends up looking like a third baseman for the Phillies.

📕 #BookReview Anna Flückiger & Jan Bemmann (ed.)'s 'Coining values: bronze between money and scrap in late Roman and early medieval Europe' investigates what role bronze and base-metal goods and materials played in late and post-Roman societies 1/2 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

2/2 He asks the mom to promise that if he raises her son, that the new freedmen will still be free. "Peter looked at her for a long time to see her thoughts." But _eventually_, she agrees, & even offers to give them the funerary goods. Then, "in the presence of all these freedmen," Peter miracles.

Out of many great papers at the Assoc.Anc.Hist conference, 1 moment sticking with me is Bill Owens' talk about slavery in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, & esp a moment where a rich matron asks Peter to raise her son from the dead. Peter notes that various enslaved men had been freed in his will. 1/2

This is such an exciting time to be working on Roman money, economy, cognition. Just so much wonderful work.

I see Simon woke up this morning and chose violence.

A better reason IMO is its closer relation to a verb & thus to ongoing process. We have Roman treatises about how to control/break people through beatings, food deprivation, imposing hierarchies, etc. This is not at the moment of enslavement but as daily routine. Drawing attention to...

This is superb. www.nber.org/papers/w30451

a volume I'm a co-editor on has just been published. Contributions aim to center urban peripheries in the Roman world (heavy on Rome and Italy) from a variety of perspectives (The paper version will cost you mightily, but an open-access digital version should be available within a day or two) 🏺

I'm trying to formulate something re: Roman economic futures that currently goes: "the extension of value circulation into the future was primarily created by means of foregrounding repetitive encounters with concrete stability," which I think resonates w/Macrae's article. Excited to mull it over.

Especially interesting since ancient warehouses have been on my mind for a few years. Powerful read.

I'm trying to formulate something re: Roman economic futures that currently goes: "the extension of value circulation into the future was primarily created by means of foregrounding repetitive encounters with concrete stability," which I think resonates w/Macrae's article. Excited to mull it over.

I wrote this is a furious fugue state after reading Owen's skeet this afternoon. How I learned I can't trust academic online resources anymore, and what happened when I asked ChatGPT for some sources... Academia is cooked. www.ancientalexandra.co.uk/p/ai-lies

I'm teaching excerpts from this book already, and it's wonderful. The title here (not the review itself) does the book an injustice, b/c Bowes works very hard to show us the resilience and hope of the 90%, and how their lives were NOT an undifferentiated mass of "nasty, brutish, and short."

Were Were those the only two options

“I think we need to admit that coins existed.” Yes!