Amy Pistone

@apistone.bsky.social

2089 Followers 3104 Following

Classicist who works on agonistic things (tragedy, sports, drinking games), professor, enthusiast of sports and trash pop culture, feminist, dog owner She/her https://www.amypistone.com/

Screenshot of an Instagram reel from the Washington department of natural resources with a graphic that says "if you fly, we can't" and beneath that "don't fly drones near wildfire". Above the graphic is a text box that says "please stop flying your personal drones over wildfires. They can ground or collide with our firefighting aircraft, disrupting time critical firefighting and threatening people's homes. Your photos are not worth someone's home"

"ok grandma let's get you to bed" meme with the old woman with the walker saying "tiktok is so overwhelming and scary"

Cover of the book Where Troy Once Stood by Iman Wilkens

A screenshot from Facebook of what I assume is a thumbnail of a YouTube video titled "Did Odysseus Discover America?" With Odysseus' journey mapped out and Thriniacia located around Maine or Nova Scotia, Charybdis nearby, and Scheria near the Florida panhandle

“I was surprised by how many academics liked it,” Christensen says. “I had to be restrained a few times by my wife. Everybody knows that I’m the worst audience for the film.” After a long pause, he continues, “I’ve been saying to myself: ‘This is not Homer’s “Odyssey.” This is Nolan’s “Odyssey.” And it needs to be judged on different terms.’”

Selfie of me and my partner making silly faces on the movie theater. And I'm wearing an Odysseus shirt

P.S. — In two weeks: The ancient Sanskrit language has 50 words for love. English has one. Here's why that matters—and what we're missing because we don't have the language to describe it.

This is because, in chasing romantic love, we were ignoring love’s many other dimensions.

The ancient Greeks understood something we've forgotten.

They didn't have one word for love. They had seven distinct categories, each capturing a different dimension of human connection:

Eros — romantic passion and sexual love (the one we obsess about)
Philia — friendship and deep intellectual connection (the love of equals)
Storge — familial love, the bond between family members (the love we're born into)
Ludus — playful love, affection without commitment (the joy of lightness)
Pragma — practical love expressed through loyalty and duty (showing love by showing up for others)
Philautia — self-love and respect (the love we often deny ourselves)
Agape — unconditional, universal compassion (the highest form)

A drinking horn with a bottle of Viking Blod mead on the foreground with soccer on the TV in the background

Picture of a jack Russell terrier dressed up in armor that looks vaguely "ancient Greek"

A picture of a brown dog with one small egg gently held between her teeth

Screenshot of search results for El Turco
El Turco https://share.google/ESZjC3ARB2UhyHicH

Cover image of Honey by Imani Thomas

Screenshot from Spotify of the cover of a modest mouse album, An Eraser and a Maze, with what looks like a polka dot snake curled up on the cover. The song is called "Speak xN Spell (Or Not)"

Collage of pictures of the exterior of a quite bougie yurt, a campfire, a rustic indoor fireplace, a scenic river, a brown lab inside a yurt, and a bottle of wine in front of a game of "viking chess" (hnefltofl)

Collage of pictures of the exterior of a quite bougie yurt, a campfire, a rustic indoor fireplace, a scenic river, a brown lab inside a yurt, and a bottle of wine in front of a game of "viking chess" (hnefltofl)

Screenshot of a post from the Chronicle of Higher Education account:
Two divisive campus leaders commissioned a report that asks an equally divisive question: Have the humanities and social sciences been corrupted by politics? chroni.cl/4eafiNL

Cover of the book The Gay Science by Nietzsche

Picture of a light blue Specialized Vado ebike looking gorgeous and imminently rideable!

The "yes... ha ha ha... yes!" Sickos meme but with ναί poorly edited over the word "yes"

A photo collage of pictures of a small brown lab (small FOR a lab, to be clear), two pictures from when she was a baby puppy and five pictures from today, one in a selfie with me and Mike, one from a trail on a hike, one sleeping on a bed, one sleeping in a back yard, and one where she's eating a dinosaur treat.

Picture of a bag of "Shaq-a-licious XL gummies", a green bag with pictures of three large gummy candies on the cover, a green shamrock, a purple cactus, and a yellow truck

A collage of photos of me and Ellen Lee and pictures of our roundtable

Picture of Caitlin Hines speaking at a podium the opening reception

Joline Fried-Midkiff, who sends both of her sons to Pineapple Cove, was impressed when her boys could name every U.S. president by the time they finished kindergarten.

The school’s affiliation with Hillsdale has given her pause — some of the college’s conservative views aren’t aligned with her own — but she said she keeps her sons enrolled because they’re thriving.

“The type of support and culture you get there is just outstanding,” said Fried-Midkiff, a stay-at-home mom. Pineapple Cove has a “bright, rich, rigorous curriculum. … They also enhance developing the whole person, with the virtues. And that was very important to us.”

Others — including faculty — came to the school after becoming disillusioned with traditional public education.

Cover image of The White Pedestal
How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
by Curtis Dozier

Studies support certain aspects of the classical model — such as phonics instruction — but generally, research on the schooling method is sparse. Findings are often limited by small sample sizes.

At Pineapple Cove, staff tout standardized test scores. A higher share of children at the Palm Bay campus are on grade level in math and reading than at other schools in the state, Florida testing data shows. The school also has a smaller proportion of low-income families than the surrounding county, which is often tied to higher scores.

Researchers who focus on inequity in education have criticized the classical approach for limiting or excluding non-White perspectives.

“Diversity in curriculum is very vital to the kinds of actual critical thinking that students should develop,” said William Rodick of the nonprofit organization EdTrust. He added that students benefit when the content they learn in school reflects them and their experiences.

This teaching method, backed by conservatives, is on the rise
Classical schools focus on Western content and American ideals. “We are going to honor the creation of our flag. We are going to honor George Washington,” one principal said.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

A picture of my dog, Sammie, with two stuffed octopus toys

That parity masks the significant gains women have made in the labor market recently. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.

Key facts
Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females, determined on the basis of a one‑time SRY gene screening.
Evidence‑based and expert‑informed, the policy – applicable for the LA28 Olympic Games onwards – protects fairness, safety and integrity in the female category.
It is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programmes.

Screenshot of me typing in @thomas and Zoe Thomas not coming up as an option at all

In 1964, Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, wrote a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath in which the prayer was omitted, that focused on "utmost respect for human life from its beginning", making it a more secular obligation, not to be taken in the presence of any gods, but before only other people. This version is still in use today by many US medical schools:[26]

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

Terms of Respect seeks not so much to persuade readers to act as to reassure them that everything on college campuses is okay, presumably in order to dissuade those with (political and financial) power from inflicting harm on the university. But the shakedowns are upon us, with no obvious end in sight. To paraphrase Alexander Herzen, it mortifies many of us to realize that ideas alone are impotent, and that truth exercises no binding control over the real world. But to respond to this state of affairs by pleading for more civility is to double down on impotence. Must those of us laboring within the university be content merely with playing defense all the time, on terms and terrain not of our choosing? Do we not have the power to organize and strive for much more than even a maximalist commitment to free speech? Or have we already abdicated any claim to that greater power, choosing instead to retreat into the sound and fury of conversations signifying little if anything? This last question I pose not out of gratuitous caviling or grievance but in mourning.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University. In August 2026, he will join Arizona State University as professor of classics in the School of International Letters and Cultures. His email address is dpadilla@princeton.edu.

A montage of pictures of Sammie, a beautiful, perfect brown lab mix

Screenshot of three of Rodger Sherman's tweets about the important sports lessons from the Iliad like how you can't let the opponent's beat player get the shot they want in crunch time

Image of a NYT article with the title "the billionaire backlash against a philanthropic dream" and subtitle "the giving pledge, once trendy among the world's richest, has come upon hard time"

Whether it has to do with environmental degradation or degradation of our politics or of people, it seems as if the public is hungry for an individual to be a counterweight to Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know whether that person is Zohran Mamdani or Gavin Newsom, who is clearly trying to position himself that way. But for whatever reason, that person has yet to be identified. Why do you think that is? One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.

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What is Fizz? 0
Fizz is a discussion and news feed for your community, whether that's
your college or city. On Fizz, you can create text, image, or video posts,
direct message other users, create polls, and more. With every post or
comment, you control your identity and can share with a handle or
anonymously. Fizz also allows you to connect across communities to
connect with people like you around the country.
If you are a college student, your community is closed and and the
privacy of the community is maintained through the requirement of a valid university email or proof of enrollment.

Because the app is anonymous, it lowers the social risk of speaking up. Students who may hesitate to voice political opinions in class or who fear backlash from peers can articulate their views without attaching their names. For some, anonymity becomes a shield that allows for exploration.

Political debates on Fizz can also expose students to perspectives outside their immediate friend groups. College social circles can be surprisingly tight-knit and everyone can share the same views. An anonymous platform disrupts that echo chamber, sometimes forcing students to confront ideas they wouldn’t normally engage with.

There’s also something uniquely democratic about it. No blue checkmarks. No follower counts. No clout hierarchy. Every opinion appears in the same font, on the same background. In theory, arguments stand on their own merit. But, anonymity cuts both ways.

Without accountability, debates can quickly devolve. What begins as a discussion about policy can turn into name-calling, misinformation, or inflammatory generalizations. Tone becomes harsher and nuance disappears. It’s easier to reduce complex issues to memes or one-line dismissals.

Many students argue that Fizz was never meant to be a political arena. They downloaded it for lighthearted entertainment such as a mental break between classes, not another platform saturated with culture wars.

Which… is fucking hilarious. And it makes sense to me that canonically, Roman scholars are the equivalent of the resident Reddit nerd who scours r/AskHistorians and writes witty 3,000-word comments on YouTube essays in their free time. (I imagine they’re also @OnBlueSky.App.)

This distinction helps shed light on the implicit question that underlies the entire debate about Mellon’s new focus. Namely, should the foundation be blamed for damaging the humanities by directing nearly half a billion dollars a year toward a social-justice-ified vision of American arts and letters, or should universities, the federal government, and other donors instead be blamed for not providing a healthier funding ecosystem to begin with, to say nothing of the anti-woke conservative billionaires who complain endlessly about the humanities and champion “the classics” without ever spending a single penny to support them?

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

This is a significant departure from the nonprofit’s past approach to managing relationships with the institutions it funds, in which Mellon officials would try to balance a college’s or university’s particular—often less political—needs against its own ideological priorities. In 2023, the foundation allotted $1 million to “deepen the ongoing conversation in Transgender Studies” at the University of Kansas—specifically, to “establish a cohort model for scholar-activists” and “create a more trans-liberatory local and regional landscape.” Another $1 million went to classics professors at Princeton and Brown for a project called Racing the Classics, devoted to encouraging early-career scholars to implement “critical race approaches and curricular experimentation.” In 2024, Loyola Marymount University won a three-year, $431,000 grant to “bridge AI practitioners and disability justice scholars and activists.” And MIT received $500,000 for something called Engaging With Music and Musicking Through Engagement, aimed at correcting its curriculum’s “Western European biases.”

I asked multiple times over the course of several months for an interview with Elizabeth Alexander, but through a spokesperson she refused to talk with me, a decision that highlights a broader set of problems within elite academic culture: a disinclination to be accountable to laypeople. A sense that private institutions, regardless of how much they influence the public, are entitled to push whatever ideologies they want. And a belief that it is perfectly natural for higher education to have a liberal slant because everything good and decent has a liberal slant. (Alexander sent along a handful of comments through a spokesperson shortly before this issue went to press. “At Mellon, grantmaking is guided not by ideology,” she wrote, “but by the powerful ideal that the rich fabric of America’s cultural and intellectual contributions must be broadened to convey the full scale of our nation’s histories, surface new ideas, and challenge long-held assumptions.”)

One may feel a variety of ways about the worldview that Mellon has chosen to promote through its grant-making. But the salient question is not whether its politics are laudable or lamentable, or even whether the projects it funds are beneficial. The real questions are: What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause? And what happens when the “choice” of whether to accede to this vision of the humanities becomes—when there is only one real funding game in town—a matter of survival versus collapse?

But this tale places too much of the blame on humanities professors, overestimating their actual power within institutions. More important, the went-woke-went-broke hypothesis does not account for the ways that economic transformations within higher education have accelerated the trends that conservatives lament. Specifically, the right-wing theory of the case gets the causal arrow wrong. The humanities aren’t broke because they went woke. The humanities went woke in large part because they were broke. As other donors, the government, and universities themselves all but abandoned these fields, Mellon became a lifeline. But the foundation has proved to be—as Jacques Derrida might have said—a kind of pharmakon: a Greek word that the philosopher noted could be translated as either “remedy” or “poison,” depending on your perspective.

The request for funds, released late last month, was mailed by Hubbard just over seven years after Epstein pled guilty in 2008 to solicitation of prostitution with a minor, according to DOJ indictments.

“The Epstein Foundation had a long record of supporting various academic interests,” Hubbard told the Texan in an email statement. “I was not then and am not now aware of any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘pedophile’ in the technical sense; his sexual preference appears to have been for young women aged 16-22, which would at most reflect partial ephebophilia. Although most of the women who were involved with him at that age retrospectively regret it, I am unaware of any evidence that the contacts were non-consensual at the time. Some were self-conscious sex workers who recruited others into his orbit and are now making cynical claims of victimization to cash in on his estate and business partners, as reported by Michael Tracey and other credible journalists.”