Friday Varia and Quick Hits

There are few things better to do on a snow North Dakotaland morning than to prepare a series of quick hits and varia. It is even better when I’m by the fire in the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Headquarters with a nice cuppa coffee.

• Turkey continues to make noise in its “culture war” by demanding the return of artifacts removed illegally or otherwise from its borders. This is fascinating. Turkey’s efforts sit a particularly complex intersection of critiques of culture, concepts of ownership and use, and nationalism.  
• You got it man … nobody messes with The Rothaus (for those who need the cultural reference (rated PG-13)).
• Some ideas on how to make DIY Classical Commentaries for students from Dickinson College. This is such a great idea. Anyone who has ever taught a language knows that no student commentary is ideally suited for their students (unless you build it yourself!).
• Farm Fragmentation in Modern Greece.
• This is fun. Can you explain a hard idea using on the “ten hundred” most common words?
• My buddy Dallas Deforest is writing about Rebetika. You should check out his blog.
• Some vaguely interesting thoughts about photography in the 21st century.
• The National Endowment for the Humanities is digitizing their grant records. Here is the first grant ever issued by this institution.
• My buddy Sam Fee’s landscape photographs are just stunning.
• How to tie a Eldredge knot.
• Some interesting travel notes in the wondrous land that is North Korea.
• Anthropologists do not love Jared Diamond.
• As if we didn’t already know, the future is Seasteading.
• The worst novelist in history. Anyone who has ever graded a big stack of undergraduate papers over a long weekend can relate to this: “This stuff is, in lowish doses, quite entertaining, but if you read enough of it, its absurdity seems to spread outward to the whole of literature, like a particularly contagious airborne virus… Ros’ writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavor of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent—and, even worse, silly.” 
• If bad writing doesn’t do it for you, check out Nabokov’s requirements for good readers. It doesn’t take much to realize that bad reading and bad writing are deeply intertwined.
• A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in a Digital Age. Some interesting conversation going on across Twitter around the hashtag #learnersrights. Check out the first step in the move from MOOCs  as outreach to MOOCs as massive credit farms. 
• Graduate school as cult.
• The Kenyan Drummer Queen.
• What I’m listening to: We Are Augustines, iTunes Sessions; Son Lux, At War with Walls and Mazes; Foxygen, We are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic.
• What I’m reading: K. Bowes, Houses and society in the later Roman Empire. Duckworth 2010.

One of my favorite apartment blocks in Grand Forks

About these ads