Current mood as the academic year winds down is less "finish strong!" or "run through the tape!" than "just cross the finish line in one piece, bro." 🧟‍♂️

The University of California system and California State system together enroll 770,000 students. 770,000 That's three quarters of a MILLION students in a PUBLIC education system that ranges in quality from good to world-class. This is a miracle.

Referring to one's pets by type ("my cat," "our dog," etc.) or by name ("Spot," "Fido," etc.) when posting on social media is a sensitive indicator of how one conceptualizes one's "position" in a nested series of technologically mediated relationships. In this essay I will

Boards of Canada is back (big time) after . . . 13 years (!). 👍👍

Just finished this (as part of this semester's informal reading group of faculty and grad students in ancient history). A remarkable book that will (I hope) help to set an agenda for future work on the complex, fascinating, and (NB) increasingly well documented rural worlds of the Roman Empire.

The Designated Hitter in the National League is an abomination. It should be relegated to the junior circuit where it belongs.

📢 Not just a new SCS Blog Post, but an entirely new blog series: engagements with/responses to select articles in our association's official journal, TAPA. First up: Michael Taylor on Duncan MacRae's "Capitoline Futures." Please pitch us if you'd like to spotlight a piece in TAPA! 👍

Four Berkeley recipients, including my dear friend and colleague @hzeavin.bsky.social. Congratulations, Hannah!

My approach to advising smart undergrads on grad school is to lay out the facts, as I understand them. I then ask them to go away and reflect. *If* they're well informed (usually takes several convos) and still interested, *then* I begin to lay out "road maps" and offer whatever help I can. 1/2

Honest conversations with really serious, whip-smart, hard-working undergraduates about graduate school in history/classics, professional prospects in academia, and the state of higher education have become one of the hardest parts of my job, I think. So deflating. I'm sure I'm not alone.

"Late Antiquity" was not created out of thin air by a singular genius. Ahem. Nevertheless, I think we can identify a relatively small circle of foundational figures who built the field into the behemoth that it has become. On *any* reckoning, Averil Cameron belongs in that small circle. 1/4

Was very excited when I picked up this brochure at In-N-Out, but was pretty disappointed by the contents. No new critical editions of Latin texts, none of the excellent recent work on Hellenistic poetry, nothing at all on gender or space or narrative in Greek epic or Latin elegy. C'mon, man.

"Preparing them for the workforce" is code for "turning them into non-thinking widgets for the capitalist machine." Our frenzied rush into a dystopian future is such a tragedy.

Was gonna post that life is good, but it was 5-0 Mets before I even finished my drink.

It's a beautiful, sunny day on the Berkeley campus, and I see small groups of graduating seniors getting their professional photos in front of campus landmarks and larger groups of prospective students and families touring the grounds. Poignant vignettes in the current atmosphere around higher ed.

Institutional surrender to the instrument of cognitive surrender will result (is already resulting) in political surrender to big tech and, ultimately, social surrender to capital. That UNIVERSITIES would willingly and enthusiastically turbocharge this systemic collapse is just devastating.

The Giants have two HRs that barely cleared the left-field fence, and Castellanos really should have caught both of them. 😬 This is @icpetrie.bsky.social content.

Is it unreasonable to hope that Penn does not, in fact, possess a "list of Jews?"

We see you. We stand with you. You are not alone. 🩵🩷🤍

What will become of Classics? Who is going to devote years to learning Greek and Latin? Who is going to learn how to handle epigraphic or papyrological evidence? Who is going to spend summer after (increasingly scorching) summer digging in Spain or Italy or Greece or Türkiye or Egypt? I am worried.

The corporatization of the university and the rise of a consumer model of higher education and the precarity of academic labor and the existential threat to all of it of AI = a deadly mix. Can anything worthwhile be salvaged or are we *already* in a death spiral? The latter is in play, I fear.

Little retreat was exactly what I needed: I had fallen into a bit of a writing rut, and the isolation and silence helped me to jumpstart my engine. Words flowing again (but to be honest: the key, for me, is simply *deciding* to write; not much more complicated than that). The scenery didn't hurt...

Some signs can be ignored. Others command a bit more . . . attention.

One more lecture (on Sulla); one more office hours; and then Spring Break. Phew. I have booked a tiny cottage in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada (California's "Gold Country") for a writing retreat. I am inordinately excited about this.

My favorite historical scholarship is comprehensive and rigorous without being "heavy," and both clever and adventurous without going too far (becoming either implausible or too "cute"). One scholar who *consistently* achieves this balance is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. What an impressive oeuvre.

⚾️ 🇻🇪 This was the only correct outcome to the WBC. (I simply could not bring myself to support this version of Team USA, with its childish and offensive embrace of military symbolism)

Gave a paper today, at a conference celebrating Susanna Elm, arguing that the ideal of *pulchritudo* is the hidden key to unlocking the entire political and ethical program of Cicero's *De Officiis*, a "repair program" for the *res publica* in the wake of its having been torn asunder by Caesar. 🙂

Habermas. I still recall my first encounter, in grad school, with STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION. A challenging read! But I have gone back to it periodically over the years and always find something generative for thinking about what might pass for a "public sphere" in the ancient world. A giant.

The next time I get a question I can't handle after an academic lecture, I'm going to look at the ceiling for, like, a minute—ONE FULL MINUTE—and then mumble to one in particular, "It's . . . just . . . whatever was written in the EO."

I like to make fun of the profusion of Companions to X and Handbooks of Y and Oxbridge Histories of Z just as must as the next guy, but in fact I love 'em—both for myself (yes, it's true) and above all for helping undergrads to get started on research topics. Worth their weight in gold, I tell ya!

Oof

Have watched some snippets of the DOGE boys' NEH testimony. What strikes me is the *jarring* mismatch between their pose—the cultivated attitude of disdain and contempt—and their bumbling, incompetent responses. That pose is SO easy to read. It's not condescension. It's not fear. It's insecurity.

Que España no tenga nada que ver con esta guerra (ni con este régimen).

A moment of beauty. ❤️

In my undergrad lecture course (on the Roman Republic), I have introduced two grading options: the first consisting of two midterms (25% each) and one final exam (50%), and the second reducing the percentages (20% each & 40%), and adding a term paper (20%). 12 of 105 chose the second option. 1/2

❗️Petition to protest the planned closures of the Wincklemann-Institut (!) and archaeology programs at Humboldt University in Berlin ⬇️

Good morning, @carlosfnorena.bsky.social ! Please share. The Homer Hotline is now available! ***** On Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, The #Homer Hotline debuts! Please enjoy these interviews with scholars of ancient epic and the history and art of ancient Greece! www.youtube.com/@HomerHotline

My response to this post/thread -- as one invested in sustaining (and improving!) the field of Global Antiquity (no scare quotes) -- is twofold. On the one hand, I agree entirely that language study (and empirical expertise more generally) is the "backbone" of any premodern historical study. 1/6

Showed my students some images of the underwater archaeology of the Battle of the Egadi Islands (241 BCE), and reminded them that they can use their one precious life to do something *other* than, say, tech or finance. And now my email inbox is filling up with excited inquiries. 😊

Reviewed today in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. 👍

No. The importance of having a good grounding in classical history is specifically so that you can declare that "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domains, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer" when you visit Nakatomi Tower and happen to come upon a scale model of Nakatomi Plaza.

The simple trick of orienting a map in an unfamiliar way almost always produces startling insights . . . like this one, in which Europe appears to be a peninsula between the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea + North Sea + Bay of Biscay + North Atlantic. Look how Atlantic the Iberian peninsula is!

"I voted for Trump, and I fully support ICE, but I didn't vote for a detention camp with a barbed wire fence next to my childrens' school." A woman from Social Circle, GA, on NPR this morning. Red-state NIMBYism in 2026. Ugly and stupid.

Pleased to announce the Spring 2026 SATHER LECTURE series, beginning this week in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at UC Berkeley. Emily Greenwood, CONVERSING ON THE OUTSIDE: ANCIENT GREEK DIALOGUES AND BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT Not recorded (as far as I know), but all welcome.

America

"This sequence might decide the game." Chris Collinsworth, with 4 minutes left in the SECOND QUARTER of a ONE-SCORE GAME.

A stimulating conference! We learned about everything from sacrificial practice in Han China, Assyrian mythology, and iconoclasm in 8th c. Byzantium to the popular cults of Hellenistic Athens, mercantile Buddhism in South Asia, and the clash between Sasanian and Armenian religions. But... 1/4

Looking forward to this weekend's conference at UC Berkeley THE RELIGIOUS DEMOS: RETHINKING POLITICS AND RELIGION IN GLOBAL ANTIQUITY Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Berkeley Global Antiquity Project. With 10 papers spanning Afro-Eurasia, c. 1200 BCE-750 CE.

A late afternoon in the dead of winter on Berkeley's Memorial Glade.