This is a fascinating read on Israeli decision-making leading up to the Iran War. One of its more notable points is that the Israelis never thought it possible that Iran would defeat the United States at Hormuz. www.nadaveyal.com/p/exclusive-...

Exclusive: The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War

An in-depth look at Roaring Lion — the war aim Israel never made public, the intelligence assessment that failure could push Iran toward the bomb, and what the Mossad told the Kurds

nadaveyal.com

Thinking more about AI companies scanning and destroying millions of books and it's interesting how technobroligarchs conceive of human knowledge as if it were a code base: a body of information that can be expanded by continually adding to it.

New Shamash Gate stele of Ashurbanipal: "The front of the stele, standing at two meters high and 1.55 meters wide, bears a large, high-relief sculpture of Ashurbanipal, while its back side features two smaller reliefs of unnamed Assyrian kings." Who could they be? www.jpost.com/archaeology/...

Archaeologists discover rare 2,600-year-old stele of Assyrian king in Iraq | The Jerusalem Post

The stele has since been moved to the Inspectorate’s headquarters to undergo initial restoration work so that it can be studied in depth.

jpost.com

In a new pre-print 🍞, a # of ancient historians look at the relationship b/w climate & food shortages in the Roman Med. using "annual palaeoclimatic reconstructions from climate field reconstructions...w/ a dataset of 55 attested shortage events" (1–650 CE). egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

This pretty much describes every conversation I've had about Trump with anyone who is neither Anglophone or American since 2016.

Wallenstein Appreciator@marbleliberal.bsky.social · 4d ago

I can help. Non Americans have no idea he's insane. The ones who are against him believe he's sane and choosing to harm them for reasons they can't figure out, the ones who are for him believe he's sane and choosing to help them. Both are stunned every time whenever he changes

Update: the error message in the logs is "could not successfully write the Controller Command Byte for the i8042" which a bit of research suggests means that the PC/2 bus in the motherboard is busted. So, anyone have any good recs for a highly durable laptop brand?

Christopher W. Jones@cwjones.bsky.social · last wk.

I had more Odyssey thoughts to share, but instead I woke up to find that my laptop's keyboard just... stopped working overnight. So I'll be spending my first day back from vacation mucking around in the Bios and registry. Wish me luck!

I have more thoughts on The Review, but after reading the discourse on BlueSky this morning I have decided to not share them, for the greater good of humanity.

Carlos Noreña@carlosfnorena.bsky.social · 6d ago

I have already seen a few *published* reviews of THE review—already rather remarkable—and this morning have encountered an extended and serious discussion of one of the reviews of the review. So recklessly do we hurtle towards a rift in the space-time continuum.

I had more Odyssey thoughts to share, but instead I woke up to find that my laptop's keyboard just... stopped working overnight. So I'll be spending my first day back from vacation mucking around in the Bios and registry. Wish me luck!

Emily Wilson calling the Sea Peoples "a now debunked 19th-century theory" was possibly the most bizarre thing about that review.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

[repeated a thread from the other place] Five (ok, six) ways in which Nolan's Odyssey is Homeric. 1. Narrative structures: a thematic ring with multiple flashbacks and timelines that unfold and entwine. Hello Homer's Odyssey

Back in the early stages of my PhD, I roomed with an aspiring actor. He once told me that historians nitpick about movies' historical accuracy but have no idea about what makes for a good movie. Anyways, Emily Wilson's Odyssey review made me think of that conversation.

Saw The Odyssey last night. Conclusion: It was awesome. "But muh historical accuracy!" -- my dude, Christopher Nolan could have put armored bear cavalry in that movie, it still would have been awesome.

It's 2027. The US has abandoned its bases in the Persian Gulf and withdrawn from Iraq. The Gulf States re-align towards Iran, who rules Hormuz. "Strategic bombing never works!" cry the airpower theorists in unison, oblivious to the fact that it seems to have worked for someone.

Oh no.

In the postmodern condition, defenses of academia collapse into two unsatisfying arguments: 1) Utilitarianism. This knowledge will help us cure cancer/solve racism/get a job. 2) Emotivism. I like studying this, so I should be able to do this for a living.

The fundamental issue in nearly all higher ed debates, viewpoint diversity, funding, value of research, etc is that the US higher ed system was built on the positivist proposition that more knowledge is inherently good, but in the postmodern condition it isn't.

Ancient history has gone global. This is surely the most exciting development in the field in the last 30 years! But what "global antiquity" is and how we should study it—and why anyone should care—are all open (and challenging) questions. Some thoughts on all of this for @aeon.co.

Academic life, summarized by my 3 year old pretending to be a college professor: "I'm going to teach classes! And grade papers! And do other things that I don't know what they are!"

An important article on local alienation from archaeological sites in Syria, in no small part due to the hidden but always present influence of the police and intelligence services and close ties cultivated between leading western archaeologists and the Assad regime.

Jen Baird@jenbaird.bsky.social · 3w ago

What is the long-term legacy of foreign excavations in places like Dura-Europos in Syria? Out today and open access in @antiquity.ac.uk with my colleague Adnan Almohamad: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Important to note that all the books called into question here were written pre-ChatGPT. Which means that this problem is going to get much worse.

Lauren MacIvor Thompson@lmacthompson1.bsky.social · 4w ago

This is...wow. I just read the review in Reviews in American History (linked in the article) too. Its paywalled unless you have Project Muse access but here is a NYT Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/b...

For the record, the Greensboro Public Library was founded in 1902. The collections were fantastic, it was the best public library I've ever visited. Almost all of that is gone now. It takes a century to build up an institution and less than two decades to destroy it.

Christopher W. Jones@cwjones.bsky.social · 4w ago

Today I visited the public library where I spent much of my childhood for the first time in 20 years. Most of the shelves and 75% of the books were gone. The children's section was largely purged of books written before 2010, except folklore/mythology. Librarians have a lot to answer for.

Today I visited the public library where I spent much of my childhood for the first time in 20 years. Most of the shelves and 75% of the books were gone. The children's section was largely purged of books written before 2010, except folklore/mythology. Librarians have a lot to answer for.

One often wonders how people with Swalwell or Platner's past can think they can run for office and not have their past deeds come to light, but I think a lot of men looked at Donald Trump and basically said "if he can get away with it, so can I."

Being an antisemite is usually pretty predictive of also being a bad person in other ways.

One of the things that fascinates me about the American Revolution is that France and Spain both joined the war against their better judgment, afraid of the forces that could be unleashed yet unable to resist the opportunity to take Britain down a notch. And those fears were realized within decades.

It is not natural to write your own language; historically most literate people have just used 'writing' unrelated to what they spoke at home, whether Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit or Babylonian. The creation of written vernaculars is where script engages politics and space. Africa is interesting here...

Isaac Samuel@rhaplord.bsky.social · 2mo ago

By the 16th/17th century, African scholars began producing written compositions exclusively in their languages: Harari; Tashelhiyt-Berber; Fulfulde; Hausa; Atemoro-Malagasy and Swahili www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-histor...

One thing no one tells you about beforehand is the amount of truly deranged email you'll get once you have a faculty page with your email posted publicly.

Why do we talk about the “history of collection” when whole sites were torn apart and dispersed across the globe? Is it a collection, or a breaking apart? Read about Palmyra’s dispersal, out now in AJA www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Collecting Palmyra: The Global Dispersal of Palmyrene Funerary Reliefs | American Journal of Archaeology: Vol 130, No 3

Palmyra has been pivotal in archaeological and historical research due to the wealth of material and the long history of fascination with the site. Its material culture can be found on every continent...

journals.uchicago.edu

I just recorded a 3-part podcast with our PoliSci department where I made the probably controversial case that the military failure to keep Hormuz open or effectively defend US bases in the Gulf has constrained the Trump admin's political options rather than the other way around.

Abu Aardvark@abuaardvark.bsky.social · last mo.

Someday I want to see a really well reported story from the Iranian side on how they managed to systematically destroy the entire US military base archipelago America had built and relied on for decades, and why the US couldn’t protect them. We kind of shrug and move on but it’s astonishing.