Joseph Howley

@illdottore.bsky.social

7805 Followers 1064 Following

I’m a Latin professor and book historian working on slavery and scribal labor in Ancient Rome. Co-edited volume “Writing, Enslavement and Power in the Roman Mediterranean” out now from OUP. Find my other writing in The Nation.

Tumblr post “did the name Odysseus already exist”
Cathy Rutherford tells a journalist that the late Margaret Thatcher did “not a bit of good” and says “ i'd put a stake through her heart and garlic round her neck to make sure she never comes back”
“ Jennifer Lopez was so kind to let them borrow this from her personal collection”
I put the pistachios in the Walk-Around Butt and padded them out with four bunches of flowers, not my style at all, but that's what I was going for
Screenshot of an automated email from LinkedIn about a message in my inbox from Amb. (Rtd) Howard Gutman Managing Director at The Gutman Group/Rtd. U.S. Ambassador to Belgium And when they come for you . . . When you have protestors who disrupt learning and intimidate Jewish students, you don't negotiate, you remove and suspend. You were so blessed to be able to teach at Columbia and yet just seek to disrupt as well. There are plenty of antisemitic schools who will be happy to have you. . . For now. The caring dedicated alumni of Columbia need to and will start the #FireJosephHowley campaign. Ambassador (Rtd) Howard Gutman C'77..
Marsupilami ride
“Whatever’s the matter, Piglet?” said Christopher Robin, who was just getting up. “Thuc,” said Piglet, breathing so hard that he could hardly speak, “a Thicc—a Thuc—a Thucydides.” “Where?” “Up there,” said Piglet, waving his paw.
“Well, good night, Pooh,” said Piglet, when they had got to Pooh’s house. “And we meet at six o’clock tomorrow morning by the Pine Trees, and see how many Thucycideses we’ve got in our Trap.” “Six o’clock, Piglet. And have you got any string?” “No. Why do you want string?” “To lead them home with.” “Oh! . . . I think Thucycideses come if you whistle.” “Some do and some don’t. You never can tell with Thucycideses. Well, good night!” “Good night!”
On a wooden fence by the river Clyde, a poster for the Govan Stones shows a Viking longship in silhouette passing a steamship
Tobias Fünke saying “but it might work for us”
By Matthew Connelly Dr. Connelly is a vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives at Columbia University. As educators, we are duty bound to defend — and advance — human intelligence. To do that, we first need to recognize that it is under attack. Science fiction has long depicted a future in which artificial intelligence becomes so strong, it overpowers humanity. In fact, the battle between bots and brains has already begun, and educators can see how it might end. Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education. Hoping to win recognition as leaders in A.I. or fearful of being left behind, more and more colleges and universities are eagerly partnering with A.I. companies, despite decades of evidence demonstrating the need to test education technology, which often fails to deliver measurable improvements in student learning. A.I. companies are increasingly exerting outsize influence over higher education and using these settings as training grounds to further their goal of creating artificial general intelligence (A.I. systems that can substitute for humans).
In diplomacy, you know you are dealing with an adversary when it sows division in your ranks. Anthropic, for instance, is demanding exorbitant fees for enterprise accounts and paying “campus ambassadors” to promote the use of its Claude A.I. tools in schools. Other companies promise cash bonuses when students meet marketing goals. That creates conflicts of interest, especially when these paid ambassadors hold elected positions in student government.
After the gunpowder and munitions factory closed down in 1919, unemployment and poverty prevailed in Dachau for years. In the 1920s the population predominantly elected political parties of the workers movement or the catholic conservative Bavarian People's Party (BVP). Since 1933 though the National Socialists were able to score a major run. Quite a few of the residents welcomed the establishment of a concentration camp close to the city. They hoped that the economic situation would be improved, for example, through supplying the camp with provisions. Until the mid-1930s there was close economic contact between the city and the camp. The camp complex was incorporated into the city of Dachau in April 1939. The initiative for this was taken by the camp commandant, Hans Loritz. The city of Dachau went through with the plan for economic reasons. But the anticipated economic upturn never occurred.
handsome cloaked Roman points to ugly slave carrying scroll
Manipulative Roman Matron and Roman Veteran
Cassian Andor tells the Sienar Systems technician that she'll never feel okay unless she's doing everything she can to stop the empire, like deleting Jira tickets
The Snowy Day Ezra Jack Keats Narrator 1, Narrator 2, Narrator 3, Narrator 4, Narrator 5, Peter, Friend, Mother Narrator 1: One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. Peter: It’s covered everything, as far as I can see! Narrator 2: said Peter.
The first thing that the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats’s children’s book “The Snowy Day” says is a simple statement of wonder: “It’s covered everything, as far as I can see!” The book has been checked out of the New York Public Library 485,000 times, making it the most popular thing they’ve got.
Indeed, what these 'partnerships' entail is not a relationship of substantive mutual exchange, but a transactional relationship that is informed by the public-relations concerns of both parties. University administrators, motivated by an opportunity to distinguish their institutional brands from those of their competitors, seek the imprimatur of AI. For their part, AI companies covet the prestige and status associated with higher education, particularly the cachet of elite research universities such as Oxford and Columbia. From our perspective as CSU faculty, it seems that the status signifiers accompanying OpenAI’s brand are at least as important to CSU leadership as the technology’s capacities are—especially given the indifferent, minimally detailed rollout of the product to our university community over recent months.5 Thus, it appears that this is primarily a case of mutual but unequal reputation laundering, where the AI firms have nothing to lose, but the university 'partners' absolutely do.
It’s yassified Justinian doing the Jeb Bush pose in front of an electoral map of the Roman Empire I’m so sorry
Keir Starmer saying "there's a famous slogan in the United Kingdom"
I Really Like Slop by Mo Willems
A twitter post from Josie Stratman. "A shrine-like exhibit has been set up for Mayor Adams in City Hall today, replacing the 9/11 photography that was there before." One of them shows Eric Adams in Field of Dreams
it's ray from achewood saying Daaamn! That answer rocks
Syros was not the only pilgrimage spot that seemed, to the Western eye, to have withered on the vine of ancient vitality. When Melville’s ship reached Palestine, his heart sank, just as it had on Syros: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem,” he wrote in his journal.8 The Holy Sepulchre was “a sickening cheat,” and it is again the arid landscape, lacking the bloom of Western painting, that pains the traveler: “Judea is one accumulation of stones.”9 He also saw Christian Zionist missionaries, for whom he had little sympathy: they were in the grips of a “preposterous Jew mania” that was “half melancholy, half farcical.”10 These forces would, of course, soon accelerate during the 1880s, as Zionism expanded beyond its initial Christian purview to inspire Jewish settlers to colonize Palestine. Yet what is less well-known is that the Greek revolution played a crucial role in this process: before Zionists sought to “make the desert bloom,” Hellenism had to bring Watteau’s lush arcadia to life.
The MORN Recension and its Textual Tradition
Within our own time there was a certain rich man named Calvisius Sabinus; he had the bank-account and the brains of a freedman.b I never saw a man whose good fortune was a greater offence against propriety. His memory was so faulty that he would sometimes forget the name of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam,—names which we know as well as we know those of our own attendants. No major-domo in his dotage, who cannot give men their right names, but is compelled to invent names for them,—no such man, I say, calls off the namesc of his master’s tribesmen so atrociously as Sabinus used to call off the Trojan and Achaean heroes. But none the less did he desire to appear learned. So he devised this short cut to learning: he paid fabulous prices for slaves,—one to know Homer by heart and another to know Hesiod; he also delegated a special slave to each of the nine lyric poets. You need not wonder that he paid high prices for these slaves; if he did not find them ready to hand he had them made to order. After collecting this retinue,
The Dude in the Big Lebowski with a speech bubble indicating that the quoted post is his reported speech
For now, however, we faculty are stuck with Columbia as it is. In my case, this means that I must teach social justice journalism not only under the cloud of the Kirk aftermath, with professors and employees being fired or chased out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate, but with the IHRA sword of Damocles dangling over my head. Social justice journalism is essentially about covering the ways in which the powerless are oppressed by the powerful — that is, a manifestation of Joseph Pulitzer’s mantra that journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This means that just about every topic my students will cover flies in the face of all that the Trump government wants to suppress and might well come up against Columbia’s new rules, too. What if one of my students should want to cover the deportation hearings for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech by our former student, the once-imprisoned Mahmoud Khalil? Will even a mention of a Palestinian activist be deemed antisemitic now? Will quoting someone who criticizes Kirk or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned Parenthood or transphobia, the ICE persecution of Brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate catastrophe, environmental racism, violence against women, or Islamophobia? Can we talk about social justice at all?
A gnarly scan of a typewritten document: "[] stated that the employee has made 'strange remarks' in the past; for example, 'I want to live in England because it is a good place and I like their form of government.' However, [] stated it is his opinion that such remarks as the one quoted above were made in a 'pop-off' manner..."
a fragment of Roman graffiti, where the letter A really doesn't look like our letter A, but the software has correctly identified and highlighted the search term
Early last semester, Droubi said, students began approaching Cheyfitz with complaints that a graduate student in the “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” class appeared to be recording them, possibly to “gather their names and comments” and intimidate them. “We believe that a student came to the course for the sole reason of surveilling and potentially harming students in the class,” Droubi said. “That ended up proving itself to be true because multiple students came forward and shared their concerns with Professor Cheyfitz.” Cheyfitz said one Palestinian student quit the class after telling him she felt upset and frightened.
Around four months into the war on Gaza, scholars of genocide were reaching a consensus that what was happening in Palestine was a genocide, the crime of crimes, and I waited for the magazine to say so, too. I tried to talk to the editor-in-chief about using the word in our coverage, but he said he didn’t think it was a genocide. The word’s conspicuous absence led me to suspect that he had prohibited its usage among the editors. This was a notable exception to the accepted epistemology; a few months into the job, I overheard another checker cold call an addiction scholar to confirm that gambling was, in fact, addictive. But I did not have it in me to keep fighting.
The point of this so-called mastery was as familiar as it was conspiratorial—“great replacement.” There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…” You can probably imagine where this line of thinking eventually went. “Jewish donors,” Kirk claimed, were “the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed, “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
“Barnard is a place that catalyzes knowledge creation, embraces investigation, and stimulates intellectual curiosity,” Barnard President Laura Rosenbury wrote in an email she sent me Wednesday evening. And yet, everything that led up to that email has made me wonder if, in fact, this is true. For weeks, President Rosenbury has been quietly working to shut down an event I have been planning with students and staff: a screening of the film Israelism, followed by a discussion with a stellar panel. For weeks, in turn, I have been asserting that as a faculty member, I have a right and a responsibility to cultivate and curate educational events without the interference of the administration. President Rosenbury finally conceded, in an email to me Wednesday night that read, in part, “Ultimately, the decision to screen the film is yours, and you maintain the right to do so in your capacity as a faculty member.”
Colleges and universities have long resisted polarization and monolithic thinking by invoking these commitments to open discussion and inquiry, and we must continue to do so. College campuses must remain places where students are able to ask and grapple with hard questions, especially those that are uncomfortable and even hurtful. Higher education’s role is not to erase conflict but to channel it into dialogue, debate and learning. To do so, educators and students must face ideas we find offensive and speakers whose words cause pain.
A weathered bronze statue of a human figure carrying a massive joint of meat on their shoulders
The most beautiful older shorthair black cat you ever did see lying in the sun on a flagstone
I *really* like slop! By Mo Willems
NYT headline: Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years
The email described access to these tools as “important for gaining a basic level of AI literacy.”
Typical Gen Z! 'Gen Z Stare' results from Generation Z's reading of Stoic philosophy, often used in situational conflict and awkwardness
On the red brick sidewalk outside Columbia University, framed photographs of Awdah Hathaleen, Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Mohammed al-Khalidi, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa. In front of each portrait is a lit votive candle and a rose.
I will always remember receiving death threats after a faculty member continuously posted me on their social media to their hundreds of thousands of followers and viewers; I remember reading the threat aloud to then-interim University President Katrina Armstrong during a meeting. The threats were not only directed toward me: I watched as multiple friends broke down from harassment by University affiliates with insufficient support from Columbia. I will never forget the time I spent filing dozens of harassment reports to the school. I will remember when my winter break was interrupted by a formal notice from the OIE, informing me of an investigation into my involvement with Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition. I was only allowed to see the evidence against me–my own social media posts and personal correspondence–after signing a nondisclosure agreement. As part of this “investigation,” I faced a transcript hold, leaving me unable to apply for jobs and additional graduate study. Despite the charges being dropped, I received no explanation from the OIE about why a transcript hold was placed to begin with.
An excerpt from the University Statutes that reads: “To be true to these principles, the University cannot and will not rule any subject or form of expression out of order on the ground that it is objectionable, offensive, immoral, or untrue. Viewpoints will inevitably conflict, and members of the University community will disagree with and may even take offense at both the opinions expressed by others and the manner in which they are expressed. But the role of the University is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome.”
We do not necessarily agree with Bartov, nor does it matter what our views are. It is possible that the word “genocide” has outlived its usefulness as a means for galvanizing public opinion if the debate about it will come to eclipse the deeds themselves. But embedding the definition into our institutional fabric would prohibit even having this debate at a moment in world history when it is imperative and in the very halls where it stands a chance to be productive precisely because of Columbia’s rich intellectual diversity. What else do scholars and scientists do but compare? How else do we advance the conversation, achieve analytical clarity, reach some agreement about standards to be applied, if not by comparing? How would we know if Israel’s actions constitute genocide or not if we do not compare them to actions by other nations, including the most heinous?
I’m afraid that the actions Columbia has taken, hypocritically encouraged by truly antisemitic U.S. government officials, will have the effect of fomenting anti-Jewish prejudice on a large scale. Scholars of racism and antisemitism will tell you that it is extremely dangerous to single out one group for preferential treatment over others. Columbia has singled out Jews on campus, bending over backwards to respond to their experiences since October 2023, while ignoring the concerns of other groups. This is especially true of the large group of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim members of our community who, among a diverse group of students and faculty protesting a brutal war, have been persecuted, vilified and cruelly silenced by the university.
Late 2nd-century statue of Glycon. (National History and Archeology Museum, Constanţa, Romania). It’s a snake with beautiful flowing hair
A substack push notification containing the phrase “a filthy jew”
What is the use of countless libraries and books whose owner barely reads even the titles of in their entire lifetime? Such a throng of books burdens rather than teaching the student, and it is vastly preferable to hand yourself over to a few authors than to wander through many. Forty thousand volumes burned at Alexandria; someone else might praise this most beautiful monument of kingly opulence, like Livy who called it “the most distinguished work of royal good taste and care.” No, there was no “good taste” or “care” about it, only well-educated luxury – no, you know what? Not even *well-educated*, since they had gathered the books not for the purpose of learning, but as a kind of spectacle, just as many who lack even the literacy of a slave acquire books not as tools for their own study but as decorations for their dining-rooms. Thus, you should only acquire as many books as are sufficient, and none just to show off.