As the apeirokinetic pantoustasis rolls ever onward, it is increasingly clear that this must be the darkest timeline.* It is at any rate the stupidest. Reason, analysis and theory have little purchase on events, leading only into a dark place of aporia and despair – even if you c … | Continue reading
The name of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff recurred time and again in the conference on Altertumswissenschaft and Historismus I was attending last week in London (one of the most intellectually stimulating conferences I’ve been to in recent years, despite my sleep deprivation … | Continue reading
There are times when a good night’s sleep is even more of an absolute necessity than usual. As a chronic insomniac who lives with three deranged and demanding cats, I’m used to getting by on the basis of less-than-deep-and-satisfying rest and not enough of it – but ideally not wh … | Continue reading
I’m trying to find the sweet spot between a transhistorical, universalising claim along the lines of Thucydides’ “most people do not take the trouble to enquire critically but believe any old crap” and a short-term ahistorical catastrophising claim about social media having rotte … | Continue reading
I am almost entirely failing at the moment to live up to the model of some of my heroes: to be able to keep thinking and writing, to maintain the equanimity required to make proper sense of the world rather than falling back on clichés and polemic, to draw strength from one’s val … | Continue reading
Could we please stop with the relentless politicisation of ancient history? The past should not be deployed in a superficial and tendentious manner by someone with no understanding of historical research, all to support a wholly contemporary agenda intended to make Britons feel b … | Continue reading
If I think about my research in terms of feelings – fear, dread, frustration, despair, brief moments of joy, the bewildering sense of dislocation induced by finding it impossible to imagine myself as someone who writes books – then it’s more or less always about the process, not … | Continue reading
Woke some time around four with a splitting headache, having slept lightly and fitfully; managed to fend off the dark thoughts of failure and inadequacy that always turn up in such circumstances at the moment, but didn’t manage to get back to sleep, not helped by the cats waking … | Continue reading
One of the resolutions I made a couple of years ago, which I have largely been successful in maintaining, was to spend as little time as possible worrying about levels of engagement online. Don’t chase likes or retweets, don’t worry about follower counts, and certainly don’t devo … | Continue reading
It is clear evidence for the growth and development of BlueSky as a social media platform that the Thucydides misquoters have started to arrive – I had to correct two misattributions of the familiar ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote in the last week. I continue to wonder whether this … | Continue reading
I see that we’re sciencing the Fall of the Roman Empire again. Science reveals that, while conventional non-science studies are obsessed with what the Romans might have done for us, actually what mattered is what they did to themselves, releasing huge quantities of lead particles … | Continue reading
Nostalgia gets pretty well everyone, sooner or later; if not an actual longing to return to the past then at least a sense of discontent with the present, fuelled by a feeling, general or selective, that it no longer makes proper sense and/or that things just aren’t as good as th … | Continue reading
Compiling my list of favourite blog posts from this year, I was struck by how many of them seem to be from Substacks, or similar platforms like Buttondown, rather than traditional blogs. As ever, this does lead me to wonder whether I’m missing a trick, or at any rate being thorou … | Continue reading
As usual, my list of blog posts and other less mainstream internet publications that I’ve enjoyed, found thought-provoking and/or just felt that others might appreciate if they missed them first time around – though I have to admit that either there were some rather quiet months … | Continue reading
One of the thing that radio does well, for obvious reasons, is directed conversation; a skilled interlocutor, drawing out someone with interesting things to say, within a structure that provides some shape and direction without being too artificial. Talking about music and life o … | Continue reading
Last month I briefly wrote about the so-called Ehrenmal that stands in the square outside the main building of the University of Innsbruck. It’s clearly the kind of monument to problematic values and with a problematic history that will always upset or enrage someone, and I have … | Continue reading
On Tuesday evening, the Innsbruck Gesellschaft für Klassische Philologie organised a trip to see Gladiator II – private room, presumably to protect ordinary cinema-goers from loud chuntering and arguments by the ancient historical contingent – and I tagged along. Well. I enjoyed … | Continue reading
At the moment, there is always a point where part of my mind realises that I am emerging from deep sleep and tries to push down the thoughts that are starting to cohere (even about how I’m going to write this up for this journal piece…), to start counting backwards in sevens or e … | Continue reading
Two days after the event, I am still somewhat baffled as to what three of America’s leading avant-garde jazz musicians – Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek and Tomas Fujiwara, playing and recording together as Thumbscrew – were doing in a small jazz club – sorry, Kulturlabor – in a … | Continue reading
It’s a sign of the rapid expansion of Bluesky that it now looks as if it’s worth my while searching for ‘Thucydides’ every now and then, in order to wonder whether I should trouble to correct misquotations and misattributions (given that it would be in my own name rather than via … | Continue reading
It’s been a very interesting week on social media – specifically, BlueSky – with a mass influx of new users, the majority presumably fleeing Ex-Twitter in the aftermath of its owner’s embrace of Trump and an ever more overt far-right agenda, and the failure of enough American vot … | Continue reading
The indispensable starting-point of my project on GenAI and the assessment of historical skills last year was student consultation: via surveys, focus groups and some really excellent volunteers on the steering group. Key principle: how do we respond to this development if we hav … | Continue reading
I sit in a cafe in Innsbruck, doomscrolling, as waves of anger, fear and recrimination circulate over social media. The bright autumn sunlight illuminates the ‘Ehrenmal’ in the square in front of the university’s main building: an angry-looking bronze eagle on a triangular stone … | Continue reading
…with my little eye, something that looks rather like generative AI. It’s been quite a while since the last new ‘Thucydides’ quote on Ex-Twitter (where @Thucydiocy remains active, though my personal account is now dormant). Activity there has focused recently on a couple of lengt … | Continue reading
I had an interesting conversation the other week with one of my new Innsbruck colleagues about the effects of how one conceives of one’s area of study. One familiar image is that of the battlefield; certainly it’s the one I’ve come across most often, not least because Keith Hopki … | Continue reading
Slept through until seven for a second night running, after a week of being lucky to get past five without thoughts of work kicking in. The gloss on this little victory is only slightly abraded by the realisation that the clocks have gone back so it’s only six; what’s important i … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, after nearly thirty years teaching in some great British universities – I mean, they’re not up to the standards of the four or five colleges in Cambridge that we all know are better than everywhere else, but they’re still pretty good – I packed my bags, held t … | Continue reading
Yesterday afternoon I invented a new index for evaluating blogs – so new that I haven’t come up with a decent name for it yet – that is the ratio between posts and authors over a given time period, most likely a year. So, a single-author blog with one post a month has an index [… … | Continue reading
One is never strong enough to be sure of always being the strongest. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Thucydides? It’s definitely BHL as he’s used the line in various publications in both French and English, as well as on Ex-Twitter last week (link); sometimes attrib … | Continue reading
I’ve just got back from a round trip to visit my parents – seven hours of driving in intermittent downpour in order to have lunch and complete assorted tasks involving stepladders, heavy lifting, wading in ponds to move water lilies and so forth. And then coming away with two bot … | Continue reading
It remains a source of anxiousness and confusion that I’m not having to worry about teaching this year. I dreamed about it last night, which suggests that I’m worrying about it anyway… I’m not sure if it this relieved or accentuated by continuing to think about the whole GenAI th … | Continue reading
Very strange dreams – some sort of awkward conference dinner in the open air, which I think was with people (1) whom I had never met before and (2) who appeared to be American political scientists, then convoluted a journey back – when I say ‘back’, I’m not sure where I was headi … | Continue reading
I’ve been trying to think of a suitable analogy for the rise of Generative AI. Currently, I’m torn between cigarettes, asbestos and neoliberalism. The point is to think of something that combines (1) claims that the thing is new, exciting and absolutely transformative, so must b … | Continue reading
Partly for my own benefit (and not least because I switched the tag from ‘LLMs’ to ‘GenAI’ at some point, so they’re not all easy to find), I thought it made sense to pull together links to the various things I’ve written about GenAI and the teaching of history and classical stud … | Continue reading
Just when I thought I was out… It is clearly a very good thing that I am embarking on a two-year research fellowship and so can choose to ignore all teaching-related messages and edicts, on the basis that in two years’ time things will either have bedded down or will have changed … | Continue reading
I’ve always used this blog partly as a convenient way of noting down passing thoughts and ideas that I might otherwise forget. For a while, I wondered whether social media might serve the same function, rather than laboriously cutting and pasting comments from threads in which I’ … | Continue reading
As Thucydides more or less said, many students do not trouble to enquire properly into things of the past, but readily accept any old rubbish that ChatGPT tells them… CUCD Bulletin has just published a piece by me on GenAI and classical studies teaching – the third in this summer … | Continue reading
Slept heavily, with extremely strange dreams – the combined result of several beers, a hefty Schmorbraten, and drifting off to sleep with ideas about the Bayreuth-set Krimi that A. has decided I need to write, for which I have at least the beginnings of a plot. At any rate the dr … | Continue reading
Efforts continue to foist GenAI on schools and universities. Are government and education management not only desperate to grasp the alleged possible savings, and feeling compelled by the waves of ‘this is the future there is no alternative’ hype, but also actually enthused by re … | Continue reading
I don’t know how far the abridgement of books for the purposes of creating a newspaper feature has now been outsourced to machines, but whoever of whatever had the task of condensing Yuval Noah Harari’s thoughts on rise of AI for the Grauniad did a superb job in reproducing the d … | Continue reading
The first veterinary practice that I attended as a paying customer – it’s a bit disconcerting to realise that this was over quarter of a century ago – had a framed poem on the wall, amidst the adverts for bilingual puppy training and sheep-shearing services (this was in the depth … | Continue reading
Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and Democratic candidate for Vice President, addressing the AFSCME in Los Angeles on 13th August: “My wife often reminds me, hope is a great word and a beautiful name, but it’s not a damn plan… You don’t hope to win, you plan, prepare and work to w … | Continue reading
Or: Neville’s further adventures in what the hell our students are getting up to without us realising, and whether this matters… I’ve been exploring Scholarcy, an apparently well-regarded suite of AI-powered tools for summarising academic papers, as used (so says their webpage) b … | Continue reading
One of the more irritating features of the last couple of years has been the rush to incorporate AI into everything, not because there is much evidence that it makes anything better or that there is huge public demand for this, but for Fear Of Missing Out in case it does turn out … | Continue reading
Some time in the small hours, despite being fast asleep, I realised there was a strange noise somewhere in the house, an unfamiliar hum mixed with white noise. Strange noises are rarely good, so had to get up to investigate it; fairly quickly the culprit was established as A’s la … | Continue reading
One of the more sensible comments in the first phase of “ChatGPT can ace our assessments! The entire system is compromised! We must revert to in-person unseen exams at once!” panic was that, if a sophisticated auto-complete app can perform well in student assessments, it’s becaus … | Continue reading
Woken by yelling cats – two to be let outside, one wanting breakfast – from very strange dream, A and I raiding offices of history magazine to get back some vital bit of evidence that would, erm, enable me to finish a short article on the reception of the Elder Pliny in 18th-Cent … | Continue reading
Normal spam works on the basis of volume: send out umpteen thousand emails with offers for different things, and even at a 0.1% response rate you can hope to turn a profit. Academic spam is a bit more tailored, at least going to the trouble of trawling a few databases – we are al … | Continue reading