David J. DeVore

Interview w me just published by the Commission for Ancient History and Epigraphy, where I did a semester of research in grad school. I got to brag about @calpolypomona.bsky.social & discuss my research and teaching! lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/20_jahre_jac...

Happy 80th anniversary of "Wittgenstein attacks Popper with a red-hot fire poker at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club" Day to all who celebrate #philosophy

It’s never been about money. If you could buy a championship the mets would have several. The Yankees would have won several since 2009. It’s about organizational competency, top-to-bottom. The Brewers, Rays, and Dodgers are the three best run orgs in the sport.

I’ll try to paraphrase: No one is totally neutral. It’s good to critique others’ biases. And bad to pretend you’re neutral.

Football players turned academics FTW!

From now on I’ll DM to alert you that I’m attacking your skeet.🫡😉

I'm not sure who saw this coming, but so far nearly all the jobs created during the second Trump administration have gone to women.

Lots of AI development has been aimed at software engineering, and a lot of tasks are not particularly like software engineering.

“The descendants of Hemings are also Jefferson descendants,” White said, adding, “There is no place on the mountaintop or anyplace in America where Black people should be barred.”

Brilliant mathematician Emmy Noether was initially barred from teaching at University of Göttingen because she was a woman. She taught for 4 years as a "guest lecturer" under David Hilbert's name. Hilbert, exasperated at the stupidity of the rule: "Gentlemen, this is not a bathing establishment."

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

The J’naii. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMqG...

Notice who’s rejecting the “turn the page“ precedent? Trump himself, plus his Congress. Look at DOJ’s & Congress’ investigative targets (Comey, James, Fulton County, Fauci). Seems as though accountability is exactly what Trump is asking for.

AI proponents always say that “AI is already here, might as well embrace it.” But isn’t the opposite also true? If AI is already here, isn’t the rational response to put up guardrails to ensure that it doesn’t kill us all or violate privacy? We did the same with automobiles and airplanes

”Balance” is IMHO a poorly conceived ideal in academic hiring. It implies a bipolar ideological scale instead of a multidimensional perspectival space. I’m all for viewpoint diversity but not for fetishizing any one ideology. If you accept the polarity of ideology, you‘re conceding too much.

@drmichaeljtaylor.bsky.social Soldiers and Silver was one of the best books I've read in the past few years!

Happy Skynet day to all those who celebrate

yeah, the thing is that if you want to give jefferson credit for creating the conditions for abolition, you also have to give him responsibility for the rapid expansion of slavery and the concomitant growth of a massive domestic slave trade: see the LA purchase and the 1808 int’l slave trade ban.

this seems…insane? and on the face of it, a good example of how not to do historical thinking?

Yes. 1) Semantically, “human nature“ implies immutable & intractable. 2) Rhetorically, invoking “nature“ lumps the phenomenon under discussion with pretty much all reality in the cosmos rather than analyzing the phenomenon in question. It’s an intellectual copout.

The most important town in America for the coming midterms is a small dusty impoverished Texas town named Beeville. A city with a checkered racial past might be a harbinger of the future: greattransformation.substack.com/p/beeville-t...

What beautiful work in every way, in my home city.

1 Kings 1.1-4 came to mind this morning. For some reason a story about an old, declining king who needs a young woman companion seemed relevant.

(The post being quoted is kind of odd given that most actual historians aren’t obsessed with dates—which I say as one of the more date-conscious of our species.)

This is an important question but very difficult to answer. A thread on the Christianization of the Roman _State_ which by proxy gives us some insight on the Christianization of the Roman _World_

Do dumb wars demand a smart takeaway? (FTR, I mostly avoid the terms "smart" & "dumb" bc they're analytically blunt. There are lots of ways to be "smart" or "dumb" & it's almost always more helpful to identify those ways than hurl the broad, shaming words. But here the "dumb" shoe fits perfectly.)

i can't emphasize enough how much the president isn't a CEO

A great use of @archive.org. Please consider donating if you don't already: archive.org/donate/

When Rand Paul is right, he’s right. Also: I think both the families of our Service members and the parents of the Iranian schoolgirls killed in the US strike would say there’ve been “significant casualties.”

1) Not pronouncing the “r” In “February.” 2) Spelling the past-tense of “lead” the same as the present tense. 3) “the decline of the Roman Empire” placed anytime before the Seljuks 4) ”the fall of the Roman Empire” placed anytime before 1204

There are no laws of history. The analogous physical sciences aren't physics or chemistry, where there are laws, but evolutionary biology and historical geology, where you're explaining past events from partial evidence and so you can't simply model with equations or perform controlled experiments.

Scientist falsifies hypothesis, film at 11

There is a lot to say about the Nolan Odyssey movie. But one point that I think has not been emphasized enough is: this is a film about living in LA, as Nolan, my erstwhile British compatriot and age mate, has done for years. I gather it’s a strange place.

Yes. Thermopylae was in fact a crushing defeat with zero upside for the Spartans. Hans van Wees, a top historian of ancient Greek militaries, proved this in 2018: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I’m honoured & proud to be a new FBA — a member of an institution which is defending the value of the Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts in a period when they are increasingly under threat. These disciplines are crucial for a rich, deep and critical understanding of the world.

Releasing public statements, covertly messaging on social media, trying to influence foreign leaders... Like diplomatic corps and intel agencies? Normal. Manipulating election and legal processes? Abnormal, worth countering. And as Trump just showed, the only country doing that to the US is Russia.