This is called ‘surveillance pricing.’ It should be illegal. I have a bill to ban it.

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.

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...

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

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...

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.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

Way past time--but ditched X this morning.

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...

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.

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?

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?"

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.

Democracy Dies Because of Billionaires. (Likely not original but I can't contain myself)

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.

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.

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.

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?

Nero-like colossal statues and Napoleon-sized triumphal arches: I shudder to think what atrociously tone-deaf monstrosity comes next.

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!

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 :-)

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

🧵 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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storytelling > nihilism

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."

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

"Melania: Champion of the Republic." Am I right? www.theguardian.com/film/filmblo...

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.

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...

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...

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

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.

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.