Happy pub day for "The Autocratic Interpretation of Athens: Rethinking Regime Theory in Thucydides' 'Archaeology'," which appears in Polis 42,3 @dgb-ancientstudies.bsky.social You can find a preprint on my academia page or access the article here: doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340479

New issue of Polis Vol. 42, No. 3 (2025) brill.com/view/journal... @dgb-philosophy.bsky.social @markfisher.bsky.social @dgb-ancientstudies.bsky.social

Congrats to Stefan Eich @stefeich.bsky.social‬ on winning the 2024 David and Elaine Spitz Prize from the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT)! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

What would we need to know to conclude that AGI was inevitable? We argue that the answer has more to do with the philosophy of social science than the tech itself. Grateful to have this piece included in the inaugural batch of Oxford Intersections: AI in Society. academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

Annual reminder that the quote is, in fact, "Kai su, teknon?"

This is very good

Word of the day is ‘catch-fart’ (17th century: an obsequious individual who will always follow the political wind.

We’re two weeks in, and I’m ready to cast my vote for genuflection as the word of the year

Cleon Peterson is an extraordinary artist who updates classical forms to comment on contemporary political violence. His house and studio were destroyed in the fires, and he's selling a special set of prints to help his family of five (plus dog!) stay afloat. Please consider buying if you can.

Cleon Peterson is an extraordinary artist who updates classical forms to comment on contemporary political violence. His house and studio were destroyed in the fires, and he's selling a special set of prints to help his family of five (plus dog!) stay afloat. Please consider buying if you can.

TIL that a UT undergrad started a nationwide campaign and got the 27th Amendment passed *out of sheer spite* when his prof refused to raise his poli sci paper grade. I'm going to start linking to this story whenever a student asks for a grade change. This is the new standard.

More like this, please

This feels a bit on the nose as far as portents go, but here’s to 2025.

If your resolution/planned coping mechanism for 2025 is to read more good books, here are some recs I received from friends and colleagues this year that deserve to be paid forward No summary can do this first one justice. Just read it and you’ll understand.

And I will achieve enlightenment when I finally pay off my student loans

Enjoying an alliterative Boxing Day

Merry Christmas from a dog that definitely made it onto the nice list

Reminded once again that Love, Actually casually made up an Xmas tradition about telling the truth and we all just played along with it

Reposting my favorite pub from 2024 before winding down for the holidays; a short piece on the temptations and dangers of reading history opportunistically. If you are in the mood for an alternative take on what made Thucydides such a brilliant political thinker, enjoy!

JOB‼️ 4 years postdoc in Politics at our amazing @homertoncollege.bsky.social www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/junior-resea...

The optics of this coinciding with the Amazon strike are appalling www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

The Kennedy Center cleans up well for Christmas

Oakeshott on the diffusion of authority between past, present, and future From "The Political Economy of Freedom"

Just published! My latest article on John Pocock and how history 'inhabits' us aeon.co/essays/histo...

Deep in the Foreign Service Journal archives and spending all my time reading the ads. Here's one from a midtown hotel in 1940 offering translations in Esperanto, rooms for $3.50, and ten-minute rides from Penn Station to Flushing.

Appreciative that the Bears are no longer even pretending that they are going to win it in the 4th

Wait is the implication of this final pivot that it's not ultimately Gates or Soros behind it all but . . . the Olympian pantheon??? If so, please tell me more

Well done Outlander (s5e12) for introducing a Thucydides quote that actually comes from Thucydides The bar is low, and a surprising number still manage to trip over it

Not a cat, but might as well be

Sixteen undergraduate papers away from 9 months of research leave. I've never been so eager to put up an out-of-office message. Thanks to the Loeb Classical Library Foundation for giving me time to finish the book. Finally.

Our grading deadline for undergraduates is Dec. 27th. I feel like they didn't really think this one through.

NEH grant submitted, representing a month of work from 12 people. Good vibes and crossed fingers welcomed.

There appears to be considerable overlap in the Venn diagram between bsky's techno-pessimists and skeeters who have strong views on coffee

There’s something unsettling about a medieval cathedral looking that clean

Request to submit this as part of my annual review

I now own a coffee machine that needs to be connected to wifi and I can’t for the life of me understand why

Grant writing is the worst writing

Thank you, friendly AI bot at blueskyroast.com. I feel seen.

Turning 41 in 2024 is getting a happy birthday email from every company you’ve ever give your information to and like two of your friends

I call performative contradiction

Only thing missing is a pipe and some tweed

I'm preparing to give an esoteric reading of 2024 when asked what I'm thankful for tomorrow

What's it going to take to convince Kendrick Lamar to chair the DNC?

So here's the funny thing about Icarus...

And to think, I’m agonizing about finishing just one

h/t Solon

Pleased to be putting on Berkeley's first-ever Graduate Conference on Early Modern Political Thought (1400-1800) Keynote: Alison McQueen (Stanford) @aejm.bsky.social Submission deadline: January 10 Date: May 3 Submission form: docs.google.com/forms/d/1Foy... Please circulate widely!

Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Political theorist: The cup exists in a paradoxical tension, a perpetual state of self-contradiction, that encapsulates what it means “to be.”

Well, that was depressing www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

"By the 5th century BCE, Thucydides felt he knew what separated civilisation from barbarism: the ability to graft the olive tree." In fact he never said anything like this. The link in the article is to a general discussion of Thucydides by @markfisher.bsky.social... aeon.co/essays/extra...