Friday Quick Hits and Varia

As the Frog Days of summer are upon us and the semester looms, it feels like the calm before the storm. The days and nights are warm here in North Dakotaland even if the mosquitos are fierce and the days are growing shorter. Campus is just starting to come back to life and the community feels like its bracing for the arrival of students and the new tradition of budget cuts and aggrieved letters in the local papers. There’s some talk about elections, the Olympics, and baseball, but even that seems to lack urgency in the dying days of summer. That might be a good thing.

So join me in relaxing and doing nothing in particular, with a little gaggle of quick hits are varia: 

• New Hesperia featuring an article on Isthmia by Jon Frey and Tim Gregory!

• Nothing quite sells antiquity like human sacrifice. Here’s the Mt. Lykaion edition.

• A 4th-century mosaic from Cyprus (which is all the cooler when you realize that they left no pottery behind (sorry, ceramicist joke!)).

• Some words on Troy.

• If you haven’t spent time reading various articles from the Undocumented Migration Project, you should.

• Andrew Reinhard’s report on the first day or so of the archeogaming expedition to No Man’s Sky.

• The Archaeology of Lawrence of Arabia.

• Free Fiction from North Dakota Quarterly.

• How every Olympic Logos ranks.

• The books of Dumbarton Oaks.

• Violins.

• National Geographic shares topographic maps.

• Ottoman Maps of the World.

• The 25th Annual UND Bus Tour. With so many things on the block to cut, it is kind of amazing that this strange tradition persists.

• A cool map of shops in Fargo in 1948. Here’s the map. 

• Graphic design before the computer.

• Feminism in Punk Rock.

• What I’m reading: G. Hutner and F. G. Mohamed, A New Deal for the Humanities: The Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education. Rutgers 2016.

• What I’m listening to: Various Artists, Day of the Dead; M83, Junk.