Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s cold in North Dakotaland with the temperatures not expected to get about -2 F today. It seems fitting that the last gasp of winter break feels like real winter. 

The semester starts on Tuesday for me and my syllabuses are ready and my classes are mostly prepped. Most of winter break projects are done (and just a bit more hustle over the next few days will wrap them all up) and the football and cricket seasons are coming to an end. The best thing about February in North Dakota is the existential quiet that lulls you into a kind of contemplative productivity. It’s when things get done whether you want them to or not.

As festivities ramp down and the serious work of teaching, reading, and writing start up again, enjoy some quick hits and varia:

• AIA, ASOR, and EAA on threats to Iran’s cultural heritage.  

• Threats to the Kariye Museum in Istanbul.

• Church-Building in Ottoman Corinthia.

• On Classics, Madness, and Losing Everything.

• More on the Dirk Obbink papyrus scandal.

• Excavated and unpublished.

• Capitoline wolf in Cincinnati. 

• Listening.

• The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.

• Fast lane to slow science.

• On busy bragging.

• Vintage Grand Seiko wallpaper.

• Uncanny Valley.

• Unmaking World Literature.

• A review of Lakota America.

• Trends in contemporary academic fiction.

• What I’m reading: Brett M. Rogers’s and Benjamin Eldon Stevens’s Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy(2019).

• What I’m listening to: Helado Negro, This is How You Smile.