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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 57m

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 · 1h

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 · 2h

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

Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social · 4h

"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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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 4d

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 · 4d

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 · 23h

📢 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 · 22h

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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Sarah E. Bond @sarahebond.bsky.social · 18h

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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Ellen Muehlberger @emuehlbe.bsky.social · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 22h

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 · 23h

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 · 23h

📢 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 · 1d

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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Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social · 1d

I feel like a broken record, but I have to keep saying it over and over again: a farmer bailout won’t do much of anything because the market is gone. There will be no incentive to plant next year.

The bailout will help payoff farmer debt to the banks. That’s all.

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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 1d

This is as good and urgent as others have been saying. I don't think it's possible to sustain anything resembling mass democracy in a post-literate society. musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society

Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

musgrave.substack.com

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

Oh, good. The Yankees are out. Now I can enjoy the playoffs without worrying about who will win.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

Redford does so much running away from people in this movie.

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 2d

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 2d

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

There’s a little voice in my head yelling that I should be working, but I’m doing my best to ignore it.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 2d

Ending the day before a long weekend and celebrating the arrival of fall weather with chili, a Paloma (with rosewater and chocolate bitters), and The Sting (1973).

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 2d

"WE MAKE NEWS LOUDER. IF STORY GOOD ON ONE SIDE, SHOW OTHER SIDE TOO. OTHER SIDE WRONG? OTHER SIDE WANT BLEACH IN VEINS? ANIMAL RUN BOTH. REPORT BOTH SIDES. EVEN WHEN ONE SIDE THINK HEAD MEDS MAKE QUIET BABIES."

“AAAGGGHHH!!!” A Memo from Animal, Your New Editor-in-Chief

“[Editor-in-chief of CBS News] Bari Weiss told network staffers in a morning editorial call that she wants to ‘win’ before delivering a rallying cr...

buff.ly

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Andrew Tobolowsky @andytobo.bsky.social · 2d

I always think about some cs majors I knew in college who never read a single book. It’s hard not to feel that the main thing happening here is that ppl convinced the things they don’t like must be dumb and pointless have made a tech to do them to the extent they thought they were ever done

MiMi Aye @meemalee.bsky.social · 7d

Author and filmmaker Justine Bateman on generative AI

"They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years - to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies - to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat.
People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people." - author and filmmaker Justine Bateman from a piece by Emine Saner for the Guardian

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3d

I've never had an issue with falling asleep, but the caffeine was fueling anxiety issues. I've been doing a third (iced) tea when I teach my night class but otherwise try to space it out across whatever my workday looks like. I have a bunch to do this afternoon, so I didn't want it front-loaded.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3d

Some days, I find it easy to hold myself to two cups of tea.

Some days, the restriction is annoying, but manageable.

Some days, I want to find and punish whoever made that rule.*

*It's me. I did that. My punishment is waiting til this afternoon to have the second cup.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3d

This has been me for the last week or so. Trying to think of this feeling less as growth and more as an attempt at recovery.

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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 3d

This is the paradox of social media, in my opinion. In the aggregate I think that it has been extremely bad for our society. In the personal, it has allowed me to read so much, to talk to so many different people, and to create communities I wouldn't have otherwise had.

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Michael Bazemore @deepwatermike.bsky.social · 3d

I connected with a history community after my PhD cratered. I've read so much scholarship and learned so many things I might otherwise have missed in a silo.

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 3d

Has anything great happened in your life because of social media?

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