Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a freezing Friday filled with COVID, cleaning, and consternation. I’m lucky to be able to do this inside by the fire. 

Spending time by the fire is a good way to celebrate this week’s New Book Day from our friends at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. If you haven’t checked out Michael G. Michlovic’s and George R. Holley’s, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend, I’d encourage you to head over to The Digital Press and grab a free download (or buy a low cost paperback). Here’s the link!

It’ll also be a nice way to watch the NASCAR tease its new season this weekend with its annual “Busch Clash” race on a quarter-mile oval built inside the LA Coliseum. It’s the introduction of a new generation of car and a new venue to showcase winners from the previous year. I’m not sure how much we’ll learn about the new car and how it’ll race at Daytona in two weeks, but it should be fun to watch!

Other than that, my weekend stretches out in front of me with some reading and some writing, and so it just feels right to kick it off with some quick hits and varia:

• Pasts Imperfect once again gets pride of place with its meditation on slow violence in Late Antiquity.

• The Climate Crisis, Cultural Heritage, and the Future of Middle Eastern Archaeology

• Attending to Place and Time: Seasonality in Early Modern Scotland and Cyprus

• A Remarkable Chapel on Chios.

• Can We Imagine Public Art Beyond ‘Toxic Monumentality’?

• Another Theater in Greece.

• We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was

• African American Midwest.

• Mindful Wandering on Prairie Public.

• James Joyce’s Ulysses.

• Theon Cross.

• What I’m reading: Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance. 2021. 

• What I’m listening to: Tyler Mitchell and Marshall Allen, Dancing Shadows. 2022.