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Weekly Varia no. 188, 06/28/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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I was back on the road this week, taking a trip that landed me in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Kansas City. This was, principally, a work trip, my first as internship coordinator for my program. Across four days on the road, I observed interns working at the Missouri History Museum and the Missouri Historical Society Library and Research Center in St. Louis and at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, as well as meeting with internship partners at each location and at the Jim’s Journey Interpretive Center in Hannibal and at the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop and Farm living history museum in Olathe, Kansas. There were a couple of other internship partners I had hoped to visit on this trip that weren’t possible because I was on a tight timeline for the observations, but it was a productive trip on balance. I observed the interns, got to know what they are working on, and learned a lot about the partner institutions. As much as the first two objectives were the central purpose of the trip, the third one is what will enable me to coordinate the internship program going forward. I have one more of these trips coming up this week, and then after the holiday I will reach out to every partner I couldn’t visit on these trips to see about virtual visits or possibly a whirlwind tour later in the summer if I have time, though my summer schedule is already busy enough that “sleep” keeps getting pushed down my to-do list.

Between meetings I largely spent the trip preparing class materials while watching the World Cup (I was awake and in town for the Netherlands game in Kansas City, but both the monetary cost and the logistical toll were too high for me to attend), but I was able to stop at the St. Louis Art Museum for its Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan exhibit while I was there. On display until August 16, 2026, this exhibit brought together sculpture, mosaics, frescos, glassware and amphorae, and pieces from Roman furniture, with a lot of rare loans from museums in Italy, and so is well-worth the price of admission. I used several of my pictures from the exhibit for this week’s images.

  • One year ago: I sang the praises of Kansas City as a food city and touched on a couple of food highlights from an unexpected trip to Minneapolis.
  • Two years ago: I went on a road-trip through South Dakota with our puppy.
  • Three years ago: I wrapped up my European trip and thought about the value of packing light.

This week’s varia:

  • It is hard not to feel like the entire edifice of higher education is imploding when every week it seems like another institution announces massive cuts, invariably targeting the humanities and social sciences because those are the programs that are most politically and socially expedient to target rather than for any empirical evidence that the programs are under-performing. Evidence can be manufactured, but it can be made to say a lot of things given the right framing. Anyway, the latest announcement came from the UK this week, where the University of Exeter, where fellow ancient history and blogger Neville Morley works in one of the affected programs. He responded in the guise of Neville Morley from Earth 2, and then followed up. It is generally a mistake to look back at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I think I would have liked to do this job during a period of something other than permanent crisis.
  • Bret Devereaux continued his look at premodern military forces for world-builders, now determining how these armies get paid. I like the granularity that he goes into with this series because even if a writer doesn’t need to get into the particulars of raising an army for a big set-piece battle the issue of may is relevant for how one might, say, go about bribing a member of the city watch to achieve a particular end.
  • Jon Del Isola used his newsletter this week to reflect on the meaning of revisionist history, noting that the reason that the term receives a bad rap is the pervasive view that historians should be searching for a single “correct” narrative, which implies that “revising” that narrative is in some sense falsifying it. I also think there is a (small-c) conservative impulse to defer to to authority, both in the sense of deferring to people who were there when the events took place and deferring to the magisterial histories of yester-year that are not as much in vogue, especially for younger scholars (which is not the same as there not being groundbreaking research, as I wrote a couple years ago). To break away from those traditions can seem transgressive, especially when used to foreground stories and perspectives that challenge the received narrative, but, as Del Isola says, this type of revision is literally the job of historians. Historians should be revisionist, whether that revision is used to enrich a traditional narrative, to edge closer to a singular truth, or to build out a chorus of voices that can shed light on the messy counterpoints of social and cultural development—which is a different proposition from bending the evidence to serve a political end or inventing the past out of whole cloth.
  • Leah Reich continued the story of “Add Yours,” adding her third installment of the series this week. This column also has a nice paean to good editors, which I will endorse whole-heartedly.
  • My take on the World Cup is that it has mostly been a success despite the institutional forces that have tried to sabotage it, be they authoritarian soccer federations, FIFA’s price gouging, or the US government’s arbitrary visa bans. Darker stories like the captain of the very fun Cabo Verde team being accused of rape have started to come out, but I enjoyed being around fans from Ecuador, Curacao, Finland, and the Netherlands during recent visits to Kansas City, and the love between the Algerian team and Lawrence Kansas is genuinely heart-warming. But, like I said, institutional forces have been trying their best to ruin the fun, such as when the US denied a visa for Michel Kuka Mboladinga, better known as the super fan who stands like a statue for the DR Congo games as a memorial to Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese prime minister of that country executed by firing squad in 1961 after being overthrown by Mobutu Sese Seko, with the backing of Belgium and the United States.
  • This is also the same country where prosecutors in Texas successfully used zines distributed at a protest at an ICE facility in 2025 to successfully convict protestors of “providing material support to terrorists,” leading to some of them being sentenced to decades in prison. This is an appalling miscarriage of justice, given that distribution of such materials is protected under the first amendment. This is hardly the first time that protected speech has been successfully prosecuted, but the other examples I can think of offhand took place during periods of war, which is what makes this a dangerous escalation.
  • I also wanted to link this piece from Lawyers Guns and Money about the Trump administration’s ruling about Kalshi betting market because Robert Farley sums up the state of place succinctly: “this administration is actively opposed to Virtue.”
  • Album of the week:
    • Willow Avalon, Pink Pocket Pistol (2026)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome (Princeton University Press, 2025)
    • Shannon Chakraborty, The Tapestry of Fate (2026)
  • Weekly Watch List:
    • Last Week Tonight (HBO)
    • House of the Dragon, season 3 (HBO)
    • The Agency, season 2 (Amazon)
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Trajan and Plotina’s neice, Matidia, sculpted after Thalia, the Muse of Comedy.
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A Roman-era sculpture of two hounds, one grooming the other’s ear.

Ctrl-Alt-Ac

Posted on by Josh Nudell
XKCD on the expected academic career path versus the actual one.

My varia for this past week included a link to Neville Morley’s blog post in which he responded to Karen Kelsky (formerly The Professor is In, now recast as The Professor is Out) asserting that the reason most people cling to academia is that they are addicted to external validation. I called the post strange, which is me being politic and understated. Morley called it mad, which is closer to the mark. I first went on the job market right when Kelsky’s advice for getting an academic job was peaking around a decade ago, so I knew her in that context, as one of a cottage industry of former academics who had found success in the liminal space of consulting, whether on how to get a job, how to find satisfaction in that job, or how to transition away from academia. In the decade or so since then, the general mood around academic work has soured as employment in the field has become increasingly squeezed by budget cuts, political oversight, and ideological attacks. The Great Adjunctification was already sweeping the field when Kelsky wrote her definitive guide to landing a job in higher education, but many people back then—yes, it is fair to call a decade ago “back then”—were still holding onto dreams that tenure lines would rebound and happy to ignore the evidence of systemic issues. Some still are, but most seem to understand both the consequences on their personal work experience (see Erin Bartram’s now-famous essay from 2023) and that entire fields of research are being aborted because stellar researchers remain toiling in underpaid, under-resourced positions, if they haven’t been driven from the field altogether. It is into this new milieu that Kelsky is working on her new book, the definitive guide to leaving academia.

To be honest, I probably won’t read the book. That position could change if it comes recommended if and when I find myself looking for other work, but there are other guides that I could use. I still have a copy of Christopher Caterine’s Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide sitting on my to-read shelf from when it looked like I was going to make a career change a few years ago, and while the specific text is a few years old I can’t imagine that his advice (having worked on the SCS Contingent Faculty Committee before I joined it, and having made a career switch) is going to prove less useful, especially given that my limited reading of Kelsky’s SubStack where she works through ideas for the book contains a version of academia that is starkly different from my own and contains a bitterness that strikes me as both unpleasant and unhelpful.

But enough ragging on Kelsky, who had a more successful academic career than I have by most traditional metrics, went on to create a successful niche for herself after leaving that career, and whose work some people find useful. Instead, I want want to elaborate on something that I mentioned in both my response to Morley and in my varia post: that “academic,” “alt-ac,” and “non-academic” are categories that entrench the identity problems academics face when it comes to finding jobs other than professor or researcher.

Each of these categories are, ultimately, descriptive. In the most literal sense, an academic is anyone who holds an academic position, usually as a professor or researcher, while an alt-ac position is one that allows the person to leverage their academic skills in another, sometimes adjacent, role, and a non-academic position would be a job without such synergy. Alt-ac conversations typically omit the third category, if only to insist that the terminal degree has value to a career, whether or not the graduates find work in the career that the program trained them for, but can be more true for some jobs and some programs than others. I am more “pro” graduate school than a lot of people I know, but it is worth thinking about these positions as a spectrum rather than a binary.

In practical terms, most people working in the latter two categories are at a significant disadvantage should they wish to continue doing academic research. Even modestly resourced university libraries are better equipped to acquire recent research than most libraries unless you happen to have an affiliation with e.g. the New York Public Library, as Bret Devereaux has pointed out, and even academic positions without research expectations have a seasonal rhythm that can be leveraged for research. In academic spaces like conferences, university affiliation also typically confers status beyond that given to adjuncts, high school teachers, or, gasp, independent researchers. But there is no law that says that you need an academic position in order to research and publish. Nor is there even a requirement that you have formal training, though it generally helps. A good editor will weigh the submission and, if they believe it has merit and/or an audience, then it will move forward through the process. I’m simplifying here, but not by much.

The issue of identity runs deeper than the descriptive categories or practicalities of conducting research. Making it through graduate school with an eye toward landing an academic position requires wrapping yourself in that identity. Some students enter graduate school comfortable thinking of themselves in these terms, while for others, including me, it takes time. This identity is also different from whether the student comes in saying “smart” things or analyzing an assigned text. It’s a way of thinking about themselves and the work, which is what Kelsky and others mean when they describe academia as a cult. This is another accusation with a kernel of truth wrapped in a bitterly pejorative terminology, but it is also a deeply-felt charge, which is natural emotion when people who are encouraged explicitly or implicitly to construct their identity this way then get pushed out and—seemingly—disowned by every person and institution in their previous life. Institutions want to celebrate successes (defined as not you), former colleagues don’t want to broach an embarrassing topic, and everyone you know is suddenly working on a different schedule. These changes don’t need to be malicious for it to hurt, especially when it goes to the heart of the identity you spent years constructing. These changes aren’t exclusive to academia, but most other jobs don’t require as long an apprenticeship or as itinerant an early career before (maybe) landing a stable position and being able to build a community wherever that may be. Academic colleagues and collaborators are a steady presence throughout that process.

Untangling these problems requires changes at multiple levels—institutional, personal, social, and cultural. And for all that, I also believe that one of the most impactful things that could be done to start these changes would be to stop talking about academic and alt-academic (or non-academic) as binaries where some people are in and some people are out. I recognize that this is an exercise in wishful thinking. Healthcare in the United States is bound tightly to full time work, leaving limited time to pursue academic research projects that won’t further a career, even if someone working in an alt-ac job wants to pursue them. But if we’re serious about there being value in academic research and believe that people working in higher education are doing a job rather than being cloistered monks of the mind, then a worthwhile place to start is to recognize a wider spectrum of people as part of a shared intellectual project—and to respect past participants, whatever they go on to do. An academic identity doesn’t have to look like just one thing, and people shouldn’t need to abandon their academic identity because they took a job other than an academic position. Suggesting the opposite unhelpfully suggests that an academic job is the only successful outcome and exacerbates the hard feelings.

Weekly Varia no. 187, 06/21/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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I spent the last few days taking in culture in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of that culture just involved the sights and sounds of a World Cup host city. We didn’t attend any World Cup events, let alone a game, but our hotel downtown was filled with fans, mostly from Ecuador, which was fun. Most of the culture was of a more high-brow sort. A few months ago I offered to take my wife to the symphony for her birthday, which actually meant a more involved trip to the city that culminated in the concert. I hadn’t accounted for the trip relative to the World Cup or its related costs when I made the offer, but I’m a man of my word and so away we went.

On Friday we spent the afternoon at the Kansas City Zoo, mostly wandering around the newly-renovated Africa sections. There is always something artificial about zoos and their enclosures, but one of the things I like about this one is that the enclosures always seem big enough for the animals. The business model requires the animals to be on display, but there are multiple ways to achieve this outcome. Some zoos seem to constrict the size of enclosures, forcing the animals to stay close to the spectators. Others, like Kansas City, keep the enclosures large, often making them longer than they are wide, or making the path snake around to both sides of the enclosure. These choices offer a nice balance of sight lines (the giraffe viewing deck puts you just above their head level, for instance, while erring on the side of comfort for the animals.

Saturday, then, offered a day of culture.

That morning we headed to the Nelson Atkins Museum for a few hours, spending most of that time at an exhibit about Alphonse Mucha, a prominent figure in the Art Nouveau movement, that explored his work, his inspirations, and how his distinctive style went on to influence both iconic band posters from the 1960s and 1970s and generations of manga and comic book artists. The museum also had a smaller gallery dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt, whose stage productions (including a Hamlet, in which she starred in the titular role) gave him one of his big breaks as an artist.

Finally, that evening, went to the symphony. The first half of the show featured three pieces, a Suite from a Concerto for Orchestra by Joan Tower, Concerto in D Minor in One Movement by Florence Price, featuring Michelle Caan on piano, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I can appreciate the skill required to play Rhapsody in Blue, but it is not my favorite piece. The other two I really liked, though, and the Tower Concerto featured a percussionist moving in rapid succession between glockenspiel, xylophone, bells, gong, triangle, and tom-tom while wielding up to four mallets at a time, which was a hypnotic dance. After the intermission they closed with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, op. 95, a.k.a. “From the New World.” This is one of my favorite symphonies and one that I sometimes put on while I work, but I have never seen it performed live. The cool thing about seeing the symphony perform beyond simply the joy of appreciating the work of world-class musicians is getting to see who is doing what, when during a performance. In this symphony, for instance, Dvořák does some cool things with strings and french horn, but it is one thing to hear the piece in your ears and another to hear it while also seeing how the action ripples across the symphony. You can also see stillness. I spent a significant part of the performance wanting to corner to the baritone horn player to ask what he thought of this piece. He spent most of the performance just sitting there, his horn resting beside him, and only picked it up to play a few notes a few times, usually for just a couple of measures. And so I was curious. Is this a piece he likes, for which he gets a front row seat to the performance? Is it an easy night? Or is the inactivity torturous, a constant challenge to be ready for those few chances to do anything? He didn’t show boredom and hit his parts, to be clear, but I was wanted to know.

I won’t recount everything we ate on this trip because that would become tedious, but there were a few highlights. Baba’s Pantry has gotten some good press recently, and with good reason. I had a falafel sandwich with a spicy pickled vegetable condiment. I also recommend the Frenchie at Seven Swans Creperie, which comes with a generous helping of caramelized onions and gruyere.

Kansas City this time of year can be painfully hot, but we had great summer weather—about 80 degrees and partly cloudy—and a great weekend. Now, back to work.

  • One year ago: Life happened and I had to put work on hold for a few days.
  • Two years ago: I took up running yet again and hoped that I could make the transition from being someone who runs to being a runner (spoiler: I got hurt again about a week later).
  • Three years ago: I reflected on being a time-bound American attending a conference that operated on Italian time.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect this week featured an interview about classical reception Ibero-America, as well as its usual goodies.
  • Javal Coleman wrote an interesting piece for the SCS Blog that explores the experience of growing up fatherless in the United States, becoming a father himself, and the legalities of fathers and fatherlessness in Roman Law. My experiences diverge with Coleman’s nearly as far as possible, but this is nevertheless an study in how the legal terms that people often use to describe the social world of Rome hide amore human experience that we can start to approach through human emotions and literature.
  • Bret Devereaux continues his series about premodern armies for prospective world builders, working on the theme that premodern armies follow from other social structures—and from the administrative limits of a premodern state. Analysis of the early medieval period of the sort that Jon Del Isola does here with Arnulf and his relationships with local elites is a fitting pair with that discussion.
  • Neville Morley had a worthwhile response to an odd Karen Kelsky SubStack post. Kelsky asserts that external validation (specifically the prestige-type from search committees, tenure committees, editors, grant committees) is an addiction for academics that prevents them from moving on. The issue of identity, as Morley points out, is real, but there are a raft of other challenges that cause people to become “stuck” in this job. While I do think that there is a sort of person whose identity is wrapped up in the prestige economy, but it is almost unrecognizable to my own situation. I have had my share of publications and conference presentations, but I have worked in jobs where fellowships are mostly not an option if I want to keep my position and where promotion is not a possibility at all. I get satisfaction working with good editors and reviewers, but I wouldn’t call my relationship with either them or with grant/fellowship/job committees a source of emotional survival. I’m “in” academia still because I was lucky enough to land a job before circumstances forced me to look elsewhere, and circumstances haven’t (yet) required me to figure out some other way to make a living in a country where full-time work is practically a prerequisite for healthcare. That’s it. As for the issue of identities, I also think that casting these as a binary—you are, or you aren’t; you’re in or you’re out—makes the the problem worse.
  • Bill Caraher rediscovered his photographic inspiration, in part by thinking of textbook-type images of statues.
  • Leah Reich returned to the story of “Add Yours” on Instagram. This installment focuses on the root problem that her team was trying to address, namely that Instagram needed people to keep posting, but the platform, its aesthetic, and its algorithm were all creating problems with engagement because “average” users were getting drowned out. This was a problem because IG would cease to be a great platform for advertising if users stopped going there. I’m invested in this series in part because I like process stories, but I also think that there is a moral in the moving pieces here for a wider range of contexts where there is a gap between what organizers (companies, teachers, etc) create and how users experience those systems.
  • Abigail Nussbaum followed the ring south in the next installment of her Tolkien reread. She puts the Caradhras arc in comparison to Tom Bombadil in that it is another false start for the adventure of the sort that few fantasy authors would dare attempt even though it both undergirds character motivations and shows the reader that the world moves beyond the events of the war. This was one of the beats I had in mind when I described the world itself as a character (or a set of supporting characters) in the books.
  • Album of the Week:
    • Sunny War, Armageddon in a Summer Dress (2025)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Kim Bowes, Surviving Rome (Princeton University Press, 2025)
    • Shannon Chakraborty, The Tapestry of Fate (2026)
  • Weekly Watch List:
    • Last Week Tonight (HBO)
    • Top Chef (Bravo)
    • Widow’s Bay (Apple)
    • World Cup!
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Weekly Varia no. 186, 06/14/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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I am back from AP Reading and starting to settle into my summer routine, such as it is this year. That process has been taking longer than I would like and I am still finding my footing amid additional demands on my time such that I have yet to spend more than a few minutes doing research since the end of the semester. I have written a bit on the blog, worked a bit on my upcoming courses, done a bunch of logistical admin, housework, and reading (albeit mostly not for professional reasons), but the sustained time and energy for research has been in short supply. I am hopeful that this will change going forward, but I also have to spend the next few weeks finishing prep for my summer class and supervising internships in my new campus role, which means that my schedule will remain both busy and irregular at least through the end of this month.

While work, and my never-ending quest for balance in my various obligations, will continue to take center stage for the coming weeks, it has been a great month for sports watching. I was disappointed with the outcome of the NBA Finals (I’ve been a Spurs fan since they drafted Tim Duncan), but it was a tremendous series to watch and I’m at least validated in my minority opinion going into it that the series wouldn’t just be a coronation of the Western Conference champion. If nothing else, I’m still scarred from these Nova Knicks in the 2018 NCAA tournament and so have a healthy respect for Brunson (who also happens to seem like a decent person). I also generally root against New York teams on principle, but this was a good story and I’m happy for all the Knicks fans, including my roommate at AP Reading this year. And then the World Cup started, kicking off one of the handful of months every few years (along with the women’s World Cup) when I become a regular watcher of this sport. The US team is even pretty good this year, and I am enjoying its embodiment of birthright citizenship and its Russell Crowe lookalike manager. Whether this US team is good enough to challenge the top teams in the world is above my pay grade, but they were certainly more fun to watch than any of the teams I have watched in past World Cups, That alone makes the tournament more interesting.

  • One year ago: I was at AP reading, trying to work on an abstract, and had a family tragedy.
  • Two years ago: I lamented the conveniences brought to us by sports betting.
  • Three years ago: I revised my opinion of Athens.

This Week’s Varia

  • Gordon Wood died last week at 92 after being struck by a car(!). I took very little US History in college, let alone graduate school, and I have never read any of Wood’s work, but I understand from my friends in that field that this was one of the titans you had to grapple with at some point if you worked on the founding of this country. Andy Craig did a nice job articulating that importance.
  • Neville Morley also wrote an in memoriam, for Rose McKitterick, one of his teachers. I took more medieval history than I did US History, but I was mostly left to find my own way when it came to the early medieval period, so McKitterick is not someone whose work I was familiar with.
  • Liv Yarrow came across Etruscan dental appliances. I was on a search committee this year for which one candidate’s research focuses on dentures and dentistry in colonial America. As squeamish as the topic could be, it was also fascinating.
  • Auburn’s Board of Trustees dissolved the Faculty Senate and seized authority for curriculum, course offerings, and degree requirements. In addition to ending even a pretense of shared governance, this is an escalation in the political interference of education that threatens both academic freedom and the education of students at Auburn.
  • Jeanne Reames has some good notes on doing research, calibrated mostly for students and interested non-academics. You can do far, far worse than this post for getting some insight into how scholars do their work.
  • Bret Devereaux started a new collection, a primer of Pre-Modern armies that he is pitching at people interested in world building. The first installment focuses on the different motivations that underpinned why preindustrial armies fight, tying the motivations to different types of social and political organization and offering principles that can be applied in different levels when designing something fresh. The second installment explores mobilization in the absences of the modern administrative state.
  • I’m an intermittent reader of Erik Loomis’s “American Grave” series at LGM Blog, but I really liked this post about Stephen Vincent Benét who won a Pulitzer for his poem John Brown’s Body and the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” before dying at the age of 44.
  • Back in 2019 I shared Robin Sloan’s novel Sourdough with my brother who both bakes and worked in the San Francisco-area tech world. I thought Sloan’s depiction of a corporate culture that encourages workers to eat nutritional gloop for “efficiency” a little over the top, but he assured me that it is one of the more realistic features of the book, which also includes a robot arm to help prepare the dough. Anyway, flash forward to this year when Marc Lore bragged that his food robots can make 500 burrito bowls an hour, where a human worker can only make 45 and makes more errors. He specifies burrito bowls for a reason, though, since this “robot” discharges specific amounts of ingredients into a bowl rotating below it because robots are not (yet) able to perform the nuanced movements to prepare food any other way. Good for Lore that the efficiency argument has spread out from Silicon Valley and people have been primed to eat all food in bowl form.
  • The latest installment in Abigail Nussbaum’s Great Tolkien Reread covers a variety of topics in in the back half of the Council of Elrond, including issues of logistics and the series’s catholic worldview. She also posted an addendum about the art of Cor Blok, of whom I am also a fan.
  • Nussbaum also wrote a post that calls Hamnet fanciful nonsense. She says of the essay that it involves “relentlessly grind away at a topic that no reasonable person could possibly care about,” but I often find those are my favorite pieces of writing.
  • John Scalzi begs you not to use AI text in your business communication. I get fewer of these inquires, but I second his plea.
  • Amanda Mull in Bloomberg explored the contours of the World Cup stadiums, focusing particularly on how the exclusive luxury suites in newer stadiums are often in corners with bad sight lines that make them bad places to watch the game, while the nosebleeds actually let you take in the event. Access and status belong to the former, but the game belongs to the latter. I mostly watch sports from my home, but I’ve been toying with trying to see events live more frequently and thinking about how the experience has likely changed dramatically since the last time I went to one before the pandemic.
  • PokemonGo players spent years mapping geospatial data in the course of gameplay and now the company that owns that data is partnering with a military intelligence firm and planning to use it to train drone navigation. Because every trove of data these days is either being used for AI, nefarious military purposes, or both.
  • Album of the Week:
    • Old Crow Medicine Show, Union Made (2026)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy in Hollywood (Princeton University Press, 2025)
    • Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold, trans. Lawrence Venuti (1940; 2023)
    • Martha Wells, Network Effect, read by Kevin R. Free (2020)
  • Weekly Watch List:
    • Top Chef (Bravo)
    • Widow’s Bay (Apple)
    • Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026)
    • The Return (2024)
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Fragments of the Ring

Posted on by Josh Nudell
Cor Blok's image for the Council of Elrond.

Reading the first installments of Abigail Nussbaum’s great Tolkien reread this year made me realize that I couldn’t remember the last time I read this series that was so foundational to my formation as a reader. I read through the four core books multiple times before the age of twenty, read The Silmarillion in full twice, and have a copy of The Children of Hurin that came out when I was in high school. But all of these reads took place in a phase of my life when rereading was my norm, before I realized just how many books were out there waiting to be read. I still remember the stories, but, by my best guess, it has been close to twenty years since I last read more than a chapter or two of Tolkien. It was high time to revisit the series, and so over the past few months I listened to the edition of the audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. The experience only renewed my appreciation for the series.

I have neither the time, nor the expertise, nor an interest in competing with Nussbaum’s Tolkien Reread, which I continue to devour eagerly, but I thought I would add to the wider discussion.

Story time and story structure. Tolkien’s style can be off-putting for modern readers. Nussbaum observed that Tolkien’s Shire stories resemble Jane Austen’s critique of English gentry and a friend responded to being told that I was rereading these books by quipping that Tolkien never met a tree he didn’t want to describe at length. All of this is true. Tolkien’s books also wander, because there is always time to tell a story or sing a song. Or to tell a story and sing a song. Lyrics on the page do little for me as a reader and I have a bad habit of skipping them, which was not possible on an audiobook. I will confess that these songs are still not my favorite bits of the book, but they are thematically relevant and, I think, are important to Tolkien’s understanding of narrative pace. Indeed, Mordor is the one section of the story where stories fail. One might think that Sam telling a story of the Shire in happier days might help carry Frodo through the darkness given narrative rules of Tolkien’s world, but that also makes their absence stand out more starkly.

Despite a reputation for dragging, there is an intentionality and style to the pace. The Hobbit, for instance, follows a deliberate hero’s journey with Bilbo coming into his own when he kills his first spider in Mirkwood at almost exactly the 50% mark of the story. In The Fellowship of the Ring, it takes half the book for the hobbits to arrive in Rivendell, with the scene at the midpoint being Frodo turning to face the Nazgul at the river. In the latter book, moreover, the urgency of the quest is placed in tension with the pace at which it unfolds. This is an unusual choice that reminders me of the narrative of logic of epic poems like Beowulf (Tolkien’s speciality) and the Iliad that will use delay to build both the world and narrative tension. I have seen this from time to time in other speculative fiction, much of which takes its cues from Tolkien, but never so consistently as it appears here.

To this end, I think it is worth comparing the pace to both older, if not exactly contemporary, speculative fiction and Tolkien’s spiritual heirs. Lord of the Rings has not only a much stronger plot, but also much stronger characterization, when compared to the former. The latter, by contrast, often seem under a mandate not to linger too long lest they lose an audience incapable of focus.

Logistics. Another factor that slows Tolkien’s characters down is that the world has material dimensions. For all that one can critique Tolkien’s for his…creative…geomorphology (the science of plate tectonics was just becoming a consensus when Tolkien wrote), he imagines a world with meaningful dimensions. It takes time for characters to traverse Middle Earth, and they become worn down by the travel. They have to rest, and the need for breaks leaves time for stories. There are exceptions, of course, especially with ancient weapons that need no care, but these are more notable for the typical rules. These characters require sustenance and do not have an endless supply of ammunition, while one gets the sense that the landscape is alive with people and creatures.

The world as a character. One of the characters in these books is the world. Tolkien presents the world of Middle Earth as a living, ever-changing thing. Sometimes this is a figurative way of describing the historical evolution of the world, but, elsewhere, Tolkien seems to mean it more literally. Forests and mountains that have minds of their own, not as tools in the hands of an enemy but for their own purposes. Those forces can sometimes be turned as an obstacle for the characters, but the are just as apt to find characters objectionable for their own reasons that have nothing to do with the conflict between good and evil.

This facet of Tolkien’s world building is an extension of one of the best things about his writing, namely how he populates the world with memorable minor characters. Some of these are lordlings in their own right, whether Faramir son of Denethor or Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth, but not all of them. Beregond of the Citadel Guard at Minas Tirith, Háma, the Doorwarden of Meduseld, and Barliman Butterbur, the proprietor of the Prancing Pony at Bree, each get only a few scenes, but are given their due. In the latter case, moreover, the changes at Bree are delivered as the first sign of the changes to be found in the Shire. Few of these characters are women, of course, which means that we’re rarely given a rounded portrait of a complete society, but Tolkien gives texture to the world in other ways that include more minor characters, gradations in the world, and orc bands forced to converse in a common tongue because they brought together orcs from different bands who don’t share a common language. Tolkien’s heirs sometimes mistake a straight gender swap for genuine progress in gender representation, as Ursula Le Guin noted in the commentary to one of the Earthsea books, but they have nevertheless made strides in those demographic categories while often going backward in terms of world building—the feature of modern fantasy that owes the most to his model.

Wisdom. The recurring theme that kept jumping out to me on this reread was the tension between wisdom and people who think themselves wise. Tolkien characters constantly talk about wisdom, talk about characters who are wise, and wisdom guiding various actions. Wisdom is often associated with particular characters (Gandalf, Elrond, Aragorn, Samwise Gamgee), but it is a favored conceit that that his characters return to when debating actions. It is also something repeatedly mentioned in the context of characters making terrible mistakes. Not everyone can be wise all the time, but the characters making the worst mistakes generally do so thinking themselves wise. Tolkien uses this binary so simplistically at times that it almost erases more complex decision making processes and I would be tempted to write it off except that there is a generation of “fans” of these books steering the fate of this country who can’t grok what makes someone wise. In other words, Tolkien might have struck closer to the truth than even he could have known with this theme.

Tolkien’s wise characters also repeatedly remind both the reader that being a shield to a society is only as valuable as the society behind it. The protectors make sacrifices to protect the Shire, for instance, or to make it possible for others to enjoy art and beauty, but it is because art, beauty, and the Shire are worth making sacrifices. Peace and pleasure are goals, and not something to be resented, let alone something that requires one to impoverish for the glory of the “protectors.”

Adaptations. I was never as much of a fan of the Lord of the Rings movies as the general consensus. They are both excellent and epic in many respects, and as good an adaptation as you are going to find. I just prefer the books. When I was in college, my complaints centered missed opportunities to pay tribute to the source material. I skipped past the obvious deviations (Elves at Helm’s Deep) and instead complained about Boromir’s burial not including the weapons of the orcs he slew. I am actually still surprised at the number of minor details that would have been nods to the book readers without requiring any revisions to the script (e.g. a banner for Prince Imrahil at the Battle of Morannon; the Argonath having axes the way they should), but I have changed my tune on the overall project of adaptation. That is, I think that the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films are successful because of how aggressively they adapted the source material.

Let me unpack this idea. As part of my reread project I watched each film close after rereading the respective book, using the internet’s favorite Extended Edition for each one. On balance, these are well-cast, visually impressive films that have great deference to their source material. I continue to have complaints about specific choices that Jackson &co. made for the adaptations, some stemming from what they put on screen and some that they didn’t. Why are there elves in Helm’s Deep, for instance, but also why does Treebeard have to be tricked into seeing what Saruman did to his forest? I also think The Scouring of the Shire is an essential part of the story on both a character and narrative level, making its absence a glaring issue for the larger meaning of LotR, and substituting Arwen from Glorfindel as a token toward gender representation both steals one of Frodo’s most important character beats (his defiance of the Nazgul as he arrives at Rivendell) and doesn’t get paid off by having Arwen do anything because they chose not to have the sons (or maybe daughter) of Elrond join Aragorn before traversing the Paths of the Dead. I could go on. But for all of these complaints, the adaptations mostly work, streamlining what could be a wandering story that unfolds across months and years into one that retains the urgency of the quest in a language that is legible in the medium of film. To this end, I also think the theatrical cuts are the stronger versions. Some of the extended material is cool, but the extended editions were also baggier and tended to drag in the way that people accuse the books of doing. Not as egregiously as Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films that seem to show every scene mentioned in the book and legendarium and have wildly unbalanced pacing as a result, but enough that I don’t find the benefits of the extended material worth the costs.

Where do you come down on Lord of the Rings?

Weekly Varia no. 185, 06/07/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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A short post this week because I have been in Louisville scoring AP exams this week. Between socializing a bit while watching the NBA finals (my roommate for the week is a Knicks die-hard, and I’m a Spurs fan as much as I have any team affiliation for the NBA), getting up early to run along the Ohio River, and wanting to explore a new city I haven’t given myself much downtime to write. The fact that most establishments in this town close at 5pm—or earlier: I saw a “coffee and bourbon cafe” that closes at 10:30am—has limited my perambulations somewhat, but I have enjoyed my time to this point.

Last night I went to Merle’s Whiskey Kitchen, which had a good burger, good fries, and bourbon, plus some live blues music. I was sitting a little too close to the stage for ear health and so left after about 45 minutes (I had finished my meal before the music started), but it was a good time. The night before that, I made reservations at the Mayan Cafe, a farm to table Mexican establishment that specializes in Yucatan cuisine. I eschewed guacamole for that reason and instead had Sikil Pak, a dip made from pumpkin seeds, as well as an excellent manhattan and mushroom enchiladas on fresh corn tortillas. The only other two meals I have eaten out so far have been grabbing a bagel one morning at Barry’s Bagel and a pizza at Country Boy Brewing in Falls City Market. The bagel was more solid than exceptional, but it had more chew than your typical chain bagel and I was happy with both the variety and quality of the cream cheese. I came across the pizza from a post online that called it wood-fired, but it turned out to be a rectangle that was somewhat more pizza-ish than your usual flatbread and less distinctive than a Sicilian or Detroit style pie. Not bad, and a fine accompaniment for a pint, but also not destination eating.

I have a few more days in Louisville and hope to sample at least one of the distilleries before leaving town and maybe another dining establishment or two, depending on what I can fit in around my work schedule.

In any case, I’ll be back to a more regular writing schedule later this week.

  • One year ago: I joked that my summer break was over (and added these years ago lookbacks).
  • Two years ago: I stayed up too late playing Civilization VI and mused about the difference between losing track of time in different activities.
  • Three years ago: I sang the praises of Kansas City.

This week’s varia:

  • I’m all for novelty yeast, in general, but not using yeast found in the gut of a man dead for five thousand years to make bread. That it is possible isn’t a surprise, but it seems wildly disrespectful to the dead.
  • Bret Devereaux wrote for The Bulwark this week about the right wing online discourse complaining about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. In particular, he explores why these commentators require such a singular, stunted version of the story and cannot deal with a genre that from its inception trafficked in multiplicity. In Devereaux’s interpretation, one I agree with, it is the very obviousness of the diversity of these ancient societies that provokes an existential anxiety and thus the urge to assert the singularity of their version.
  • Leah Reich used her newsletter this week to talk about her job as a user researcher at Instagram, focusing primarily on how management layers limit innovation and the need to “dick around” when trying to come up with something new. I have a healthy respect for institutions and a certain amount of bureaucratic organization, but I also think this observation is more broadly applicable. Micromanagement and bureaucratic systems that constrain the autonomy of workers quickly lead to stagnation.
  • I knew Raul Pacheco-Vega from the internet, where we interacted a few times about writing process and writing instruction. He was nothing less than generous in his responses. I watched from afar, but with consternation, as he dealt with health issues stemming from overwork, and it was that observation that gave me pause when I suffered from a more minor form of the same. I was saddened to hear that he passed away this week.
  • Album of the Week: Sunny War, Anarchist Gospel (2023)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Patrick O’Brian, Letter of Marque (1988)
    • Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance, read by Candida Gubbins (2025)
  • Weekly Watch List
    • Sports! (I left for AP on Monday and haven’t had time to watch any scripted media)
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Clark Memorial Bridge over the Ohio River at Dawn
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St. John United Church
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A sword-wielding winged pig and a cannon.

May Reading Notes

Posted on by Josh Nudell
Eight books in a stack, from bottom to top: Between Two Rivers, The New Roman Empire, Fulvia, All Consuming, All That We See or Seem, A Map for the Missing, The Tusks of Extinction, Rose/House

This May was somewhat more hectic than usual but I managed to read at least a little bit every day and have finished three books from this year’s summer reading list, as well as starting to ramp up my pace on reading academic titles. Those goals are again interrupted this week (as is my writing for the blog) because I’m at AP Rating, but this was a good start to the summer that hopefully bodes well for the coming weeks.

You can find my April reading notes here and trace the series back from there.

Professional Reading

  • Giulia Icardi, Affirmer sa puissance par la mer: La rivalité pour l’hégémonie en Grèce dans la première moitié du IVe siécle avant J.-C. (MoM Éditions, 2024). I don’t usually include works in foreign languages in this list, mostly because it is rare that I sit down to read them start to finish. I use scholarship in languages in other languages for my research, but I do so strategically. Introductions, specific chapters, and articles, but rarely entire books. A few months ago, however, I received the invitation to review this title from a journal on the European continent and decided that the book looked interesting (it had been on my radar for a while) and the academic challenge sufficiently rewarding to take it on. The book wasn’t quite what I expected—more an assessment of naval infrastructure in Laconia and Boeotia than a wider exploration of maritime hegemony in the fourth century Aegean—but I appreciated the careful discussion of the institutional features and geography. Reading the book took longer than I had hoped, but that was more a feature of a stretch of the year that didn’t give me a lot of time to focus on it than anything other than finishing the semester.
  • Adrian Goldsworthy, Rome and Persia: The Seven Hundred Year Rivalry (Basic Books, 2023). A narrative history of the conflict between Rome and Persia, and I was underwhelmed. I have some knotted thoughts about narrative history coming out of this book that I hope to write about at some point, but I also found something unsatisfactory about the implication that Rome and Persia were two constant poles that defined a region for nearly a millennium. It isn’t that Goldsworthy is unaware that the Persian dynasty changed midway through that period or that both states had concerns beyond what the other was doing and he touches on these throughout, but it often seemed like too much to handle satisfactorily and too limiting a focus when the argument is little more than the observation that the presence of the other dictated rivalry.
  • Tara Mulder, A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2026). Near the end of this book Mulder sums up the communis opinio of childbirth in ancient Rome and, by extension, the ancient Mediterranean more broadly, as being that it “was deadly and terrifying.” Childbirth certainly had its risks, but this description is also the result of imagining women isolated in a patriarchal world and projecting modern medical practices backward into the ancient world. A significant portion of Mulder’s “feminist history” is dedicated to revealing the cultural world of giving birth, locating the practices within the contemporary medical thinking (from mostly male doctors, but also from midwives), as well as within a world of other women (free and enslaved) and within a world that was both more callous around bodily autonomy and that expected communities to provide support than is sometimes the case today. Some of the practices in the ancient world would horrify medical practitioners today, but Mulder makes the case that some of these are different rather than worse, or else the result of fewer surgical tools. In the most recent Pasts Imperfect Mulder highlighted a growing recent bibliography on childbirth in the ancient world, as well as exploring her use of “critical fabulation” to imagine full lives for women we know very little about. These are both useful components, as is the basic argument at work here, but I also want to praise Mulder for how she translates the often obtuse ancient medical texts into something accessible to most readers. I wrote in a short review of this book that the material won’t be for everyone since it addresses technical and sometimes graphic descriptions of bodily functions, but it is also a rich look at an activity that defined the lives of roughly half of adults in the ancient world and typically gets only a few lines in textbooks.
  • Jane Draycott, Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale University Press, 2025). The author of Cleopatra’s Daughter, Draycott here offers another accessible biography of a woman from ancient Rome (popular here is not a dig at Draycott, who flags Celia Schwartz’s academic biography of Fulvia in her acknowledgements and largely takes more time to contextualize the world in which Fulvia lived). Like with Cleopatra Selene, what Draycott does very well is to breathe life into a time and place. Here, she applies a touch of prospography to locate Fulvia within the nexus of relationships in a tumultuous time of Roman history, arguing that she was every bit the political force that her husbands were. I found the portrait approachable and am leaning toward using it as an assigned next when I teach Roman history next spring.
  • Kathleen Sheppard, Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age (MacMillan, 2024). I first encountered Sheppard when she appeared on the Historians at the Movies Podcast (now Reckoning with Jason Herbert), talking about archaeology and Ancient Egypt in films. Egyptology is a bit of a blind spot for my in my ancient history reading, but I’ve been trying to incorporate more archaeological material into my classes and this summer I’m teaching an ancient world in films course, which gave me an excuse to engage with her work. Women in the Valley of the Kings offers a series of biographical profiles of women who were important to the development of archaeology in Egypt, whether as archaeologists themselves, as promoters and fundraisers, or as a teachers. As is often the case with books of this type, Egyptology was just one part of their lives, which lets Sheppard touch on their family stories, their involvement with suffrage movements, and their hetero- and homosexual romantic relationships while making the simple argument that they cannot be erased from this intellectual project. The chapters are easy enough to read and I’m going to assign sections in class, but I suspect that I would have been more satisfied with Sheppard’s academic work on similar topics. I also recognize that I’m the primary audience for popular histories. I like and appreciate popular histories as both a teacher and a writer—three of the five five books in this category for May belong to the genre, and I’m midway through another that will appear on my reading list next month—I just sometimes get frustrated with their limitations.

Unprofessional Pleasure Reading

  • Boualem Sansal, 2084: The End of the World, trans. Alison Anderson (2017). Like Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation, this novel represents a North African response to a classic of European literature. Where The Mersault Investigation looks back at the French colonial period, however, Sansal projects forward into a totalitarian future. Abistan, founded in 2084 by Abi the Delegate of the god Yölah, comprises the entire world. They defeated Angsoc in The Great Holy War, after which Abi gifted the people with Abilang and created The Apparatus that governs society. Everyone must demonstrate their morality and their fidelity to Yölah, with criminals and non-believers punished with torture and death. Nothing before the year of foundation is allowed to exist. 2084 opens with the protagonist Ati in a sanatarium in the mountains recovering from tuberculosis, followed by his return journey to Qodsabad on which he meets Nas, an archaeologist whose work promises to reveal a new pilgrimage site related to Abi’s early life. Ati settles back into his life, but he can’t forget the doubts that have started to creep into his mind about the rules of his society. Hoping that Nas’s work will provide answers, Ati sets out to locate him and ends up with the dangerous knowledge that the world is more complicated than he had been taught. For me, 2084 works because of its intertextual dialogue with 1984. I wasn’t as moved by Ati the way I was with Winston Smith the first time I read 1984 and the plot is largely a vehicle to explore the setting, but Sansal achieved something special with the juxtaposition of the settings. Orwell condemned secular totalitarianism, but Sansal shows how that portrait has more than a few of the trappings of religion, just as religion can use a manipulated language to reinforce its demand for blind compliance. I’m not sure that this intertext is enough to demand reading on its own, especially given the relative weakness of characterization, but I was glad to have read it given how much I admire its interlocutor.
  • Hiromi Kawakami, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, trans. Asa Yoneda (2016). Kawakami imagines a future in which people struggle to survive and breed in this collection of interlinked stories. Each story centers one or more lineages that has taken different adaptations, whether cloning people in a factory where their genes are spliced with animals or telepathic powers. Much of the education in this world is accomplished by Mothers, a partly cloned, partly synthetic hybrid, and Watchers who survive generations through cloning. There is a loose plot about how this world develops made possible by the loose interconnections between episodes, but it is also a book that left me with impressions and feelings of sadness and beauty more than one that is memorable for its narrative.
  • Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lords of Uncreation (2023). The third book in Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture trilogy, which explores a far-distant future where humanity has colonized the stars, developed a Pathenogenic race of warrior women, and is facing an existential threat from The Architects, a massive alien race that appears suddenly out of Unspace and remakes entire worlds. Except that Idris Telemmier, one of the few intermediaries left from the original class of augmented people who can navigate ships through Unspace, believes that they are forced into these atrocities by an even more ancient race that is manipulating them from a place at the center of the universe. This leaves Idris trying to drag events there even everyone else is busy trying to kill architects or squabble for power over whatever piece of civilization(s) they expect will remain. Most of the plot action centers those squabbles and Tchaikvosky has a rich imagination for how these societies function, but Idris’s arc also reveals this to be an inversion a story like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Rather than journeying into the stars in search of a divine creator, Idris works ever further down in search of the malevolent beings that set the Architects against humanity, and with a suitably mythological explanation.
  • Robin Hobb, Fool’s Errand (2001). I read the first two trilogies sent in this world a decade ago but picked up this one, the first in her Tawny Man Trilogy in a Kindle sale last year. The book opens roughly fifteen years after the events of the Farseer Trilogy when FitzChivalry helped defeat both the Red Ship Raiders and Regal, his wicked uncle, placing Kettricken on the throne of the Six Duchies and raising her son Dutiful, the biological son of Fitz and the spiritual son of her husband Verity (because magic). Fitz and his world Nighteyes have been living in a cabin under the name Tom Badgerlock, raising an orphan, growing a garden, and severing most of the ties to his old life. But this will not be his fate. The Fool (now Lord Golden) calls him the Catalyst, a generational figure who can change the course of history, and when Dutiful disappears amid a spate of pogroms agains the Witted (people who bond with animals) he is summoned to find him. The gap between reading the earlier books and this one meant that I spent the first hundred pages or so reorienting to the world and trying to remember who the characters were, largely being frustrated with some of Hobb’s antiquated tendencies in writing this world, but then I settled in and came to again appreciate the sensitivity with which she writes characters. I’ll probably finish this trilogy at some point.
  • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, narr. Simon Vance (1823). Check another one off my list of classic English novels. I was in part inspired to read this one because of the recent Del Toro adaptation, and I was surprised to learn how much his plot changes owe still to the film tradition rather than following Shelley’s original—not that I particularly want that. More than anything, three points stood out to me from this book. One: how early in the book Frankenstein awakens the creation. Two: how much this is a book about the natural science of its time, whether in the form of Victor Frankenstein’s experiments, or in how the creature has its intellectual awakening. Three: how Shelley rejects giving Frankenstein a tortured backstory. He’s a tortured scientist striving against death itself and his family is just…decent. His parents are upstanding people, his father keeps bailing him out of financial and legal straights, and most of the ills that come to them are his fault. This is particularly funny if, as I did, you come away thinking that the character Frankenstein is loosely modeled on her husband Percy (I saw Lord Byron in the character Robert Walton).
  • Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, narr. Susan Bennett (2016). This is a classic writing book that preaches a lot of now-standard writing advice regarding revision (“Shitty first drafts” is a classic), persistence, and practice, so I’ve been meaning to read it for a while. I don’t disagree with much of what Lamott wrote and she’s writer with a certain style of her own, but I mostly found myself frustrated with the book. Some of this is my usual frustration with writing guides that are primarily concerned with fiction writing, but it was also that she affects a tone filled with folksy humor that is also suffused with an ambient, affable, but palpably present Christianity. Not the hard-edged evangelicalism of contemporary discourse, but a type from decades past that seems quaint now. This religiosity doesn’t affect the advice, but she frequently wove the advice into personal anecdotes that often had a religious tint to them. I may scan “Shitty First Drafts” in case I want to share it with my students, but otherwise I came away thinking that I can get the same quality advice tailored to the writing I do without as much religiosity.
  • Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism, narr. Will Damron (2019). I read this book looking for an advice guide and found a manifesto. Like Newport’s other books, he centers a core idea (in this case, that touching grass can improve our quality of life) and then threads that together with anecdotes from historical examples and from his own life. In Digital Minimalism Newport argues that people need time when they can exist without the mediation of other people’s thoughts, whether those come in the form of phones, social media, books, audio books, podcasts, or, probably, music. In fact, I violated one of Newport’s tenets for Digital Minimalism by listening to the book in headphones, usually while walking my dog. In short, Digital Minimalism starts from the premise that people are not meant to be connected all the time and thus that missing out is not a bad thing because it allows us to put our attention on the most important things, whether “high value” hobbies of making things or concentrated attention on those around us. I’m not a Digital Minimalist by Newport’s definition and I had my share of frustrations with the book. It often reads like a fluffed up blog post filled with empty-yet-presecriptive ideas about how people should live their lives of the sort that populate a genre of internet efficiency culture. But I also think he’s not wrong and so have been finding my own path toward a more digitally constrained life.

Short Stories

None. I don’t track short stories rigorously unless they’re part of a collection, but since I’m making it a goal to read more of them this summer I thought I should add a section with brief descriptions and assessment.

Weekly Varia no. 184, 5/31/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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May is drawing to a close, which means summer is firmly underway. I have made steady progress on my summer goals—I submitted both reviews, finished three books from my summer reading list, and have only had one day on which I haven’t written since the semester ended—but it is also becoming clear that this will be a summer defined by routines interrupted. If my usual challenge with summers is the lack of a schedule, this year it is that I will need to adjust my schedule week by week until July, at which point I will be teaching again. These shifts will require nimbleness on my part, but my goals for the summer start with building daily habits, not completing them on any given schedule. Predictable routines are useful tools in this practice. Routines make it a little easier to start on days when there are other things going on. To push through distraction or disinterest until the habit takes over. But routines are also only an aid to building a discipline (as Bill Caraher talks about it in one of the links below), not the discipline itself. The latter is what actually matters.

  • One year ago: I spent a week reading student portfolios for the first time.
  • Two years ago: I reread That Noble Dream, a classic history of the historical profession.
  • Three years ago: I was in Kansas City for AP reading.

This week’s varia:

  • Pasts Imperfect featured an essay by Tara Mulder about her new book A Womb of One’s Own, a history of childbirth in ancient Rome, touching on both her argument, the value and danger of “critical fabulation” as a methodological tool, and other recent bibliography on the topic. I’ll be writing a bit about the book in my monthly book post because one of the places I review for assigned it to me. Spoiler: it is very good.
  • I learned that Owen Rees has a SubStack this week, through this post about Clearchus, who was a Spartan soldier during the Peloponnesian War and later mercenary commander who fought with Cyrus the Younger. Rees’s post is a relatively straightforward biography of the man in his times. It doesn’t surprise me that Rees has a SubStack given that he’s a prolific producer of content geared at making ancient history accessible to the general public and this project seems very much in that same vein.
  • John Del Isola used his latest post to tease out how interactions on social media flatten the understanding of the world because they “cannot tolerate incompleteness or uncertainty” that are necessary to understand when doing historical research. If an education should be about cultivating habits of mind, there are few things worse than getting trained by algorithm.
  • MIT announced that it is closing three of its four libraries, consolidating the physical collections and laying off research librarians. There has been a broad shift in library spaces since I was in college twenty years ago, with digital resources and multi-purpose spaces replacing physical stacks. What MIT is evidently doing is a more radical shift than is happening most places, but it is similarly over-responding to apparent usage patterns rather than trying to find ways to hold to facilitate that usage while also staying focus on their mission as repositories of knowledge. For much as I enjoy the convenience of digital materials, I have also found that they make some types of materials ironically harder to get access to when my home library doesn’t have (or can’t afford) a subscription. I can request physical books through the library consortium, but that process doesn’t work if every copy in the state is digital. This thought reminds me that I started drafting a post in praise of physical media last year that I may want to finish one of these days.
  • Paul Thomas had a nice reflection on the ethics of citation and why AI citations and summaries violate them. I like the way he talks about modeling behavior for his students. I have sometimes brought my own work to class to show students what it looks like, but I could probably do more to model the practices even more directly. Thomas also critiqued the grade inflation in a way that I largely agree with, namely that it is not unreasonable for students at academically high-achieving institutions to mostly receive As and Bs, and that their doing so is not representative of compromised standards. This is not to say that everyone will receive those grades, or even should receive those grades, but that high achieving students tend to perform well. I have come in recent years to believe that some aspects of the grade inflation panic are indicating real issues with education, but also that the focus on grades is a red herring that inhibits action on more substantive issues that do ask less of the students at various points in the educational system. Artificially limiting the number of As that get handed out will increase anxiety and competition without actually changing how much the students learn.
  • I have been somewhat amused that, after years of writing about why I believe AI is an existential problem for education and, by extension, for society at large because of what people imagine it does, I find myself on a moderate wing of the anti-AI spectrum. That is, I believe that there are modest uses of AI that can be useful, but also that we need to dismantle the political project pushing AI into every facet of everything. Not only will this shift mitigate further environment damage, but it is also a precondition for starting to undo the social and cultural harm that its reckless adoption is causing. Anyway, these thoughts brought to you by Marisa Kabas: “Hating AI is Good, actually,” which explores both the wave of boos for pro-AI speakers several recent AI scandals that include signs of an AI rebellion.
  • And yet, some in Silicon Valley dream of a “post-biological future” in which people can upload their consciousnesses and have virtual “children” whose life they would occupy as their own to outlive their physical body. Just think: you would get to have your own “mind [child]” that, as Amy Nogard, my writing partner on an AI project, put it when I shared this link, you coparent with an AI developer.
  • Bill Caraher unpacked his tiredness, noting that it risks slipping toward Live Journal confessional style writing. This is something I’ve worried about with the opening essays to these posts since being tired is easily the most common theme. I try to juxtapose that personal note with some observation about the nature of the academic calendar, some event I’ve been involved in, or something I’ve been thinking about, but the fact remains that they begin with the same refrain. In any case, Bill has plenty of reason to be tired, if ever anyone needs them, and his observations about those effects are worth reading.
  • Neville Morley had one of his twelve days in a year, and also inaugurated a more regular newsletter with this and that topic less related to academic material. I respect the shift in style, and note the terminology since he is one of several bloggers I follow who dedicates attention to changes in the form.
  • Danny Chau at The Ringer turned to poetry to describe how good Victor Wembanyama is at basketball. I have always been a fan of good basketball and so I became a Spurs fan in the late 1990s because of Tim Duncan. I have rediscovered a lot of that affection this year because of Wemby.
  • World Cup 2026 is set to kick off on June 11 and the US government, with a little help from FIFAs ticket pricing structure, seems intent on turning it into a fiasco even the usual standards of these international events. Hotel prices in host cities remain elevated despite the lack of reservations, cost and customs policies are keeping people away, and the latest report is that the Iranian team is being prohibited from staying in the US overnight despite playing all three of its scheduled games in the country. I am convinced that most people in this administration have exactly two goals: to enrich themselves and to break things (standing in the world, diplomatic relationships, institutions, etc, etc) so thoroughly that they can’t be repaired. To the extent that there is a third goal, it is to create the conditions where whomever tries to put those things back together will face such headwinds that the remaining electorate will be dissatisfied with the slow progress and give them another crack at goals (1) and (2).
  • Album of the Week:
    • Los Lobos, The Neighborhood (1990)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance, read by Candida Gubbins (2025)
  • Weekly Watch List:
    • Top Chef (Bravo)
    • For All Mankind, season 1 (Apple)
    • Eurovision finale
    • Monsoon Wedding (2001)
    • The Mummy (1932)
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Class Notes: Ancient World History at the Movies

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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The Private Life of Helen of Troy movie poster starring Maria Corda as Helen.

I will be spending July this year teaching a new summer class loosely modeled on a Medieval History Movies class that I once taught for a colleague on an emergency basis. The course is writing-enhanced and accelerated for a five-week summer session, which, when combined with an online, asynchronous modality calls for creativity in meeting the writing-enhanced rubric of “cognition, process, and product.”

I spent most of the spring semester developing how I wanted to run the class and the last few days tuning the structure, making decisions about which movies would make the cut, and sketching out assignments before I sit down to write the syllabus.

My tentative plan is to have the students collectively manage a WordPress blog as the primary course hub. Students will each write three (3) posts across five weeks and edit and publish three (3) posts from other students, giving them experience doing both types of writing work. The fallback option would be to have the students just submit three papers that have the same parameters other than editing, which would also then require a discussion board or something similar (see below). Everyone will go through this process in the first week of the course, before doing two of the four other weeks. Posts will be scheduled to run in a given week of the course, all readings and the film list will be available right from the beginning of the term, giving students the option of watching ahead to draft their posts.

I have run course blogs before, but not in about ten years, and not with an asynchronous class. Blogs have pros and cons, as with pretty much every course activity, but I have been curious about moving course activities away from the LMS and this seems like one potentially fruitful avenue for a small class since it can both foster more interaction and give a framework for discussions outside of a typical discussion board while giving students two types of writing experiences. In addition to writing and editing, students will be tasked with responding to their classmates and managing the comments on their posts for a significant portion of their participation grade. A smaller portion, as well as regular, sustained interaction will take place in a course Discord server with dedicated channels for each course unit, course feedback, and one for discussion about editing. As a summative assessment, students will complete a single long paper that asks the students to evaluate how the presentation of the ancient world has (or has not) changed from the earliest films in the course to the most recent, with the assignment guide available as soon as the course is.

One recurrent issue with online summer courses is the gap between how much work is supposed to be assigned (dictated by federal credit hour requirements) and how much work students think they ought to be doing. This course mostly accounts for the required time on task by the length of the films that that are assigned, and “watch big budget films, one per weekday” is a little less onerous a homework assignment than some, but I am also curating readings to help students with the analysis (and that will be a component of the blog rubric). Running this course asynchronously is made possible by streaming, but it also means that the students will likely need to rent most of the films, so I have chosen readings from both primary and secondary sources available online, through the university library, and a one or two scanned chapters rather than requiring them to purchase textbooks.

With those preliminaries out of the way, here is the preliminary final course outline with notes

Unit 0: Preliminaries and Orientation

The first few days of the term will not have any assigned films. Instead, the students will read the opening chapter form Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Designs on the Past and complete their first blog post, an analysis of movie posters and promotional materials from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. This will give the students a grounding in the range of films that existed that we are not watching that they can talk about in their final papers, as well as orienting them to the course blog.

Readings

Unit 1: Archaeology, Pseudo-Archaeology, and Egyptomania

I might have decided to include this unit specifically so that I could assign Stargate, but it grew into something more substantial than that and archaeology offers a useful lens to think about how we approach this ancient material. The real question was whether to put Cleopatra here or with Rome. I She’s here, mostly for course balance. Half the class will write and edit blog posts this week, with the other half as respondents.

Films

  • Cleopatra (1899), just a very short clip
  • The Mummy (1932)
  • The Mummy (1999) [Recommended but not required: The Mummy Returns]
  • Stargate (1994)
  • Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
  • Cleopatra (1963)

Readings

  • A chapter from Kathleen Sheppard, Women in the Valley of the Kings (tbd: Probably chapter 4 on Margaret Alice Murray)
  • José das Candeias Sales, “Theories on Pop Culture and Egyptology,” in How Pharaohs Became Media Stars
  • Eleanor Dobson, “Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy (1999): Modern Legacies of the Tutankhamun Excavations” in How Pharaohs Became Media Stars
  • Egyptian Hymn to Ra
  • Selection: The Book of the Dead
  • Selection: Plutarch, Antony

Unit 2: Greece Between Myth and History

This is the unit where I have the shortest list of movies and the longest list of readings, which makes since given that I’m a historian who works on Ancient Greece. The core tension I want to explore in this unit is how the popular imagination typically thinks about Greek myth rather than Greek history, with the result that myths get “historical” treatments and historical topics get mythological ones. This is why I’m not surprised to find two comic book movies in the list. Here, again, half the class will write and edit blog posts this week, with the other half as respondents.

Films

  • Troy (2004)
  • 300 Spartans (1962)
  • 300 (2006) [Not exactly recommended and definitely not required, but noted: 300: Rise of an Empire]
  • Hercules (2014)
  • Alexander (2004)
  • Extra Credit: The Odyssey (2026)

Readings

  • Selection: Herodotus’s History (introduction and Thermopylae)
  • Selection: Plutarch, Alexander
  • Selection: Xenophon, Spartan Constitution
  • Ruby Blondell, “Helen of Abercrombie and Fitch” in Helen of Troy in Hollywood
  • Kim Shahabuddin, “The Appearance of History: Robert’s Rossen’s Alexander the Great,” in Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander
  • Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “”Help me, Aphrodite!” Depicting the Royal Women of Persia in Alexander,” in Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander
  • Monica Cyrino, “How the Rock became Rockules,” in The Modern Hercules

Unit 3: Roman Republics and Empires

This unit has the greatest choice of films give or take mummy movies, so you’ll note that it has colonized several other categories. The challenge, I suspect, will lie in how to frame the discussion for each unit. In Egyptomania, for instance, I want to focus on Cleopatra qua Egyptian, rather than her relationship with Romans that so dominates the focus. Likewise, I thought the course balance worked better to put The Life of Brian here to think about Roman provinces rather than to put it in the final unit on religion where it would neatly slot in with the films about early Christianity. Placing the film here still keeps it in the course, and building connectivity across units. Toward the same end, I am mildly torn about whether to include Centurion (2010) as I do in this list as another “high empire; provinces; legions” film to contrast with Gladiator, or whether it would be better to assign the execrable The Last Legion (2007) to bridge with King Arthur. Half the class will once again write and edit, with the other half as respondents.

Films

  • Spartacus (1960)
  • The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
  • Gladiator (2000)
  • The Eagle (2011)
  • The Life of Brian (1979)

Readings

  • Historia Augusta Life of Commodus
  • Principle Ancient Sources on Spartacus
  • Guy Stiebel, “Romani Ite Domum: Expressions of Identity and Resistance in Judaea,” in Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s The Life of Brian
  • Joanna Paul, When it comes to ancient Rome, Hollywood sticks to the same tired old formula (in The Conversation)
  • Matthew Taylor, “Dreaming of Rome,” in Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition
  • Martin M. Winkler, ““Culturally Significant and Not Just Simple Entertainment”: History and the Marketing of Spartacus,” in Spartacus: Film and History

Unit 4: Religions, Ancient and Modern, at the Movies

The final unit will focus more or less directly on religion (okay, King Arthur is a bit of a stretch, but he Artorius mentions Pelagianism!). The readings for this section are the least fleshed out, in large part because I want this set to mostly be about the ancient material itself so that the students can juxtapose how the films project modern understandings into the post, but the evidence tends to be fragmentary and so will take a little more finessing, especially to include some material evidence. I considered assigning Gods of Egypt in this unit, which would require reading The Contendings of Horus and Seth and Isis’s special salad, but there are plenty of other films to include. [Addendum: I swapped Quo Vadis (1951) for The Egyptian (1954) on Tony Keen’s suggestion.]

Films

  • The Egyptian (1954)
  • Ben Hur (1959)
  • Prince of Egypt (1998)
  • Agora (2009)
  • King Arthur (2004)

Readings

  • Selection from Exodus
  • Selection from Bede (assuming I keep King Arthur)
  • The Tale of Sinuhe
  • Selection from sources about Hypatia
  • Tony Keen, The King of the who?

Summary Notes

Twenty films to watch across five weeks, with release dates spanning every decade between the 1930s and the 2010s except for the 1940s (excluding a theater excursion to see Nolan’s Odyssey, which will release in the third week of the course). No list can be exhaustive, and I can’t even pretend Some terrible films that failed at the box office, some bad ones that made a lot of money, and some genuine classics. I may trim the film list or make substitutions before publishing the syllabus, but I’m happy with the shape of the course. I made an executive decision early on to pick only theatrical releases mostly from Hollywood studios rather than episodes of TV and foreign films, mostly for the purpose of making it easier for the students to write their final papers. There are exclusions I regret like The Giant of Marathon (1959) or Sikander (1941), but I was able to find a thematic or topical doublet for pretty much every film.

The biggest work-in-progress is with the readings. In addition to picking the specific section anywhere I listed “selection,” there are a few soft spots in the list where I want to give more material for the students to think about without making the reading too substantial on top of the films. This may end up being some supplemental “recommended” readings that the writers can use each week in addition to the core required readings. I have a running list of ideas for what these readings might look like, but I’m always open to more suggestions.

Weekly Varia no. 183, 05/24/26

Posted on by Josh Nudell
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Rest remains elusive around these parts, at least in absolute terms. I spent most of the past week reading portfolio for my university and trying to squeeze time for two book reviews in around that obligation. I completed one on Friday and should be able to finish the other tomorrow or Tuesday to meet my deadline.

The portfolio project is in some ways tedious. It is a week spent reading artifacts students submitted as one of their graduation requirements—a process made all the more uncomfortable by the computer lab being frigid even by my standards. One person broke out a thermometer at one point, which revealed to us that it was 66 degrees Fahrenheit in the room, a touch colder than our unseasonably cold weather. One person brought a space heater.

Aside from the environmental conditions, the experience of reading portfolio can be exhausting. Some of the papers are excellent. Some are not. Some stand out mostly for being exceedingly long. But I also find the process to be eye-opening for me as a teacher because it is the rare insight into what happens in other disciplines around campus and a focused look at what it is the university prioritizes, with the latter being the point of the exercise. Basically, the portfolio serves as a self-study to determine whether graduating students are leaving their course of study having achieved to some level the outcome statements set by the university and whether the curriculum requirements are working. Our job reading portfolios is functionally to take the student inputs and code them to create a report to be delivered to relevant governance bodies who can decide whether changes need to be made. It is an imperfect and time-consuming system with people from many disciplines assessing work outside their areas of expertise (I read several statistics papers, but had to pass the math essay that had probably fewer than a hundred words amid pages of proofs on to someone else), but two years of doing this has given me a better sense of what happens elsewhere on campus, for good and for ill, than I have gotten at any point in my teaching career.

  • One year ago: I got serious about watching more movies.
  • Two years ago: I lamented that cozy coffee shops all close earlier than they used to and the contraction of publicish spaces without alcohol.
  • Three years ago: I briefly considered how many books I won’t read in my life.

This week’s varia:

  • Bret Devereaux concluded his Carthaginian army collection this week with an evaluation of odds and ends, such as how they fought. As usual, these series are a useful précis for studying these topics, especially in a case like this one where the sources are so weak.
  • One of Jeremiah McCall’s high school students did a neat media analysis of the Trojan War. McCall talks about the project here. I haven’t watched the whole video yet (I listen to a lot of podcasts but not many YouTube videos), but I always like to boost the work of projects like this.
  • Charles Kenneth Roberts responded to the news that the faculty at Harvard voted to cap the number of As they assign with a post arguing that grades are a poor measure of student accomplishment and noting that the grade anxiety creates barriers for student learning. I agree with all of this and like the idea of a system that expects most people to pass, but the problem remains that marking some number as exceptional would replicate the same inflationary pressures bumping into an imposed cap that traditional grade systems face now. One of the things I liked about specifications grading was that it made clear that when I assigned an A it meant that I was vouching that the students had achieved a benchmark on specific levels rather than achievement of a more nebulous sort. It didn’t matter how students met that mark, though. Some students cleared the bar on their first submission, others revised their work repeatedly until it passed muster, and both earned the same grade. At the same time, I took to flagging specific students in my own records as “excellent” performers in the class so that I could account for this in writing letters of recommendation because the absence of a percentile mark meant that this information was not immediately evident from the grade book. Roberts’s system would, at least in theory, make that internal mark visible.
  • For the second week in a row I find myself recommending a Brian Forbes column at The Ringer. This time he asks the pressing question “who’s to blame when an Ivy League president drives into his students?” It is a serious problem for the American higher education that so many of its senior leaders see their students not as burgeoning citizens seeking and education that will empower them as members of a free society and the professors as specialists in fields that will make that possible, but as revenue streams and costs both in need of disciplining.
  • I missed Sonja Drimmer’s blog post against AI policies from last month, but I heartily endorse it. By the terms she articulates my disclosure system is functionally a non-policy. I refuse to sanction any use, but I also refuse to police its use in my classes other than to customize my feedback to how the student produced the writing. As Drimmer writes here, institutions are sending mixed messages around AI and then expecting faculty to pick up the pieces. I’m going to invest the bulk of my energy in my students who show up looking to take advantage of the opportunities I’m offering them.
  • Peter Greene ran a test with ChatGPT “editing” the work a of gibberish generator, which does a good job articulating how little the source or intent of the input matters for how ChatGPT goes about reviewing and “correcting” a block of text.
  • The chorus of boos that greeted several clueless graduation speakers delivering remarks about a future where workers have been replaced by AI warmed my heart last week. I have seen several headlines on social media about companies starting to realize that that AI replacements aren’t actually cheaper than employees once the services started charging market rates (especially as the price of computing equipment and power are going up thanks to the war in Iran), though I haven’t been able to read any articles making that case explicitly with evidence.
  • At Vulture, Lane Brown wrote about manufactured virality behind social media marketing campaigns. In short, these involve two steps. First comes the clipping campaign that takes a clip of video or audio and uses bots to gin up the appearance of popularity. Then comes the narrative campaign that latches on the viral video to tell the audience how to think about it, counting on a time-starved audience to know who constitutes an authority opinion. Brown makes the case that these astroturfed campaigns both reflect and exacerbate an information ecosystem where people are left to rely on the wisdom of the crowds even as they propel us toward an even more artificial and isolated one mediated by AI.
  • Leah Reich dedicated this week’s newsletter to thinking about speed, timelines, and proposals, and the differences in these between tech and elsewhere. Her catalyst in this instance is a rejected proposal and while this essay pulls several related threads together I got hung up on the challenge of proposals, which is something I feel in my bones. I love coming up with ideas but hate writing proposals, and particularly struggle to articulate why anyone should care about a project until I’m done and can see the implications. This is a problem in a field where abstracts are often expected to convey the conclusions and significance before you’ve finished the research.
  • Lindsey Adler wrote an excellent profile of Amy Wallace, usually better known as David Foster Wallace’s sister, at Defector. The piece explores their relationship growing up, their shared love of language, and her presence in his work, as well as the broaching the topic of his suicide. I’m not usually one to read the comments, but I recommend doing so in this instance because some of the conversation centers a prominent omission from the essay, namely the accusations that DFW abused his girlfriend Mary Karr and other women. I haven’t read anything by Wallace in close to a decade, but went through a phase in graduate school where I read all of his essay collections, two collections of stories, and two novels, and came away with an intense admiration for his writing. Adler does a nice job of grounding that distinctive voice and style within his family upbringing.
  • Abigail Nussbaum’s Great Tolkien Reread reached the Council of Elrond, focusing for the first of two posts of the chapter on the personal histories of the people involved. In particular, she draws out the story of the Gandalf’s imprisonment in Isengard and his naked assertion that in pursuing new knowledge Saruman has left the path of wisdom—a foundational ideological proposition in these books that Nussbaum flags as a utopian impulse at odds with the genuine improvements brought about by modern technology.
  • John Scalzi wrote a remembrance for his friend Shelley Combs, which dovetails into a discuss of online connectivity since he met Shelley as a fellow traveler in the early days of blogging.
  • Album of the week:
    • Ray Price, Night Life (1963)
  • Currently Reading:
    • Kathleen Shepherd, Women in the Valley of the Kings (St Martin’s, 2024)
    • Robin Hobb, Fool’s Errand (2001)
  • Weekly Watch List:
    • Last Week Tonight (HBO)
    • Top Chef (Bravo)
    • For All Mankind, season 1 (Apple)
    • Widow’s Bay (Apple)
    • The Sheep Detectives (2026)
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