✨The Sirens and Odysseus✨ This fabulous scene of the fateful moment that the Sirens seek to lure Odysseus and his crew is our pick for #MosaicMonday. The mosaic is from Dougga in Tunisia and dates to the C2nd CE.

dance of the shrew monks

i was visiting a neighborhood bar in boston when a roving gang of elite college professors strode in acting like they owned the place. they saw me ordering a domestic lager and shouted "this motherfucker's not chasing novel gustatory experiences!" and started beating me with heavy wooden rulers

New podcast episode! We talked to @dannybate.com about his new book about the history of the alphabet, "Why Q needs U" -- a very fun conversation! www.alliterative.net/podcast/2026...

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

Abrego Garcia should apply for compensation from the weaponization fund

The AAACC is proud to announce the launch of our brand-new Kristina Chew Paper Prize! Please share widely within your networks and encourage your students and colleagues to submit!

Super excited to have so many people interested in Roman royal portraiture from my last thread. While I have you, let’s keep talking about Nero’s portraits and modern people who want them to be Polaroids. /1

Laughs in University of Wisconsin.

in a little over a week @joegoodkin.bsky.social will be doing this at @gettymuseum.bsky.social www.getty.edu/calendar/ody...

It's not 1536, but Anne Boleyn has taken over the news. Recently a team of computer scientists, electrical engineers and a historical novelist think they have discovered the “true face” of Anne (& her mother) by applying AI-based computational facial recognition to Holbein sketches. The catch? /1

This stuff is sooooo stressful as an int'l grad student. If the proposed changes go through, it'll for sure change stuff for me--I'm already past 4 years, because most grad programs are longer than that. Feels targeted at grad/professional students...

This is going to come across as pretentious and unhelpful, but I really recommend reading books. Reading a book is the only thing I do where I feel like I'm nourishing my attention span, rather than sanding it down. The trick is to just read whatever you enjoy — not what you feel like you should.

When nobody visits the web anymore, what incentive is there for people to populate it with information? That means AI search will be retrieving information from deteriorating, out-of-date sources and feeding it endlessly back to us. And that means even fewer people will populate the web. (2/3)

This is the dumbest shit I've ever heard of. I want to be able to SEARCH. As it is I've been hugely frustrated with the elimination of boolean modifiers in the basic search function of Google. Guess I'm ditching entirely--I hear DuckDuckGo is decent.

Nazis actually go to the most astonishing lengths of bullshitting to detach classical antiquity from all its surrounding 'non-Aryan' influences

What is maddening about this debate is that citation practices are not just about AI hallucinations. Scholars should be familiar with the ongoing conversations in their fields. Citations aren't throwaway padding. They are about matters of methodology, ethics, and care. 🛢1/2

Humanities and social science profs are finding out how natural scientists treat authorship and we are losing our damn minds.

Published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Peer-reviewed. Large sample size. Sound methodology. An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in individuals exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Ensitrelvir blocks the enzyme coronaviruses need to make new copies of themselves.

Do You Have Games on Your Phone

I get sooooo much cross-stitching done at conferences. So much time where I’m just listening and need something to do with my hands! So, progress on this huge project…

The SCS has signed onto @historians.org's statement opposing new Texas Tech University Course Content Guidelines which prohibit content related to “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” in core and undergraduate classes, without defining those terms. Read more: www.historians.org/news/aha-opp...

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

A terrifying but also heartening story. "The experience, she said, revealed a level of community solidarity she had never anticipated. 'One of my biggest takeaways from all this is the ways in which the community really showed up for me,' [Mel Curth] said."

I won the @cacscec.bsky.social Women’s Network Best Pre-PhD Paper Prize last week, for my work on Calypso, heteronormativity, and straight resistance to queer positionality in the Odyssey!

LISTEN TO @adamserwer.bsky.social (as a general rule but please especially here)

I'm offering a 3-session online course for @92ndstreety.bsky.social in June on white nationalism and GrecoRoman antiquity. The far right knows more about ancient history than you expect, but there are traditions of classicism that challenge their narratives. Join me! roundtable.org/live-courses...

“If students note that you are ‘arrogant’ (as in being knowledgeable in your field, as your Ph.D. might suggest), drink.”

Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Good lord, Springer needs to have a public, prime time crow-eating. They published a *meta-analysis* at 2.5 years after first public release? That’s not time for multiple, good quality studies to even exist (6 months for funding + IRB, a year of data gathering, 6 months to process data & writing.)

Fellas, is it asexual to fundraise?

oh this one is mine

the more I think about it, the more I feel like “Odysseus is from Boston” is true in a sort of ecstatic truth way

How your email finds me

[Enter Rumor, painted full of tongues.]

The fact that I'm somehow making progress on the dissertation considering the amount of Silmarillion fanfiction I've written in the last few months is truly crazy. Guess all that stuff they say about the momentum of daily writing is true--and it doesn't all need to be on the same project!

Amazing that in the national divorce the libs are getting the NFL, butter and cooking oil, being attracted to adult women, standup comedy, Bud Light, and now also Catholicism

The four types of children (wrong answers only): The child made of gold The child made of silver The child made of bronze The child made or iron (Fifth child about whom we do not speak made of a mixture of iron and clay)

I think this is likely true, given that I was asked to prove that bottom surgery on prepubertal children does not happen when I was writing for the Atlantic. Despite this never having been a policy or practice, despite it being actually counter-indicated by trans experts for a number of reasons

1 Just passed through security at La Guardia. ICE entirely doing security! 100% of ID and identity checks done by ICE…Truly icky and dystopian. Some thoughts.

Speaking as a Wisconsinite: 🙃

"The Ancients could do wondrous things, but often made mistakes" is a common trope in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but said fuckups are usually framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reasons real public works often come to horrific ends. (1/3)

I love blizzard conditions on March 16. Double love when the university doesn’t close the campus so I have to make a call about my class.

“This [AI] technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less…” right, now can we stop buying the “humanities aren’t lucrative; that’s why no one majors in history” nonsense?

Hearing @michaelhobbes.bsky.social cite “Elden Ring no hit randomizer runs” as content he gets overly invested in despite the objectively low stakes was an EXTREME “devil’s sacrament” moment for me just now. The podcaster who lives in my phone is just like me fr 😆

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent. State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes. www.wired.com/story/gramma...

God I just love Rebecca Solnit so much. Gift link here! www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/m...

NEW: The bad news about international-student enrollments at American colleges just got worse. An exclusive @chronicle.com analysis of just-released State Department data shows new visa issuances in the summer of 2025 dropped by more than a third. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

Roman baby shoe 🥹