In honor of me reading all of these thesis proposals, what was *your* senior thesis about?

Why Are Tech Billionaires so Obsessed with the Roman Empire? - Electric Literature From Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, too many wannabe Caesars are thriving on domination

The Classics are an eternal flame, it's life-affirming to think with people long gone. The institutional evisceration of the field, which surrenders this past to the far right & technofascist "wannabe Caesars," is a grave error & an injury to our descendants.

electricliterature.com/why-are-tech...

Rome rose from the ashes of twin fires — in Ovid's telling — out of the purifying smoke of the annual pastoral rites and the damning fumes that curled around Remus's funeral pyre. Blessed and cursed from the very beginning.

I'm going nowhere in particular with this. Except to say...

Sheep schlep to campus for commemoration of Roman festival At 1:24 a.m. on Wednesday, March 19, a curious message was delivered to the inboxes of slumbering students: “SHEEP COMING TO CAMPUS!” A perfect string of four words, if there ever was one. The occasio...

Some Classics depts host Parilia-adjacent events. Williams brought sheep onto campus for a while. But is there a university bold enough to build the bonfires? A president who will run through the flames, as is tradition, to purify the flock & protect its future? 🔥
williamsrecord.com/464003/featu...

"Cry, Wolf" | a story about dire wolves and snow-white mythmaking YouTube video by Alison Laurence

This is the legendary past that Colossal invoked in naming its first engineered wolves Romulus & Remus, creating geographic and temporal distance from the actual dire wolf’s deep North American roots.

I recorded an audio version of this essay (to avoid other writing, naturally) youtu.be/ORsukdovw7A

Tanti auguri to the eternal city!

It's been 2,779 (?) years ab urbe condita in 753 BCE — which puts #America250 in amusing perspective. Rome’s impossibly precise founding date, April 21, was chosen many centuries after the fact to align with the Parilia, an existing pastoral festival 🐑

An unforgettable opossum is waiting on the other side of this link... #histsci #envhist

An unforgettable opossum is waiting on the other side of this link... #histsci #envhist

They Thought What? Unpacking the history (and present) of science

"Brushing off these practices as unscientific implies that 'true' science is, and always has been, unimpeachable. It denies us a chance to examine what flaws may fuel our own ways of thinking."

A new mailbag from @wbarlowrobles.bsky.social

I'm immensely comforted that everyone who replied to @ladyhistorian.bsky.social gave more of less the same source-based answer

Reid Wiseman reports "four green crew members" on comms!

A screenshot from p. 17 of Bolman's History of Social Science article entitled "Institute Life." In a passage that details scholars' recommendations for Latour's faculty appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, Bolman quotes an addendum provided by neuroscientist Roger Guillemin who wrote that Latour was of “one of the oldest and most highly respected families of the great vineyards of Burgundy. There is in him some of these profound qualities of the hard working people who, from what nature provides, make the greatest wines of France."

What an ace outcome of your time at the IAS... thank you for writing this! And thank you for this bit especially.

I’ve been out of the game for a while and lost track of people in the move to this place, so if you’re an adjunct/VAP/postdoc in history, can you reply and let me know what you work on? I am an editor at @contingent-mag.bsky.social and we are often looking for book reviewers etc.

In the 1850s, before it was denuded by archaeologists and the tourism industry, 420 species of flowers and plants grew on the Roman Colosseum — and every single one is catalogued in amateur botanist Richard Deakin's Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855): publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

War Happens in Dark Places, Too In thick woods and swamplands and on small river islands, they bided their time.

Seven years ago, we published our first piece, a gorgeous essay by @kerileighmerritt.bsky.social. Since then, we've published nearly 400 pieces and paid every single contributor for their work. Thanks to everyone who's donated to, read, and taught with our magazine over the years!

Why Write Historical Fiction? I wanted to understand a hidden part of my own family’s history.

“Imagination is a vital tool that any writer must deploy to access aspects of the past.”

Our latest, from Ben Nadler.

Mountain lions gain protection under California’s Endangered Species Act State agencies are now mandated to protect the big cats, which have been increasingly vulnerable due to habitat loss

A legal mandate! Was heartened to see this decision come out the same day I was lecturing on the incentivized extirpation of California grizzlies. Past is prologue but not prescription 🐾
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Herd of large, brown woolly mammoths walking out of a forest into a snowy clearing.

So pleased to have an essay in the latest issue of Configurations! It's called, "Stories of Arctic Crisis and Alaskan Mammoths: Neocolonial and Anticolonial Approaches to De-Extinction and Rewilding."

muse.jhu.edu/issue/56326

#mammoth, #Alaska, #neocolonialism, #woodbison, #colossal

Man uses tool on face of 20-foot clay bison sculpture in a dark workshop

Gary Staab is making an alarmingly large bison family that will travel among a number of museums this March. Some stops are only 1 day, so mark your calendars. www.si.edu/newsdesk/rel...

Black and white photograph of a man wearing a checked shirt standing next to a sign saying 'We do not have a dinosaur'.

#WyrdWednesday Sad times.

Snakepit Operator, Highway 66, Sayre, Oklahoma. Photo by Steve Fitch, 1973.

americanart.si.edu/artwork/snak...

Over There, Again The American Legion at home and abroad

"The 1927 expedition to Paris exposed the central contradiction of the early American Legion – an organization that sought to present itself as a benign custodian of memory and shared sacrifice in combat, yet one haunted by its history of vigilantism and exclusionary nationalism."

Yuki Kawamura makes his Chicago Bulls season debut | FULL HIGHLIGHTS YouTube video by Chicago Bulls

Self soothing by watching highlights from Yuki Kawamura's iconic debut on repeat. Shortest* player in franchise history, baby, let's gooo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=52uF...

*Nate Robinson is shorter, I'd wager.

Every child who learned to read English in New England before 1800 would have been familiar with an image of John Rogers being burned at the stake.

It was one of the main images reproduced in the New England Primer, and one of the first longer passages children learned to read independently.

This year, we are adding audio versions of many of your favorite articles, and donors to the magazine get early access through our private podcast feed!

Donate today and you’ll get to hear all of our monster series authors over the next few weeks, beginning with Sam Moore.

Live TV report on cougar capture in San Francisco neighborhood interrupted by coyote ‘Your eyes do not deceive you,’ ABC7 told viewers about unexpected turn during report from Pacific Heights

Lately, re: coyotes, cougars, and other Californians www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Re: archivists 🧡

Welcome To This Class Part 2 Writing & Anger, Spring 2021

“Major historical dread meant something to me then, in that context, lifetimes ago, back in 2014 . . . It was an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived.”

Welcome To This Class Part 1 Writing & Anger, Spring 2021

“[F]ull disclosure: as I write this during the first week of January 2021, in the midst of an insurrection a mile away at the US Capitol, my imagination is taxed, so I’m not 100% sure what we’re going to do. But we’ll figure it out.”

Our latest, from Oline Eaton. Look for Part 2 on Friday.

On the television, the Bears vs. Packers game. On the laptop, the Bulls game. Both Chicago teams won ❤️

Not at #AHA2026 but my heart is always in Chicago.

Seriously, I am shy, please come talk to me and save me from having to approach people cold.