Yeah, it's made up. I rarely flex online, but as the person who wrote one of the textbooks on this period, pure and simple. Just plain wrong.
06.03.2026 19:21
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Yeah, it's made up. I rarely flex online, but as the person who wrote one of the textbooks on this period, pure and simple. Just plain wrong.
Reads an awfully like that, doesn't it?
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.
Admittedly, that's a really difficult one to start with!
An Italian Girl is nicely structured and swiftly moving. The Sea, The Sea is still, to my mind, her masterpiece.
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.
They set me on my way!
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)
This is why you find stuffy scholarship deriding her and her brother, who shared her civic values, as a "louche aristocrat." Because how dare they acknowledge their privilege and its responsibilities!
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.
