Douglas Boin
@dougboin.bsky.social
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Author, most recently, of CLODIA OF ROME: Champion of the Republic (Norton 2025).
pinned post!
Five years ago, the idea came to me that one fearless woman from long ago who risked her own name to preserve the rule of law against corruption and self-interest might inspire others to follow her example. Happy publication day, CLODIA OF ROME.
8 months ago
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Douglas Boin
Congressman Greg Casar
9 days ago
This is called ‘surveillance pricing.’ It should be illegal. I have a bill to ban it.
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The Washington Post Is Using Reader Data to Set Subscription Prices. How Does That Work? - Washingtonian
If recent events have not compelled you to cancel your Washington Post subscription, then you might have been in for sticker shock at the dawn of your latest billing cycle. Many readers have been noti...
https://washingtonian.com/2026/03/12/the-washington-post-is-using-reader-data-to-set-subscription-prices-how-does-that-work/
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Mark Copelovitch
14 days ago
Again, the reason so many of us in academia are so categorically opposed to AI is not because we’re Luddites or idiots or denialists. It’s because ~every current tool & application of it is built on criminal theft & the bad faith monetization of it.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Folks, if you're in Rome this weekend and interested in antiquity's overlooked women's histories, go see MJ's talk!
www.hf.uio.no/dnir/english...
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Mary Jane Cuyler: The Materiality of a Mystery — The Cult of the Bona Dea at Ostia through the Archives - The Norwegian Institute in Rome
Evening LectureMary Jane Cuyler is a Visiting Researcher at The Norwegian Institute in Rome in Spring 2026 and the recipient of a 2025–2026 Shohet Scholar Grant from the International Catacomb Society...
https://www.hf.uio.no/dnir/english/research/news-and-events/events/2026/cuyler
15 days ago
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She couldn't vote, couldn't run for office. But she stood up, stood out and passed the torch of history to the next generation who knew her story. Your're not forgotten, Clodia of Rome
#InternationalWomensDay
17 days ago
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Never, in all my years as a scholar of the later Roman Empire, have I heard this claim about declining literacy made before.
@theatlantic.com
Care to share your fact-checking receipts? I'm intrigued, to say the least!
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
19 days ago
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Big shout out to my husband who, more than a decade ago, gifted me that first edition in the last post. I think it might have been a birthday present, and that memory made me grab the book this week for my travel.
28 days ago
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Someone who had never heard of Iris Murdoch asked me about her today, and when I described her--I've been reading her for 20 years--their joy was as if they had learned of the existence of a long-lost friend. Makes me so happy that her writing still enchants.
@irismurdoch.bsky.social
28 days ago
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No bigger indictment of how toothless legacy media has become than seeing a headline with the phrase about last night's "familiar falsehoods," as if we can just shrug off the civic collapse we're witnessing
28 days ago
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I like the tenor of this essay very much. Emotionally, it asks us not to look away from dark chapters in recent history. Intellectually, it reminds us that history doesn't move in a straight line--which is why we should be open to learning from all parts of it.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/o...
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Opinion | Historians Confirm: Tomorrow Won’t Be Better Than Today
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/opinion/history-hope-delusion.html
about 1 month ago
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Douglas Boin
NPR
about 1 month ago
Researchers found a tiny bottle from ancient Rome that contained fecal residue and traces of aromatics, offering evidence that poop was used medicinally more than two thousand years ago.
n.pr/46eGEiL
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That ain't perfume! Ancient bottle contained feces, likely used for medicine
Researchers found a tiny bottle from ancient Rome that contained fecal residue and traces of aromatics, offering evidence that poop was used medicinally more than two thousand years ago.
https://n.pr/46eGEiL
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I like this phrase "electoral autocracy." It applies to Rome's Republic, which was never the gilded age of liberty and representation modern memory makes it out to be.
about 1 month ago
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Imperatrix--the only time it appears in ancient Roman literature, comes in Cicero's speech against Clodia's power and authority. "Madame President" would have been a wonderful reclamation of it.
about 1 month ago
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Way past time--but ditched X this morning.
about 1 month ago
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What's that? A "hybrid work of true crime and feminist history"? Oooh, sounds right up my alley
@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/b...
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History’s Most Prolific Female Killer, or a Victim of Disinformation?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/books/review/the-blood-countess-shelley-puhak.html
about 1 month ago
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When you say "History matters," people usually think that means knowing the context behind a headline or a pressing current event. But relevance works the other way, too. Engaging with the past first can reveal blindspots in the news or in culture.
about 2 months ago
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Like all of us in education are just supposed to go back to the classroom and, what, ignore that unaccountable billionaires are whimfully wrecking people's futures along with the health of our civic society?
about 2 months ago
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What distresses me greatly about the WashPo is the message it sends to students: journalism students, writers, readers. They'll look at these adults and rightly demand to know, "Why are you actively sabotaging our future? (As Cicero used to say) For what good?"
about 2 months ago
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We're losing so much of our civic glue, needlessly, with these WashPo firings. Reading a newspaper used to give you a pretty good snapshot of the world. It was eclectic, and rewardingly so. You emerged more informed about a little of everything and eager to engage.
about 2 months ago
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Democracy Dies Because of Billionaires. (Likely not original but I can't contain myself)
about 2 months ago
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The Roman elite hated Clodia because she used her family's money and her voice to advocate for voting rights, workers rights, and antI-corruption legislation. To an elite it was unfathomable that people with money would actually want to help protect civic society.
about 2 months ago
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Douglas Boin
Chris Kluwe
about 2 months ago
Don’t know how many more examples it’s going to take for people to realize that billionaires are an existential threat to democracy and its institutions.
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Douglas Boin
Benjamin Harnett
about 2 months ago
GenAI is one more example of the way our society’s putative leaders are desperate for magic beans and silver bullets instead of the actual leadership and hard work the role requires but are constitutionally incapable of through stupidity, weakness, and moral bankruptcy.
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Absolutely unconscionable to the legacy of Bradlee and Graham and Robinson and others. Billionaires are allowed to just buy and break our cultural essentials, with revolting impunity?
about 2 months ago
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Nero-like colossal statues and Napoleon-sized triumphal arches: I shudder to think what atrociously tone-deaf monstrosity comes next.
about 2 months ago
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And yes, I have totally felt, perceived, detected that stigma (if you write for anyone outside the house, as an academic, you're suspect!). But being gay helped me...quit caring what other people think, real early!
about 2 months ago
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In the AI slop age, it's hard to find audiences that will acknowledge that. But it's what keeps me doing what I do. I was always a writer first, then I became a classicist (and now historian). The writing part has never changed :-)
about 2 months ago
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The thread resonated because, frankly, craft matters to me almost more than whatever topic is at hand; because for my own personal goals, I try to write, well, well!
about 2 months ago
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Yes, of course, there are half-baked novels in a closet somewhere. But the more I kept going in grad school, the more I gained an expertise, I started transfer my love of craft to my scholarship. And so here we are.
about 2 months ago
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Namely: if I'm truly honest (with myself), my pie-in-the-sky wish was always to be a writer, which, realistically meant choosing a career where I could write--and writing was valued
about 2 months ago
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Re-Blueskied that last thread because it home with a convo my husband and I were having; he perennially likes to ask me why I do my career ("Rome?!") and it's become clearer recently
about 2 months ago
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Douglas Boin
T. J. Stiles
about 2 months ago
Second, an essential aspect of writing is to read the kind of work you are trying to produce. But academic incentives are to read only work intended for the professional audience. How can you write narrative or even a work of argument for a general audience unless you read trade books yourself? 5/9
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Douglas Boin
T. J. Stiles
about 2 months ago
The closed-circle structure leads academics to dismiss work from the outside, no matter how scholarly the methods or how significant the findings. If it's not by an academic, the default is to call it "popular," i.e., "not serious." It can be safely ignored. I heard a superb historian... 6/9
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Douglas Boin
T. J. Stiles
about 2 months ago
🧵 I've had academic historian friends who wanted to write for a non-professional audience, but didn't know how. Let me break down the problem. As I see it, it's structural. Basically you have no professional incentives to write for or read books by anyone outside a closed professional circle. 1/9
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Why look, a fine example of the humanistic thought-provoking "culture" whose contributions to our own civic good David Brooks was extolling just this morning in this very paper!
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/m...
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‘Melania’ Review: 20 Stage-Managed Days in the Life of the First Lady
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/movies/melania-trump-movie-review.html
about 2 months ago
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Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college. The Path of Love in Hinduism Modern Art American Literary Traditions The Problem of God The Ancient Novel
add a skeleton here at some point
about 2 months ago
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I saved this Jill Lepore quote from the Chronicle of Higher Ed a while back, and it resonates with Brooks's column today, too, which is kind of a way of saying I'v been thinking about this civics issue a lot
about 2 months ago
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Brooks: "Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find these things in the realm of culture." This is why I've never become a nihilist about my field of study
about 2 months ago
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Brooks: "We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values." Agreed. There are lessons across history of selfless people who fought for causes that were not directly related to their own good or well-being. We need more of that
about 2 months ago
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No one decides to study history (let alone ancient history) for the job security or the earnings potential! But I'm incredibly grateful for the people around me who never doubted my passion and helped me get here
about 2 months ago
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This, too, from Brooks' column obviously struck a chord: "Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money." Because
about 2 months ago
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Storytelling > nihilism
about 2 months ago
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Lots of what David Brooks wrote in his last column resonated but especially this: "Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did —...students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization."
about 2 months ago
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Every serious piece of news, they present as some jokey metaphor, which distracts from the moral collapse of our country and makes this once great paper a laughing stock
about 2 months ago
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"Melania: Champion of the Republic." Am I right?
www.theguardian.com/film/filmblo...
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Black cakes and branded buckets: welcome to the White House premiere for Brett Ratner’s Melania movie
Monochrome catering was all the rage at the VIP screening on Saturday for Ratner’s officially sanctioned $75m feature-length documentary about the First Lady. Have the photos whetted your appetite?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2026/jan/26/melania-amazon-authorised-documentary-white-house-premiere
about 2 months ago
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Not even funny anymore. I canceled my subscription of 25-years because of this kind of editorial gamesmanship. The country literally needs something, anything better than "reiterates false claim"s.
about 2 months ago
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So, ICE is going to the American consulate in Milan for the Olympics in order to, what, protect our country from teleportation?
www.repubblica.it/politica/202..
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https://www.repubblica.it/politica/202..
about 2 months ago
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Assolutamente pazzesco. Perchè devono stare soldati americani di immigrazione nel conolato a Milano? Per proteggere di nostra paese contra teletrasporto?
www.repubblica.it/politica/202...
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Piantedosi ora ammette: I’Ice sarà alle Olimpiadi. Tajani: “Non sono le SS”
Il titolare dell’Interno vede l’ambasciatore americano: non opereranno in strada ma dal consolato a Milano. Il 4 informativa alle Camere. Non si placa la polem…
https://www.repubblica.it/politica/2026/01/28/news/piantedosi_ice_olimpiadi_tajani-425122357/?ref=twhr
about 2 months ago
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Billionaire buys media. Critical thinking, accountability, a steady drum beat of investigative work, reflections on culture, ideas, and history, all essential to civic cohesion, vanishes. In their place: a MELANIA movie
about 2 months ago
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reposted by
Douglas Boin
Max Berger
about 2 months ago
The regime-affiliated oligarchs who bought up Twitter, the Washington Post, CBS, and TikTok didn't do so to turn a profit. They are taking control of the media to limit the public's ability to resist authoritarianism and oligarchy. If they run the outlets into the ground, that's fine.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Moral or even intellectual consistency was never their goal. They will drop "deeply-held" (US journalism speak) values in a flash if it means protecting their own power. Raw power, not the principles of democracy nor the values of civic society, has been their only end.
about 2 months ago
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