Exploring Antiquity and Modernity with Neville Morley
From the office of Prof. Neville Morley, Supreme Plenipotentiary, Überboss and Vice-Chancellor of Ex University, Earth 2: Your ever-caring and responsive senior management team has heard your pathetic whining about the Why On Earth Should We Keep Paying You? pro-formas, the ever-shifting timescale for their completion and the sheer opacity of our plans for making […]
The sociologist Kieran Healy raised a really good question over on Bluesky today: We’re missing a word for the facing page of text before the start or after the end of a classic journal article. This material survives in the scanned copy of the famous article, a fragmentary and often strange glimpse into forgotten everyday […]
It is deeply uncomfortable to admit, but there is truth in the old claim that one becomes more conservative with age. This isn’t a ‘bit’, burnishing my credentials for an application to become Director of one of the new Centres for Western Civilization that seem to be popping up all over the United States in […]
How is it August already? It’s not that I got nothing done last month, but too much time was absorbed by online meetings, online chats, reading lengthy and often mendacious documents from management and just trying to process what’s happening at the university – above all, the sense that there really is no plan or […]
Like any self-respecting scholar of classical antiquity, I have Opinions about Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey, even if I haven’t seen it yet. (1) Obviously the most important aspect of any such adaptation is how it relates to my own specialist field, so I was delighted to see a clear Thucydidean influence in the rational explanation […]
This will be a shorter newsletter than usual, so I’m glad that I’m not attempting to charge anyone for it… Long-standing readers of this blog, especially those who stuck with the ‘Twelve Days in the Year’ series, will be aware that I’ve been struggling for some years with chronic fatigue of some sort, which was […]
Dear germs colleagues, I acknowledge receipt of your interminable diatribe letter. As your Supreme Plenipotentiary I am of course conscious of the anxiety that these entirely indispensable exterminations regrettable redundancies may be causing you. I and the rest of the senior management team will do everything in our power to get you to stop whining […]
In the good old days before GenAI, anxieties about student plagiarism sometimes focused on essay mills, where one could buy bespoke essays on whatever topic was needed, complete with references and bibliography, TOTALLY UNDETECTABLE by plagiarism software (though obviously that’s not an issue as they were For Research Purposes Only) because they would be unique […]
I’ve never been convinced by the ‘seven stages of grief’ thing, even after they’ve come up with assorted workarounds and cheats to deal with the lack of empirical evidence to support the model as originally proposed (you now don’t have to go through the stages in order, apparently, you can move backwards and forwards between […]
[The other Neville Morley, Supreme President In Chief of Ex University on Earth 2, has a further bulletin.] Earlier this year we introduced a new training course in Corporate Conscience, compulsory for anyone we thought had the potential to cause us trouble. I am aware that some of the more idealistic and naive among you […]