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Since it's pride month I'm going to say. Can we stop making fun of adults who don't have sex. Not even particularly asexuals, just general people who don't like sex personally or don't want to have it for whatever reason. It's just not great to portray people who don't have sex as weird losers or naive little kids or whatever, even as a joke

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can we please please please learn to differentiate between things that are good but devalued because of their association with women (caring for children, being compassionate), things that are neutral but seen negatively because of their association with women (the colour pink, having long hair), and things that are bad but associated with women because of misogyny (being materialistic, being stupid) because otherwise we’re gonna keep getting takes like “being gender nonconforming is anti feminist” and “not studying for your classes is feminist”

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Meow Wolf's Omega Mart in Las Vegas, Nevada

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Dancing in front of Matisse in the Hermitage

Photo by Sergei Podgorkov, 1970

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An Amateur Snapshot of Kodak’s Early Days, 1930s photo by H. F. P. Middleton

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The use of Shalom by the Trump administration is possibly the only legitimate Not In My Name situation for Diaspora Jews.

You have a neo-fascist American president with obvious dreams of authoritarian rule, using Hebrew as a political wedge.

Not In My Name indeed.

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I'm really glad people are bringing up that the first Nazi book burnings happened at the Institute for Sexual Science, but I feel like something that gets missed is that the whole reason they went to the Institute first was because Hirschfeld was Jewish.

I've had people tell me that I'm erasing LGBTQ people (even though I'm a nonbinary bisexual myself), that I'm gatekeeping the Holocaust (wat) and other things to the point I pretty much left social media for awhile as a whole. But historical context is so important for this because the Nazis were of the mind that Jewish people were corrupting the German youth into degeneracy (this is part of why I hate that this word is being used so much again now) and sought to eradicate Jewish scientists, teachers, philosophers, artists etc first and foremost.

See the pattern here? This is important. And this is why you can't ignore that at the core of Nazi bigotry is antisemitism. You would think that wouldn't be a controversial thing to say but here we are.

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Re: my observation that the average undergraduate now seems to have much greater familiarity with Homeric epic and at least some Greek literature (esp. tragedy) than with the Aeneid or any Roman material, I think there’s a myriad of things at work here but at least one is that we’ve reverted to this weird cultural construct where ancient Greek myth and literature is viewed as universal while Roman literature is viewed as particular and this affects what books are taught e.g. in high school and college English classes but also what gets mined for retellings. and I also think Roman material is often imagined as being more deeply implicated in the ideological framework of patriarchal western imperial society and like, in some cases perhaps that’s fair, but I would argue as a literary historian that Roman poetry is precisely where we see the cracks forming in Roman gendered imperialism just like Greek tragedy is where we see the cracks forming in Athenian gendered imperialism. whether we want to commit to any idea of authorial intent is a different question but imo it’s impossible to read e.g. Roman elegy or pastoral or even Lucan and come away with the pop-culture idea of the iconic masculine Roman subject (hell, I think even the Aeneid questions the conventional notion of masculine Roman virtus that Lucan absolutely shatters, but that’s another discussion)

anyways this also gets combined with a dynamic that’s really maddening to me as a classicist where anything Roman is almost exclusively gendered as masculine in popular culture (see the Roman Empire meme, but also the subculture of Jordan Peterson bros roleplaying as stoics and reading or pretending to read Marcus Aurelius) whereas on the Greek side we have Anne Carson’s Sappho translations and a total saturation of feminist rewritings of Greek myth, Homeric epic, and tragedy. this is actually really weird from the perspective of a Roman social historian, given that women are far more visible in Roman material (esp. from the 1st century CE onward) than they are anywhere in classical Greek society, and it has the consequence that Roman poetry (except, like, Lucretius I guess) gets sidelined because the types of dudes that are going to maybe read Marcus Aurelius or Tacitus are definitely not going to read Catullus or Vergil’s Eclogues or even the Aeneid given that poetry itself is often gendered as feminine in the 21st century popular imagination, and the types of non-classicists who like Anne Carson’s Sappho and feminist approaches to Greek myth are also probably not going to read Roman poetry

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…Okay? I’m confused but I’ll take it?

Portrait of “Pétrarque”, c. 1830 by Pierre-Louis Grevedon.

Here we have an excellent example of the way Petrarca’s likeness is not “standardized” the way Dante’s is. Who the heck is this angelic little brat? Are we meant to recognize him by the douchey little goatee again? Or the big vulnerable eyes? If he really had such great hair why did he end up wearing that awful head wrap all the time? WHO ARE YOU REALLY, FRANCESCO?!

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all the cool and hot people study Humanities and languages

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Yeah I just splurged on an original 160 year old Gustave Doré Divine Comedy print...