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.

Teaching archaic Rome at the moment and refamiliarizing myself with the evidence for the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Jaw-dropping to me that they managed a structure of this size (at this location!) in the late 6th c. BCE. By far the largest in central Italy at the time. 1/2

"Dad! Why can't I find the Book of Genesis??" My son, taking a Bible course in college, not realizing that he had ordered The Oxford Annonated Bible: The Apocrypha and *not* The Oxford Annotated Bible, WITH The Apocrypha. 😂

What's your recurring anxiety dream? Mine: realizing that the play in which I'm performing begins in an hour or so and I haven't even begun to memorize my lines. 😬

I would prefer to be "united" behind the following three reforms: 1/ Abolish ICE 2/ Prosecute secret police criminals 3/ Fire Bovino, Homan, Noem, and Miller (and prosecute them, too)

Bovino's demotion + backtracking on the "domestic terrorist" line + Noem's sudden vulnerability = BLOOD IN THE WATER. What we need now are sharks. The moment calls for SHARKS. What we're getting instead is "I'm gonna give 'em the benefit of the doubt." I am Losing. My. Patience. with my party. 😡

This is far from the most violent or horrific image to have come out of Minneapolis, but this one has hit me particularly hard. The kid reminds me so much of my sons at that age. I feel vaguely nauseated when I look at it. A very powerful mix of rage and sadness. It's a devastating photo.

I am beginning to rethink my longstanding preference for analytical over narrative history. The best versions of the latter are *also* thesis-driven, insofar as one's decisions about where to begin, what to include, and what to emphasize necessarily rest upon (implicit) claims about what mattered.

International collaborations with non-US scholars -- lectures, conferences, exchanges, visiting positions, etc. -- are becoming increasingly difficult to organize. There are far worse problems at the moment, of course, but the coming diminution of intellectual exchange will be so impoverishing.

Cal and Stanford moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference was just the first move in a hemispheric re-ordering.

The "rise of China" is not simply a matter of manufacturing, exports, and economic power. It is also about a new and dynamic infrastructure of knowledge production. This global shift in research capacity will be one of the defining stories of the 21st century. [gift link]

"You're very fancy." A 6th grader, to me, just before I launched into my disquisition on the importance of farming.

Today I make my annual visit to my wife's 6th-grade class to deliver a 40-minute, illustrated lecture on the agricultural revolution, state-formation, and social order in ancient Afro-Eurasia -- an acid test of my claim that one can lecture on any topic at any length to any audience!

"First they came for..." was well on its way to domination of our discursive space, but "The party told you to reject..." has roared to life with a NOT SO FAST, MY FRIEND.

Finally, the WCC UK is on Bluesky! Lots of exciting updates in the next few months, so do give us a follow @womeninclassicsuk.bsky.social

"Texts are artifacts. History contains them, not the other way around." An aperçu from a brief hallway conversation with an art historian. A useful way for those of us who work with both texts and material culture from the ancient world to think about the nature of our evidence!

Another AIA/SCS meeting in the books. It was great (as always) to catch up with friends. I went to more complete panels than I had in several years (ahem), and they were *excellent*. And the Presidential address—raw, emotional, powerful—won't be soon forgotten.

re-upping for the feral hordes of archeologists and classicists descending upon san francisco today now this very moment

I'm going to go with the legendary Johnnie LeMaster. A lanky and weak shortstop; a career .222 hitter; and the only player in MLB history to play for *three* last-place teams in one season (1985: Giants, Indians, Pirates). Booed so routinely that he one put BOO on his jersey. Incredible.

*The Mind of the Slave: The Limits of Ownership in Roman Law and Society* is the most original and most compelling contribution to our understanding of Roman slavery that I have read in a long time. The Q: How were the subjectivities of enslaved persons imagined by the slave-owning class? 1/4

Conference presenters and presiders: please use the microphone—even (NB) if you think it is unnecessary. This is a VERY simple and zero-effort way to enhance the accessibility of your panel. 👍

Getting away from it all at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. (AIA/SCS attendees: if you need to decompress from the conference for a couple of hours, you could do much worse than this ⬇️)

Here's to a Happy New Year—and to more light in our lives in 2026. ❤️

In 1990, Crayola "retired" several classic colors, including BLUE GRAY, GREEN BLUE, and an all-timer, RAW UMBER, replacing them with "fun" new colors like VIVID TANGERINE and WILD STRAWBERRY. We didn't know it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end. In this essay, I will

Don't really want the tech CEOs at the top of my posts. So I'll bump them for this afternoon's sunset.

This, for me, is THE image of 2025.

As I reflect on the year in politics, I reserve my most incandescent rage not for Trump, his Republican enablers, SCOTUS, or the MAGA right, but for the tech billionaires who have sold their souls to this regime. Those grotesque inauguration photos are near the top of my I WILL NOT FORGET list.

Just finished AMERICANAH (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Loved it. I wonder if it's too late to shoehorn it into my top 5 for 2025 (I had already squeezed six books in there anyway)...

The open embrace of ignorance as an indicator of trust has gone hand in hand with increasingly coarse and insulting language directed towards the marginalized—"saying the quiet part out loud"—as a marker of in-group solidarity on the right. Can we reestablish public shame? I believe we can. 👍

A pet peeve: when an established scholar declares that they wrote their conference paper on the plane (or, worse, in their hotel room after a night of carousing). It either signals disregard for the enterprise or serves as a self-congratulatory boast about their own brilliance. Seems to me.

"Quiet quitting" by professors when it comes to AI and student writing is a serious risk. The temptation to give up (in effect) instead of devoting *substantial* resources (of time, energy, and emotional investment) to what can seem like an unwinnable fight is real. But it *is* the good fight.

Studying history and reading novels both get us out of our own heads, the first by helping us to imagine different worlds, and the second by prompting us to inhabit different subjectivities. Those who do neither are forever imprisoned in the here, the now, and the self.

I have been struggling to understand how Cal lost to Hawaii. But then it hit me: their helmets were EVEN BETTER. Look at these!