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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2h

Exactly this.

Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2h

This is the biographical tradition about Alexander in a nutshell. Every adult who met him was supposed to understand his destiny. Even Aristotle was supposed to have inducted him into esoteric knowledge few philosophers even knew. It's all legendary. And also expensive, which is left out here.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2h

A personal connection between student and teacher demands more than, and is more important than, individualizing each lesson.

Annie Abrams @annieabrams.bsky.social · 7h

sal khan on his true north knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/at-k...

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3h

New varia post: behind the scenes of cowriting, plus a few recent links and stories I read, and my weekly media roundup.

joshuapnudell.com/2025/10/12/w...

Weekly Varia no. 151, 10/12/25

New varia post: behind the scenes of cowriting, plus a few recent links and stories I read, and my weekly media roundup.

joshuapnudell.com

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3h

Thanks!

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Liz Bourke @hawkwinglb.bsky.social · 10h

Interesting piece from @jpnudell.bsky.social: joshuapnudell.com/2025/10/10/i...

Is Our Children Reading?

Reading discourse is back, but I hold out hope that a lot of young people harbor a desire to read more despite the many factors that are contributing its erosion.

joshuapnudell.com

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 16h

flipped classrooms & the unquestioned shift toward “student-led learning” were also part of the deprofessionalization->adjunctification->mechanization program whose ultimate goal was a fully administrative university

John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 17h

The over-reliance on standardization as the mechanism for writing instruction really was a pretty unbeatable context to produce de-professionalized teachers okay with using AI to grade

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 8h

This nice little thread gives me a chance to once again share my love for “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946)

joshuapnudell.com/2025/01/26/w...

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 16h

So my point is that we need to get better at understanding when the language of progressivism is co-opted by bad actors to hustle into the public sphere (“too innovative for regulation”) technologies that threaten the basic foundations of trust necessary to a functioning society.

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 16h

No, resurrecting the corpse of Anne Frank so 12-year-olds can gossip with her is not how you “make history come alive.” It’s how you destroy history so that someone can come in, rewrite it, and then author a future to their liking.

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wishda @wishda.bsky.social · 17h

But have you considered that maybe the point of it all is to make the Machine God who will replace humanity?

I certainly hadn’t, but apparently it is a major life goal in Silicon Valley.

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Slurmsadako MacKenzie @slurmsmackenzie.bsky.social · 22h

GenAI truly was the worst technology to come along at this moment.

An energy and water guzzler when we most urgently need to take climate action.

A disinformation machine as our journalism fails.

A bias machine as fascism takes root.

A job killer in a cost of living crisis.

Bria "tries to write a book" Horses @thevoidencore.bsky.social · 6d

The "cognitive decline and brain damage from repeat COVID infections" and "easy to use robot that makes slop and melts your critical thinking skills" is a hell of a combo in a post-fact media ecosystem

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 17h

IMHO, LLMs will be an economic negative for years.

They'll do a worse job than humans,

but will still replace humans because they're cheaper for employers,

but really they're costlier, it's just that lots of costs get externalized to society by our horrible energy/tax policies.

Lose-lose-lose.

The Real AI Risk is ‘Meh’ Technology That Takes Jobs and Annoys Us All

While AI doomsday scenarios dwell on the risks posed by superintelligent robot overlords, one Nobel-Prize winning economist fears a more mundane possibility.

www.bloomberg.com

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 1d

I am struck by how lack of standing seems to so frequently evade court challenge to unconstitutional government actions.

It's an odd thing missing, given that this problem was solved in ancient Athens: for certain matters the entire citizen body ('ho boulomenos,' 'whoever wishes') had standing.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 1d

Peak Celtics is before my time, but the transition between 2004 and 2008 was striking. The Pats were a thing in 01 and 02 and the Sox in 04 was cathartic, but then Sox in 07, Celtics in 08, and Pats in 04 (plus 17-0* in 07) shifted the tenor from a sense of inevitable doom to it being "Titletown".

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 1d

As someone who lived in New England through the transition, the Boston type is recent, developing really only in the last 25 years. I'm absolutely not challenging that characterization now, though.

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Jonathan Kennedy @getradified.net · 1d

I sincerely believe this is an intended consequence of the push for AI in everything.

Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social · 1d

"even if it's AI, it's at least true" hard to overstate the damage this stuff is doing to people's brains. we're gonna be cleaning the slop out of archives for decades

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 5d

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 6d

have just come across a YouTube account that has been using Sora to upload reels of fake, AI-generated “90s sitcoms” every few hours

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Carlos Noreña @carlosfnorena.bsky.social · 2d

📢 New SCS Blog Post

Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell -- in the first part of a two-part series -- explore the deep roots of our thinking about the nature of human relationships with artifical companions, stretching from Hollywood to Ovid and back again.

Great reflections on classical reception here!

SCS Blog: Part 1 of 2: Pygmalion in the Age of AI Companions | Society for Classical Studies

www.classicalstudies.org

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

New blog post: a few thoughts on recent reading discourse, wherein I make a case that it is on us to help students resist the structural factors that are, in my opinion, leading to an actual crisis in reading.

joshuapnudell.com/2025/10/10/i...

Is Our Children Reading?

Reading discourse is back, but I hold out hope that a lot of young people harbor a desire to read more despite the many factors that are contributing its erosion.

joshuapnudell.com

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Sarah E. Bond @sarahebond.bsky.social · 2d

Grab some wine! Some late antique communion bread 🥖 loaves from the 7th-8th centuries with Jesus upon them have been discovered in Anatolia. www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/10/c...

Charred Byzantine-Era Loaves of Bread with Greek Inscriptions Discovered in Anatolia

An archaeological excavation campaign carried out at the Topraktepe site, corresponding to the ancient city of Irenopolis, has yielded a discovery of extraordinary scientific significance: five charre...

www.labrujulaverde.com

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Reposted by Professor Nutella

Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 2d

I spend weeks putting together a methods syllabus for new history majors and he just...skeets it out

jokes aside, great thread below

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 2d

All I want in life is to persuade everyone, when encountering politics & culture, to ask, "why are we talking about this?" I mean that very literally: anything you encounter on your screens reflects a choice. Someone covered that, talked about that, rather than the many other things out there. Why?

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

New blog post: a few thoughts on recent reading discourse, wherein I make a case that it is on us to help students resist the structural factors that are, in my opinion, leading to an actual crisis in reading.

joshuapnudell.com/2025/10/10/i...

Is Our Children Reading?

Reading discourse is back, but I hold out hope that a lot of young people harbor a desire to read more despite the many factors that are contributing its erosion.

joshuapnudell.com

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

This was my first experience with co-authorship and I'm really happy with how the piece came out. Please read and share!

Carlos Noreña @carlosfnorena.bsky.social · 2d

📢 New SCS Blog Post

Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell -- in the first part of a two-part series -- explore the deep roots of our thinking about the nature of human relationships with artifical companions, stretching from Hollywood to Ovid and back again.

Great reflections on classical reception here!

SCS Blog: Part 1 of 2: Pygmalion in the Age of AI Companions | Society for Classical Studies

www.classicalstudies.org

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

New review from me over at CJ-Online, about Ory Amitay's new book Alexander the Great in Jerusalem.

One of the most enduring scenes involving Alexander the Great is found nowhere in the extant histories of his reign. Other than describing the siege of Gaza in 332 bce, the Greco-Roman Alexander histories are conspicuously silent regarding his activities in Southwest Asia, but historiographical silences provide fertile soil for myth to germinate—especially when they involve Alexander. From this particular silence emerged an invented relationship between Alexander and the Jews. By far the most well-known of these stories, as told in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (11.317–345), involves Alexander and his entourage traveling to Jerusalem, where he meets a delegation by the High Priest Jaddus. Overwhelmed by the sight and recalling that this god had visited him in a dream, Alexander abases himself before the high priest, perhaps in an echo of proskynesis, recognizes the power of the Hebrew god, and grants privileges to the Jewish people. This scene has received the bulk of scholarly—and artistic—attention, despite being in Amitay’s telling a synthesis of the earlier stories (5), reworked to make this Alexander a model for an educated Roman audience who might find Judaism “alluring and attractive,” as some allegedly did in the time of Domitian (157–61). The chronology here is complicated by Josephus’s version being both the last composed and the first published in its extant form, but this discontinuity offers Amitay an on-ramp to untangle the deeper roots of this earlier material.

Alexander the Great in Jerusalem contains five chapters, the first four of which offer philological studies for each body of evidence. Amitay moves progressively in these chapters from the stories with the earliest date of composition in a likely Seleucid Romance that he believes developed between the Fifth and Sixth Syrian Wars (195–170 bce) through Josephus’s account in the late first century ce. These four chapters share a common structure. Legends are “ahistorical” and “demand explication” (1), Amitay writes, so each chapter first introduces the story in its extant version before dissecting that story using contextual clues and the tools of philology. In each operation, Amitay exposes the thematic elements at play that both offer clues as to the date of composition and reveal the evolution of the Alexander legend in the region. After all, Alexander is only rarely Alexander in these stories. Instead, Alexander becomes a cipher for Jewish authors to explore the relationship between dominant foreign powers, the Judean religious leadership, and the Judean god.

The first four chapters require Amitay to delve deeply into the manuscript traditions of the Greek Alexander Romance, Rabbinic literature, and Josephus. He provides both translations of the Greek and Hebrew passages and copious commentary on specific terms that make these chapters more accessible than they otherwise might have been, but there is only so much he can do without compromising the project. Despite this bar to entry, these chapters reward background knowledge by revealing how live issues like the conflict between the Jewish community centered on Jerusalem and the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim became written into the Jewish legends about Alexander.

Amitay pivots from the literary tradition to a historical reconstruction in Chapter 5. The silence from historical sources has caused scholars to reject the mythological tradition that Alexander visited Jerusalem, but Amitay argues that we should not be so quick to accept this argumentum e silentio. ...The most compelling argument Amitay makes for the silence in the narrative histories of Alexander is also the most pedestrian: that the diplomatic exchange and events of the hypothetical visit were simply too unremarkable to warrant treatment by the canonical sources. That is, a diplomatic exchange repeated innumerable times throughout this fragmented region evolved into a myth that imbued the exchange with religious overtones and created a special relationship between Alexander and the Jews.

Throughout this final chapter, Amitay repeatedly concludes speculative reconstructions by admitting their tenuity—even while offering them in sufficient numbers to give the impression that some exchange was more likely than not to have occurred. At the same time, Amitay also allows the legendary material to creep into his reconstructions. On Alexander’s alleged awe, for instance, Amitay says that such niceties were called for by diplomacy, but also that “it may well have been authentic” (180), whether by Alexander himself or by “one of his minions” like Parmenion whose “overly positive reaction” was transferred to Alexander in oral tradition (179). Why these men would have been any more impressed than Alexander is left unexplained. Setting this bit of armchair psychological analysis aside, Alexander in Jerusalem is a tremendous accomplishment that offers the most thorough study to date of the legends about Alexander that formed in Hellenistic Judea and, through those legends, captures some of the complexity of this time and place.

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