A lot has happened here. I revised my book and sent it to my editor! And also, I got two bunnies. They are perfect beings. Anything I would have written for this newsletter would have devolved into just talking about how obsessed I am with these ridiculous floofs. Look at their reproachful eyes (if you can find the eyes) as I clean rather than attend to their shameful lack of treats:

But I did emerge from bun nesting to write a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the Discourse around the Odyssey movie and how it fits into the long, long history of Take Culture around Homer, going all the way back to Sappho.

This was a dream assignment, honestly: my wonderful editor 1) found me, 2) told me that she wanted me to ramble about weird esoteric myth stuff in my voice, and 3) got me advance tickets to a screening on Monday!!! Sometimes, I really love being a writer.

That said, some jokes didn’t make it into the final piece. There were some that there wasn’t room for, some I didn’t think of until after I actually saw the movie, and some I thought better of before even trying to make them work. But what is my personal newsletter if not a space for me to reveal the weirdest corners of my brain?

Enjoy, and let me know in the comments if you’re interested in more bunny content.

Jokes that my editor (correctly) cut for space, but that really deep-cut fans might enjoy:

Anne Carson renders Sappho’s repeated Greek pronoun as “some men say… and some men say… and some men say… But I say…” The shade! Can men even really understand the Trojan War?

But my favorite text from the Hellenistic period is Theocritus’ Idyll 11, in which an emo teenaged Polyphemus sings about how the sea-nymph Galatea doesn’t love him because of his unibrow and tries to win her over with promises of endless cheese. It’s a sympathetic-villain prequel long before Wicked.

Lucian asks Homer the very same questions you’d have to imagine a celebrity profiler would ask today after fully cataloguing what Homer was wearing and what they ate for lunch:

Most damningly, he says that he wrote every single line, even the ones bracketed by Hellenistic scholars as inauthentic. It’s every scholar’s nightmare: what if all those charred Herculaneum papyri that are about to get unrolled and read by AI accidentally reveal just how wrong you were about every argument you built your career on?

When I started writing [Not All Dead White Men], I was begging people to care what internet trolls were saying about the Stoics, because I believed their interpretations had teeth and legs. But in the decade since, the discourse has effectively lapped itself. And now here I am again, exhausted, hoping we can all stop talking about how much Elon Musk hates that Nolan cast a black woman as Helen of Troy, please.

I haven’t seen as much hand-wringing about Zendaya’s casting as Athena, but maybe that’s because the vein of outrage there was tapped decades ago. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena was originally published in 1987, the year I was born. The professors who first argued about it are emeriti now. It’s almost funny how internet personalities who haven’t really read any ancient literature think that, when they accuse today’s classicists of doing violence to the ancient world by caring more about identity politics than about Greece and Rome, they’re being original.

I can’t think of a more boring question to debate than whether it’s ok to have cast a black woman as a mythological character. I won’t even get into all of the scholarship that’s been written about race in antiquity, eviscerating the fantasy some people still hold on to of an antiquity populated by white people with RP accents.

Bad jokes I whispered to my ex during the movie screening:

“Wow, Travis Scott really putting the ‘rap’ in ‘rhapsode,’ am I right?”

[After Matt Damon says something about “ten years of rage” pouring into Troy when the gates opened:] “Wow, see what they did there? Rage? Like Achil–”

“If Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway don’t have sex in a tree, I want the zero dollars I paid for these tickets back”

Jokes that I didn’t even try to make work:

• something something Telegonus stingray spear Steve Irwin

In good news, I haven’t felt even slightly tempted to look at the comments section for this one. I’m sure it’s a land of nightmares worse than any Odysseus sailed through. And I have my own harsh critics closer to home telling me my work’s truest calling is being nibbled on.

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Normally I’d make a joke here, but the truth is, nothing is a bigger joke than the lack of mental health support in academia. And the trauma of these annual conferences is real, actually! Let’s for one moment not make light of it or wave it off with a sarcastic quip, shall we?

The 2019 SCS in San Diego was, of course, particularly infamous for its multiple incidents of flagrant racial profiling. Most of the time, the stuff that happens isn’t the kind that gets covered by intellectual magazines, but it’s still very real. Every damn year at the SCS, people I know are forced into situations where they are in contact with people by whom they have been sexually harassed or verbally abused in the past (not to mention some of the shit I’ve seen happen at the conference itself). Most have also been part of the dehumanizing experience that is interviewing year after year for an abysmal job market. The conference is inherently challenging for disabled people and a nightmare for the immunocompromised. And even if none of that resonates with you (how?!), academia is absolutely chock-full of undiagnosed, unhealed neurodivergent people, and getting a thousand of them in one place can kind of be a living nightmare.

If you’re in San Francisco this week for the SCS and you realize that your nervous system needs a break from the madness, here are a few of my local suggestions.

Transamerica Redwood Park

Trees ALWAYS help. Even if you don’t have time to make it up to Muir Woods (or the redwood forest in Oakland, a less touristy option that I love), there’s a small redwood grove just a 20 minute walk from Union Square. You can duck away from the conference for an hour and get some of the tree time your nervous system probably desperately craves. And then you’re right near Chinatown! I recommend House of Nanking, the kind of restaurant where you tell them your dietary restrictions and then they bring you food and you trust them that it’ll be delicious.

Drink & Draw at Mother on Tuesday night

If you’re queer, introverted, and artsy, there is no better place to spend your cash on a Tuesday evening. While you’re in the Mission, visit Dandelion Chocolate, which is far superior to Ghiradelli.

City Lights Bookstore

An institution for a good reason, and if you go during the day it’s easier to enjoy the murals on the street.

Exploratorium or CalAcademy Thursday evening

Two of my favorite science-y museums in the city have adults-only hours on Thursday evenings. Shed your uncomfortable conference attire and reconnect with the wonder of your inner child (without having to deal with the noise made by actual children).

Case for Making

I’m sorry, did you think I wasn’t going to include an art store in this list? After I wrote this? There’s a Blick right in Union Square that I will undoubtedly be stopping at, but if you’re up for a bit of a trek for a hidden gem then go to Case for Making, an adorable store that sells handmade watercolors. They also do online workshops that are a lot of fun. Last Halloween I hung out with my overstimulated anxious senior bulldog and took an art class where we made these beetles with ink:

How cute are those?

Escape room at the Palace of Fine Arts

I have a friend who does an escape room every time she visits a new city, and I can vouch that the Palace Games ones are really, really good. There’s also a balloon art exhibit nearby that I’ve heard is fun.

Enjoy your visit to our amazing city. I promise there’s a lot more going on here than dystopian tech companies. And please remember to be kind to yourselves and each other, friends.

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But I wanted to pop back in with some gift ideas. Not Classics-related gift ideas, which have already been handled flawlessly by the wonderful Tori Lee on the Pasts Imperfect newsletter. I need that first vase in my life, I think. My one and only classics-related gift recommendation remains the Iliad-scented deodorant that I’m wearing right now:

Their marketing emails are also a delight, so you might consider signing up for updates even if you don’t intend to buy their overpriced deodorant. A recent email from them included the sentence “We would be nothing without your armpits”. Flawless.

But unlike Tori, who puts together hilarious gift guides that are fun to read even if you have no intention of buying a bunch of random classics-themed stuff, I want to put together a dangerous guide of art supplies that will probably set you off on a path toward starting your own medium-sized craft store in your home.

Yes, I’m still on the art kick I wrote about here:

It’s gotten so much worse since late July, honestly. Empty glass candle jars filled with pens and pencils are now the dominant life form in my home. I’ve filled multiple 100+-page sketchbooks. I did THREE daily art challenges in October. I’ve stopped pretending that I’m ever going to host a dinner party and turned my dining room table into my art studio. And I can only imagine this state is going to continue to worsen, because art has become one of the most consistently joyful, fun, and soul-nourishing parts of my life, and the last time I made the mistake of looking up from my sketchbooks the world outside my dining room window wasn’t getting any less exhausting and soul-crushing. Replacing mindless doomscrolling and iPhone games with sketching has, I regret to say, made me a healthier, better-adjusted, more mindful person. Gross, I know.

If you want to follow in my extremely cringey footsteps, here are my top recommendations. I tried to link to my favorite art supply stores where possible, but I’m not getting any sponsorship money or affiliate links from any of these products. I’m just a simp.

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favorite art subscription: Sketchbox

If I had to pick a single gateway drug to an art practice, it would be a Sketchbox subscription. For $25 for the basic version and $35 for the premium, at the beginning of every month you receive a curated box with a relatively small collection of high-quality art supplies. Not that small, to be honest. December’s “color shift watercolor” box has six colored pencils (plus a bonus white one), five full pans of iridescent watercolor, a tube of white watercolor, a water brush, a gold pen, and ten sheets of coldpress 100% cotton paper (5 black, 5 white). There’s plenty to go on there to paint all the Christmas ornaments your heart could desire.

Nearly every box contains something that I find to be an absolute delight. Since I subscribed in March only one box has been kind of a dud for me, and even that’s mostly a matter of taste, I think — I just wasn’t at all into April’s box of neon-colored matte acrylics. But May’s alcohol marker box was a gem. July’s “watercolor journey” box was another standout for me, featuring a metal tin with twelve watercolor half-pans and a Hahnemühle accordion-style sketchbook that I used to document my trip to Greece last summer. I can’t recommend this subscription enough, and although it’s not cheap the price is comparable to other art subscription boxes and the value is much better than anything else I’ve seen.

favorite single art kit if price is no object: Mossery

If you have $200 to drop on a single art kit, or have an extremely generous relative looking for gift ideas, these are really great. I bought myself the James Chapman kit and filled out every damn workbook page and the entire sketchbook that came with it. I’m taking my sweet time with the Gretel Lusky alcohol marker kit, but it’s an absolute treat.

favorite sketchbook that is also everyone else’s favorite because I’m a basic bitch: talens art creation

When I was in Greece this summer, my dad saw me sketching and said, “Oh, I have so many blank notebooks! I should give them to you!” That poor man had no idea what he was in for, because I immediately told him that I’ve become kind of a nightmare with my opinions about paper. When he asked me what kind of opinions, I started ticking them off on my fingers: thickness, roughness, material, color. And in a sketchbook also size, shape, and binding type. At some point he fled, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting any notebooks from him for the holidays.

Fortunately, my partner’s sister is an artist who’s very happy to geek out about paper with me. When I was in Berlin earlier this year she took me to a wonderful art store called Modulor, where I promptly lost my mind. Among my purchases was a small, square sketchbook that quickly became one of my most prized possessions. As it started to fill up, I realized it might be hard to find another without returning to Berlin or paying 90 euros in shipping, so I did some research. And that’s when I discovered that it was essentially identical (down to the precise size, page count, and paper weight) to the Talens Art Creation sketchbooks that every single artist on Instagram raves about. Oops.

Unsurprisingly, every art influencer has a point, because this sketchbook rules. It’s portable, reasonably priced, and its pages hold up really well to pretty much everything. You wouldn’t want to use them for, like, a full-on watercolor piece using wet-on-wet techniques, although a light wash of water is fine, especially if you use a clip. Alcohol markers do bleed through, but the bleed is easy to cover with acrylic marker or gouache, both of which it holds up to great. I’m on my third of these now, if you count the original Modulor one. My most recent art deco-y one has pure white pages, but I slightly prefer the off-white that most of them have. Opinions!

favorite colored pencils: Derwent Drawing

I only started using colored pencils in, like, October, so my opinions are fairly lightly held. But I’ve been using them a lot, and these are the ones I reach for the most, including to take on walks. They have a lovely thick core and waxy texture, and the muted, nature-inspired limited colored palette just makes for really nice drawings. I opened these two months ago and my favorites are already starting to get a little low.

favorite pencils: Blackwing

Another extremely ice-cold take, but sometimes a good thing is just good, you know? And these pencils are just good. I like that they don’t mess around with Bs and Hs: the pencils come in matte, balanced, firm, and extra firm. The firm is great for very light sketches, and matte is my absolute favorite pencil for soft, smudgy marks, although of course conversely it holds a sharp point for lol amount of time. Their colored pencils are also fun (and erasable! sort of! not really, but more than most).

favorite pen: sakura micron PN

Everyone loves a Sakura Micron, a hands-down great artist-quality pen with archival, waterproof ink made by the company that makes the status-y gelly roll pens everyone was obsessed with in middle school. (Gelly rolls still slap, by the way. Their white pen is great.) Many artists use these in an 01 thickness, a great fineliner choice, but my personal favorite is the PN (plastic nib) variety. It’s sort of like a very firm brush nib and can actually lay down a variety of different thicknesses of line, which is great. I thought this was an unusual preference, but a fairly recent Strategist guide also listed it as “the very best pen for writing and art.” So you don’t need to take just my word for it.

favorite art supply that everyone in my family loves: koh-i-noor magic fx pencil

I don’t think I’d used one of these multi-colored pencils since elementary school, but I saw someone drawing mugs with them on instagram and was totally charmed. Now they’ve become my go-to for warm-ups, just to loosen up and get started making marks. My favorite is to use them for cute little master studies. But they’re also great for making art with kids, because it takes the choice element out of picking art supplies and stops decision fatigue.

favorite art game: mythical creatures

If you’re looking for something fun to use those pencils on, this game is my favorite. I’ve tried a few different art prompt games, but this one has just the right mix of whimsy and structure. You pick from three animal decks (small, medium, and large), a deck of settings, and a deck of random details (the weakest part IMO) to create a strange and horrifying chimera. My ex and I are also regulars at “Drink and Draw” night at her favorite lesbian bar, and the game is a big hit there too.

favorite art supply if you want to create a lot in a chill way: arrtx acrylic markers

These markers have been everywhere lately. I think Arrtx just sent a set to every artist with more than 50K subscribers, or something? But they really are a good value. They come in a ton of colors, they have a nice brush nib, and they don’t shred your paper the way Poscas do. (I love a good Posca, but let’s be real. Those things make even pretty sturdy paper pill like an old sweater.) They’re opaque enough to fix mistakes but transparent enough that you can get some cool effects by layering light on top of dark or muted on top of bright, like doing an underpainting with gouache or ink. And you truly can’t beat markers for a low-maintenance art supply: there’s no setup and no cleanup. Keep a set near your bed and color first thing in the morning, and I guarantee you’ll start the day in a better mood than if you started scrolling.

favorite art supply that’s also a fidget toy: faber-castell kneaded eraser

Real-ass artists recommend kneaded erasers for lightening your base sketches, and also because they can be formed to a really specific shape to allow you to remove pencil tone in a highly controlled way. I, on the other hand, recommend kneaded erasers because they’re the best damn fidget toy I’ve ever found. They’re sort of like a slime — the good ones with a lovely texture, like Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty — but if you stretch it far enough it gets a really soft, almost kinetic sand-type consistency. I would say I’m now futzing with some of this in 100% of Zoom and phone calls. I can’t recommend it enough.

favorite art supply for making art in unexpected ways: caran d’ache neocolor II

There are so many fun ways to use these Swiss water-soluble wax pastels (not to be confused with their neocolor I water-resistant pastels, which are basically just expensive crayons). They’re an ideal travel art supply, and they add great texture to mixed-media sketches. My personal favorite, extremely niche neocolor use is to keep a tin next to my bathtub with a mixed-media paper sketchbook. I either use a water brush to activate them or dip the neocolors directly into the bathtub for smudgy marks. My bath sketchbook is an absolute delight, 12/10, can’t recommend keeping one enough.

favorite stickers, 2025 edition: stickii

In the past I’ve raved about Pipsticks, and they still have a place in my heart, but Stickii is my new love. I feel a little insane saying this about stickers, but they feel more adult than Pipsticks (although I am low-key obsessed with the NSFW secret Pipsticks Swear Jar store). But Stickii works with a lot of indie artists, and they offer sticker organization options for the true sickos among us. Classicists may especially want to snap up their dark academia/light academia pack, or just subscribe to the Vintage monthly packs.

for the truly insane with an infinite budget and a need to make classics part of everything: a custom set of parthenon-inspired watercolors

We’re past the point where we’re still blowing people’s minds by telling them that ancient statues were painted, right? Everyone now knows that the Parthenon was absolutely garish? God, I hope so.

Anyway, when I was in Greece, I snapped this picture at the Acropolis Museum of the most commonly used ancient pigments:

It took a lot of research, but I eventually found a single handmade watercolor company that makes all of these pigments using the actual minerals, which my 12-year-old daughter informs me are mostly extremely toxic (apparently realgar and orpiment are both arsenic sulfides, and yes, I’m slightly concerned about how much she knows about esoteric poisons). L’oeil, fortunately, doesn’t care, so you can put together a full set with their bone black, azurite, malachite, chrysocolla, cinnabar, hematite, realgar, ochre, and orpiment. Lead oxide white (cut off at the edge of the photo) was, I guess, a bridge too far. Most of these will set you back about $20 for a full pan, except the azurite, which costs 80 freaking dollars.

I want to be clear that this isn’t the kind of thing where I’m saying “it will cost you $200, but it’s sooooo worth it!” It is not worth it. I did get myself these watercolors, because I had a concept that I was going to do a gorgeous watercolor painting of the Parthenon using them, and I started playing with them and they’re just… fine. Unsurprisingly, our knowledge about pigments and chroma and what have you has come a long way in 2500 years. (If you’re willing to chill out on the “contains the actual minerals used in antiquity” thing, A. Gallo — my favorite premium watercolor brand — has a $15 half pan of “azurite hue”. So it’s still a lot, but you’ll get a gorgeous color with excellent lightfastness for much less money.) But if you need a very niche and specific art/classics gift that almost certainly won’t arrive before Christmas, this is it.

Happy holidays to all. If I’m being honest, I probably won’t send you anything again until 2026. Let’s hope the end of 2025 is relatively chill and uneventful. It owes us that, I think.

Hartman writes:

Was my decision to entitle Kafka’s bug story The Transformation “brash, if not brassy,” as the writer Joy Williams asserts in the May 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine? Surely not. It was Kafka himself, who, having translated a section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses at his rigorous Prague secondary school, did not call the bug story Die Metamorphose but rather Die Verwandlung.

The word “Verwandlung” held personal significance for Kafka, who uses it to describe changes that he perceives in some childhood photographs in a letter to Felice Bauer written while he was composing Die Verwandlung: “At that time I think I still belonged completely to myself, and seem to have been very content that way. As the eldest, I was photographed a lot and so there is a long series of transformations (Verwandlungen).”

I love this recusatio, although honestly, it has to be a little disingenuous, right? Obviously translating the title of “Kafka’s bug story” (amazing description, btw) as The Transformation is a bold move. I don’t know if “brassy” is exactly the word I’d use for it, but it’s not far off. It’s sort of a BDE translator move, honestly, to take a text with as well-established a translated title as The Metamorphosis and go back to the drawing board. The whole “Surely not. It was Kafka himself” rings a bit false to me. But I enjoy the attitude.

If I were a betting woman, I would say that even though I like Harman’s choice here — and I might even think it’s the correct choice, as a translator — I wouldn’t put money on it standing the test of time. I think The Metamorphosis as a title is here to stay, like it or not, as is The Brothers Karamazov, a title that feels extremely outdated but will probably stay frozen and never shift to the much more contemporary-feeling The Karamazov Brothers. (Or even just The Karamazovs?)

With that said, if a brave translator with enough rizz wants to come in and change some titles, here are a few that I badly think need an update.

The Apology

It will not surprise you to hear that, as an undiagnosed autistic 16-year-old, I had a rough time my first year of college. I was a mess. I immediately got involved with a guy four years older than me who had a girlfriend, let him pick the humanities and social studies sequences I was then stuck with for the rest of the year, and then spent the next few months in a state of sobbing, sloppy denial after he told me he was staying with his girlfriend. I was convinced we were meant to be together. (Although, amazingly, he and I did get together 15 years later, and have now been together for six years!! Sorry, 16-year-old Donna, you were just way ahead of your time.)

The one saving grace of that first year was that I had truly the perfect freshman roommate. She was so kind and smart and wonderful. Just an all-around lovely person, even when I was a total disaster.

We used to read each other’s essays and give notes, and I distinctly remember that one of her essays was about how the title of Plato’s Apology was disingenuous because it turns out that Socrates isn’t remotely apologetic. It’s probably a good thing that I hadn’t taken any Greek yet and didn’t yet know that apologia means something like “a formal defense of a position” in Greek and implies absolutely nothing like the word “apology” does in English, because I probably would have been insufferable about it. Then again, she was such a genuinely good human and student that she probably would have thanked me for helping her out.

This isn’t intended as a dunk on her at all, and not even on her professor. The humanities sequences at the University of Chicago are taught in a New Criticism model, which is to say, there isn’t much emphasis on placing texts in their social and historical context. You’re reading for form and ideas. If your professor happens to know about the social and political context, you better bet you’re going to hear about it, but they’re covering thousands of years of literary history and they don’t know about everything.

So the blame goes not to my roommate or the underpaid adjunct who was teaching her, but to literally hundreds of years of lazy translators who have been content to let this misleading title stand. A brave translator would title the text something like Socrates Represents Himself in Court, Like One of Those Morons in Law & Order Who Ignore the Advice of the Judge. Spoiler Alert: He Gets Convicted and Executed. It may seem like a stretch, but everything in my title actually happened, unlike Apology. Do it, you cowards.

Oedipus Rex

This one, admittedly, is a bit of a low-key obsession of mine, because what asshole is responsible for the insertion of a random Latin word into the Greek title? One of the shibboleths of the discipline of classics is that you will never, ever hear a classicist refer to this text as Oedipus Rex. Only stuck-up English majors who want to sound fancy do that. Actual classics people will always refer to it by either its proper title, Oedipus Tyrannos, or just as Oedipus, because let’s face it: everybody knows which of the two plays titled Oedipus you’re talking about. Only the most pedantic asshole will say, “I’m sorry, are you referring to Oedipus Coloneus, the unloved play nobody ever reads and clear loser of the the so-called Theban trilogy (although we educated people all know isn’t actually a trilogy, of course, but rather three plays written and performed separately over a period of decades)?” Look, we can be a pretty obnoxious bunch, but nobody is that obnoxious.

But because I’m not not obnoxious, I also need to take this soapbox moment to point out that “tyrannos” is a really specific and brilliant word here, because tyrannoi were typically not hereditary kings, so Oedipus is considered a tyrannos because he became king after he defeated the Sphinx. Although of course he is also a hereditary king, much to his horror. So the title itself encapsulates the fundamental tragic irony of the play and the mismatch in knowledge and viewpoint between the characters and the audience. “Rex” could never.

Suppliant Women

“Which Suppliant Women do you mean, Donna? Aren’t there several?” Yes. Yes there are. Most Greek tragedies and comedies are titled based on their choruses, and, as you might guess, there were a number of plays where the chorus was a group of women begging a man to help them out against another man or group of men trying to do something terrible to them. Just a cool, fun reminder. And let’s not forget that all these plays were written by men and performed by men for a male audience and likely don’t reflect actual empathy for actual women, but rather a way to process some complex feelings about socially constructed gender norms in a safe space before returning to everyday patriarchal bullshit. These plays deserve new titles, and women deserve better, period.

Bonus Round: A Play Renamed Correctly

Plays that weren’t named after their choruses are usually named after the protagonist. “Protagonist” (first actor) is a technical term here — the lead actor played the character with the most lines, like Medea or Oedipus, while the deuteragonist (second actor) played a cast of characters brought on to disagree with or challenge them, and then the tritagonist (third actor) played a number of usually-unnamed messengers with bit parts. This means that the protagonist of the play we call Antigone played Creon, and indeed, early records suggest that might have been the show’s original name. However, Antigone is the character we all care about most, and it’s definitely her play. I’m glad this one stuck.

Readers, are there any texts whose titles fill you with inarticulate rage? Share in the comments!

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But then something changed. And I’m so grateful, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. But first, here’s the story.

Looking back, I think it started when I was shopping for holiday gifts for my kids and saw a cute travel watercolor set with a sketchbook and cover and thought, hmmm. I didn’t get it, but the seed was planted, and a little while later I bought a small watercolor palette and some paper and started painting. I had no idea what the hell I was doing and was pretty bad at it.

In the past that definitely would have been where this journey stopped, because as a recovering gifted kid, I really struggle with doing things that I’m bad at. Between that and my time in academia, which taught me that you should never open your mouth if you might be wrong or show someone work that is less than 100% polished, I’ve got some pretty serious baggage in this area. Just last week I was at a fun, friendly, intensely competitive friends-and-family quiz bowl night and I realized just how hard it is for me to open my mouth unless I’m 100% bulletproof sure I know the answer. An eleven-year-old beat me on a question about Greek mythology, the literal topic of my expertise that this newsletter is about. Yup.

One of the hardest parts about picking up a hobby as an adult is that you swiftly run face-first into the inevitable gap between your taste and your ability. Kids don’t have this problem, mostly. Some are perfectionists from birth. But most don’t really know what “good” art is, so they dgaf if their rainbows are wonky as hell. They sing at the top of their lungs even when they have no pitch. They don’t obsess about spelling and grammar. Something to aspire to, honestly.

But because I had impulse-purchased a bunch of art subscription boxes during a wave of existential despair following the inauguration in January, I couldn’t immediately drop this new hobby the moment I realized I was bad at it. And I got better much faster than I expected to, which was surprising and gratifying. There’s probably a lesson there about all the hobbies I’ve abandoned in the last twenty years, but I’m not going to think about it too hard for sanity reasons.

I’ve been traveling a lot this month, which is why I haven’t been updating this newsletter as regularly. (I figured you’d all welcome the inbox break.) Normally I’m pretty bad at journaling when I travel, even if I’m in the practice of regularly doing morning pages at home. But this time I’ve been loving using art to document my travels. I spent a week in Greece, and it was so much fun to paint what I saw. I regret to say that everyone who has said that sketching your travels helps you experience them on a different, deeper level was completely right. I’m so sorry.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this practice has been so meaningful for me, and I think there are two major reasons. And if you’re a writer, both of them might help you!

I started making art when I needed a creative outlet during a break from working on my book. My manuscript was with my editor, and the #1 rule of having material with your editor is: DON’T FUCK WITH IT. The last thing you want is to end up having to reconcile two different manuscripts.

But then all of the anti-trans executive orders started coming through, on a pretty much weekly basis, and not working on my book became downright excruciating. So I painted instead, and honestly, it helped a lot emotionally. I cannot recommend it enough.

Art has also helped me access something I thought I had lost, or maybe never had: a softness, or earnestness, or vulnerability. Like many millennials, I’m a little bit irony-poisoned by nature. In the first draft of my memoir every time I came close to having a feeling I deflected it with either a sarcastic quip or over-intellectualizing analysis. And like many writers online, I’ve also built up a pretty thick skin to harassment after a few brutal run-ins with far-right troll mobs. But the first time I realized that I felt nothing when I was called a [Jewish slur redacted] [misogynist slur redacted], I didn’t feel proud or relieved, I felt… sad. I mourned my lost softness. A thicker skin feels like a mixed blessing at best. And while it may be an unfortunate necessity to have one while existing and promoting your work as a writer, it’s also something of a liability to your work, because how can you write true and beautiful and deeply funny things if your soul is just one giant callus?

I felt very alone in this ambivalence for a long time. When I tried to describe my sadness about the thickening of my skin, it felt like people responded with a shrug and a yeah, it sucks, but that’s just how it is. But then I read this gorgeous piece by the always-on-point :

More to Hate

Stupid C*nt Writing Stupid Things

“Stupid cunt writing stupid things.” This was one of the first tweets I remember receiving after publishing my first op-ed, in the New York Times, in 2013. I had signed up for Twitter shortly beforehand, and had very few followers. I still remember a four-and-a-half hour bus ride from Ithaca to New York City where the reactions came so thick and fast—many of them critical, some of them laudatory, a few of them abusive or threatening—that all I did was refresh my phone, bewildered, just trying to get my head around what was happening…

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a year ago · 131 likes · 18 comments · Kate Manne

All of it resonated so much, but especially Myth 4:

Our sensitivity, after all, is part of what often leads to being invested in and good at this work in the first place. Our sensitivity may indeed be something precious—morally and politically. Our sensitivity helps us to feel for, and with, others, and motivates the act of bearing witness and refusing to remain silent. So I am distinctly ambivalent about growing less sensitive over time, let alone deliberately cultivating a “thick skin” in the way many writers are told to. Maybe we just need to sit with, and seek support for, the big feelings we’re entitled to following certain kinds of very public firestorms.

Manne links to this beautiful piece by the poet Joy Sullivan, where she writes that her “primary task as a poet” is “to remain open and bruisable to this world.” I love that. Physically, I bruise easily — I like to joke that there’s an old, overripe banana somewhere in my mom’s side of our family tree — and I can remember a time, as a sweet and sensitive kid, when I bruised just as easily emotionally. And I want to get back to that. I strongly suspect that what I need to bring my writing to the next level is to fuse the big feelings of that earnest little kid with some of the humor, sharpness, and insight I’ve cultivated as an adult. And I think drawing will help me get there, because I’m extremely open and vulnerable and bruisable about it. A guy on Instagram said that a goofy little dragonfruit dragon I drew with oil pastels looked like it was drawn by a child, and I was crushed. I mean, he wasn’t wrong! But still, ouch.

So I licked my wounds for a little bit, and then I made this:

Have I considered that, if this practice is just for me, maybe I should keep it secret and not share it with people online? Yes, of course I have, and that’s my plan for 99% of what I make. But I thought it might be worth risking a bruising to share some of what I made if there’s a chance I could inspire anyone else to give this kind of creativity a shot.

Do you have an art practice? Are you curious about which art supplies, companies, and kits I’m obsessed with and which I think are totally worth passing on? Share in the comments! But be nice, please. I’m not looking for validation, but also I’m just a sensitive baby artist, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to a three-year-old about their wonky-ass rainbows.

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If I’m being honest, the state of the world is taking a toll on me, creatively speaking. I’m finding my manuscript revision for my memoir more challenging than expected. At the same time, people have been contacting me more with questions relating to my first book, Not All Dead White Men, which unfortunately feels extremely relevant once more.

For those interested, I wrote an essay for Foreign Policy about comparisons between Donald Trump and Julius Caesar. It was fun to write, but it definitely made me think more about how I got into this kind of work, which isn’t typical for classical scholars. Most of the time.

A few weeks ago, I talked with Rhiannon Garth Jones about her book All Roads Lead to Rome:

Inevitably, though, in addition to talking about the content of the book, she and I got to talking about the meta element — the process of writing a book like this, one that is both academic and highly researched with respect to material from thousands of years ago while also speaking directly to the contemporary extremely online world. It’s a weird feeling! Most classicists, I assume, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about memes as part of the process of writing their books, so it was a real treat for me to get a chance to talk with someone who has shared that experience — and had colleagues gently warn her about the dangers of it, as mine did.

This is a very exciting book. I tore through it in a weekend, I loved it so much. And, on a personal level, you are doing me a huge favor, because people ask me about the Roman Empire and tech bros all the time.

I cannot stress this enough. Understandably, most people look at the title and the subtitle, and they’re like, “Oh, really cool that when that meme happened, you were sort of ready to go,” and I’m like, “No, no, I wrote that proposal 4 months before.” The meme sort of started the same week that we’d sent out the proposal. The universe really had my back on this, which is not a thing I feel like I say very often.

Well, the opposite has happened to me now, twice, where I have submitted a manuscript, and then a little while later, Donald Trump got elected and I had to rewrite the whole thing.

I was literally just joking with someone, I would love for my work to be slightly less relevant, actually. “May your work be less relevant” is what academics should wish for each other, in my opinion.

Thank you!

Maybe not totally irrelevant, but just not so… soul-crushingly of the moment.

You’re one of the only people I know who have had this experience. I do like to joke, “Ah yes, that normal part of the classical scholar’s book process, where they have to be on the internet every day reading the news to figure out what’s going on with the present moment and how their book is going to deal with it, and not poring over fragments from 2500 years ago.”

I wrote it in a very condensed timeframe. I handed in my PhD dissertation on the 31st of January. I had, like, 3 days of celebrating. And then I wrote it in less than 7 months, which is not a thing I would advise anyone to do.

Wow.

But I think in some ways, it helped a little bit with that overwhelming pressure of how, every damn day, something was happening in the news that just felt so incredibly relevant to what I was thinking about and working with. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t have longer to write this manuscript.

I remember with Not All Dead White Men, there was a moment where I was finishing up the revised version in July and August 2017, and that was when all the stuff was happening in Charlottesville, and I was sort of like, “Do I take a few more months and add another chapter about Sparta and far-right militias?” And ultimately we decided not to, in part because… what would happen in those few months? Would I feel like, okay, well, now we need another chapter about specific Roman emperors? Thank you for doing that for me, by the way.

But at a certain point, I just felt that I was done. The next person can build on my work, or I’ll build on it in the next project.

And I think that absolutely has to be the attitude, right? Someone else can take it from here, and if they don’t, I guess I’ll pick myself back up and go again. But I had the exact same thing. I was finishing in the summer, and I was watching the US election…

The Zoom transcript is not capturing how much I’m just shaking my head in sadness and dismay.

Yes, and my hand movements of despair.

So this is a very exciting book for a ton of reasons, and I’m glad that you were able to really capitalize on that moment. It builds on some of your dissertation research, right? That’s why you were able to sort of turn that around so fast.

Yeah, although, comically, not a lot. Half of Chapter 8, that’s my dissertation. To be honest, maybe more like a third of Chapter 8. But a lot of the bigger picture stuff, a lot of the threads that run through, a lot of what emerges in the chapters on the British Empire and the German and Italian empires on academia and archaeology, that’s very much stuff I learned and worked with as part of the process of my PhD. I’ve been thinking about this for a good 10, 15 years. So it wasn’t like I just sat down to write the book out of nowhere. And then I covered nine empires in the books, so it was more like, okay, I think I have the framework, I have the theoretical underpinnings, I've got some really rock-solid case studies. Fortunately, I think it was just a good hypothesis.

It’s an excellent hypothesis. And I do think it is an unusual kind of book for a younger scholar to write. It’s got a really wide scope, and such a relevant, of-the-moment topic.

This might sound kind of mean about myself, but a number of people have told me, “Oh, this is such a you kind of book. Only you are sufficiently strange to have this enormous breadth of interest that you could pull together.” I kind of joke quite a lot that I'm intellectually tarty.

Nice.

Because I am, honestly. I mean that in a good way.

Is there a bad way to mean that? We should all be more intellectually… I’m trying to think what Americans would say, because Americans wouldn’t say tarty, right? They’d say, you know, intellectually promiscuous.

Yes, that works! We should all be more intellectually promiscuous. And yes, a lot of people were like, “Oh, do you really want this to be your first book? Do you not want to write an academic monograph? Do you want it to be this popular and kind of informal thing?” And the whole time, I was thinking… I might only get one book. I might not have an academic career. Have you seen academia? My chances aren’t great. And even if they were, I want to do this more, and I want to do it in this way. More than I want, I don't know, the box check on my academic CV or whatever.

I was in the same place 10 years ago. When I signed the contract for Not All Dead White Men, my editor was like, “Just so you know, you're going to be unhireable on the tenure track if you do this as your first book. Ethically, I can’t have you write this if you don’t understand that.” And I completely believed her! I didn’t think, “Oh, no, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I made the same choice you did, because I thought, “I want to do more stuff like this. I don’t want to go back in that box.”

I think I got a lot of very similar advice from a lot of people who were incredibly well-intentioned and supportive, and they weren't saying “it's a bad idea” or “you shouldn't do it.” They were just like, “Do you fully understand what you're doing?” And I was like, “Yeah. And I'll be honest, I don't really want to fit their rubric, and also, have you met me? I'm never going to.”

Hard same.

I'm actually fine with that, thank you.

My heart really goes out to you, making that choice. But if it makes you feel better, I don't regret it for a second.

It’s a very popular style of book, obviously. I think that’s pretty obvious from page one. I had a lot of colleagues and friends peer review each chapter informally. I’m not going to tackle the entire historiography of Imperial Russia without getting some people to check this for me. And literally every single time I asked an academic colleague to read it, I had to preface it with, “I need you to know the tone is deliberately informal compared with what you’re used to, and that will not be changing.” Nearly every time I got some sort of text or email that said, “I get that you prepared me, but I was a little surprised.” But this is not a book for academics. I hope some academics will read it and enjoy it, obviously. But they are not the primary audience.

I had the opposite side of that. I published mine through Harvard University Press, so people expected it to be more academic. And then I got a lot of people being like, “It was much more readable than I expected it to be! It was almost fun, except that the topic was… so not fun.”

Incredibly not fun. I’ve read your book. I think that’s such a funny indictment of how we think about academic writing so often. Your book is definitely accessible, from what I remember, and engaging, but I wouldn’t have said it was not academic.

My very first version was more sarcastic. And then my editor made me cut the snarkiness.

I was delighted at how many of the snarky footnotes my editors let me get in.

Yes, sorry, when I said cut the snarkiness, she meant put it in footnotes, which I did.

But that’s just good academia, right? Academics do snarky footnotes all the time.

Honestly, apart from how wonderful some of the individual people I've met have been, the main selling point for academia I have encountered over the last 5-6 years isthat you can be really snarky in footnotes.

Thank you all for supporting Myth Takes, a place where I feel completely free to be as snarky as I want in the main body text (although I do still love a footnote). I’ll be publishing less regularly this summer, but I’m still here, and I appreciate you.

As with Not All Dead White Men, I believe that the work I’m doing in Antiquated is even more urgent and necessary than it was before Trump got elected. The world needs queer stories that are complex and messy and human. But doing that work of reimagining? It’s hard. See also: this post from two months ago.

It’s even harder this time than it was in 2017. I’ve been told that no matter how many books you write, each one is harder than the last. I believe it. Somewhat counterintuitively, it is much easier to say something true in scholarship than in memoir. Even if you’re telling a story of events that happened to you, getting to the heart of those events requires a kind of patience and excavation and humility that I wasn’t completely prepared for.

Also, last time I rethought an entire manuscript to meet a political moment, I had a neurodivergent four-year old. Now she’s twelve and in middle school, and I’ve added two six-year olds and an old bulldog and two coparents and a life that is just orders of magnitude more complex than what I was working with in 2017. Richer and more joyful, but definitely more complex. My brain is a busy hive of logistics bees — have I sent in the health forms for summer camp? Does anyone need a medication refill? Should I be worried that the dog’s ear infection doesn’t seem to be resolving? Just how long can I continue to drive with that “low tire pressure” alert without doing something about it? Are we out of milk/laundry detergent/fucks to give for each other’s bullshit? And when those bees start swarming, it becomes next to impossible for me to write anything I don’t want to delete immediately.

I’ve been working on this book for so long that digging into the revision feels like a visit with an old friend who knows me extremely well but who I haven’t seen in ages. The first hour or so, you’re just catching each other up on what’s going on in your lives. How’s your new role at work going? Contractors sure are a nightmare, right?

After the throat-clearing is done, you get into what’s really going on with you under the surface. And then by the end of the evening you’re into the stuff so deep that you didn’t even realize it was there, and it isn’t until you hear yourself say it that you realized how much it needed to be said. Stuff like “I definitely need to leave my job” or “do I really believe in God” or “I want to re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol” or “I think the trauma from X event is impacting my ability to live my life.”

If you’re a Morning Pages person, you know what I mean. It’s the work that happens on Page 3. Most days, by the time I’m nearing the end of Page 2, I’ve written all the thoughts that were in my brain and I’m strongly tempted to call that enough. But the stuff that happens on Page 3 is the real stuff. Everything that you’re secretly furious with your partner about but pushing down, everything you’re so ashamed of it hurts to even look at it directly.

The question that’s occupying me these days is: how to I get to the ocean floor of my own mind, where all the colorful and violent and bizarre sea creatures are? I don’t want my reader to spend the entire memoir there — that sounds exhausting. But I also suspect that any memoir worth reading takes the reader down into those depths every so often before bringing them up to the surface. You need to be able to get to Page 3, which is almost impossible to do in the presence of logistics bees and children with big feelings and subcontractors who are treating the moss on my roof and a dog who seems to have become allergic to herself, somehow?

I wish that I could give you some kind of easy, foolproof trick for getting to that ocean floor. If I even claimed to have one, this would be a very different kind of newsletter. I’ve been noticing an increasing number of Substack newsletters focusing on giving advice on how to improve/grow/monetize your Substack newsletter, and the content therein usually boils down to the fairly obvious: figure out what value you’re bringing your readers, and then give it to them consistently.

But instead of dropping a paywall here, I’m going to give you a list of suggestions for getting to the ocean floor that I guarantee you already know.

1. Go for a walk. I know: groundbreaking. Bring your dog and prepare to reassure passing concerned strangers that her reverse sneezing is totally normal and not a seizure

2. Journal. Morning Pages feel cheesy almost every time, but they work

3. Meditate — or, better yet, treat yourself to a massage and let your mind wander

I hate so much that those three things really work. So here are three things that also seem to work for me, but are less boring and grown-up:

1. Dancing in your underwear

2. Starting a deeply weird art project, like carving erasers into stamps

3. Exactly the right amount of alcohol, maybe about 1.5 drinks, and then getting really angry about something

And here are three things that have never worked, not once:

1. Staring at a blank Google doc

2. Either negative or positive self-talk

3. Giving yourself a deadline (“I must access my deepest, hardest thoughts by next Tuesday at the latest”)

Ultimately, my best advice is that when you find yourself procrastinating by handling a bunch of other annoying bullshit — just let that happen. It might feel like you’re avoiding the hard work by doing literally anything other than it, but really you’re calming down all the swarming logistics bees, which is key.

Your mileage may vary, of course. And noticing and paying attention to what does and doesn’t work for you, with curiosity and without judgment, is an important part of the journey. Actually, maybe it is the journey. Noticing everything your brain does to avoid really being with itself is the hardest and most essential work.

Good luck getting to your own ocean floors, friends. I can’t wait to see what deeply weird stuff is down there.

Which is why I’m SO grateful to Rhiannon Garth Jones for addressing this question in her new book, All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily. Rhiannon goes through the long history of empires identifying as, with, or in conversation with Rome to show all the ways that Rome has become a shorthand for power. She’s also done me personally a huge service, because I can answer all of those messages in my locker by pointing people to her work.

Rhiannon was kind enough to talk with me over Zoom about her wonderful book. The conversation was so rich that I’m actually dividing it into two sections. I’ll publish another, shorter one about the process of writing this kind of public-facing academic book in a future newsletter.

Rhiannon Garth Jones is a medieval historian who works with material culture and textual sources to think about how people used the past to define their own identity and project power. Her PhD explored the Abbasid caliphs’ relationship with Rome through their art, architecture, and cities during the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam, offering new insights into this pivotal period. Her book, All Roads Lead To Rome, explores the way ancient Rome has been used by cultures, empires, and religions in ways that still impact the world today.

One of the parts of your book that I found the most fascinating was the idea that there hasn’t really been a sort of uncontested site of primary Roman-ness – I don’t want to use the word ‘romanitas’, which you use rarely in the book, because I think it means something in the context of ancient Rome and then it doesn’t get used a lot later on. So I’m going to use “Roman-ness.” Anyway, what does Roman-ness even mean, beyond sort of a vague continuity of power and authority?

I mean, honestly, I think you captured it quite well in the question. What does it mean except for this proxy for power and authority? I think you can identify a lot of the key things that it means at certain points in time, and to certain people and perspectives. But this is kind of my point. There is no one unifying thing that you can pin down, and if you think there is, that’s because you have a very specific framework that just doesn’t really map onto all the evidence. It isn’t the city of Rome.

Exactly. From a very early time.

If your particular thing is, “oh, I’m only into the Republican period, the bit where there’s something I can call democracy.” I have questions, but fine. Sure, then the city of Rome defines Rome. But then even with what we know of the history of Rome from 753 — if that’s really it — until about 27… that changes enormously, their idea of themselves, their function of government. The major and minor gods. And realistically, nobody is really talking about that bit. What they want is the idea of republicanism and democracy married to the high imperial stretch of power and military success. And that’s… a 100-year period, maybe?

And not the same period, right? That’s part of what it seems to mean to be Rome in people’s minds. It’s both the Republic and the imperial period at the same time. Senators in togas arguing, the Cicero period, and simultaneously the imperial period. People seem to think of both these things as though they were contemporary when they think about what it means to be Rome. Simultaneously Cicero and Marcus Aurelius.

Right. And if what you mean is they’ve actually got a massive empire, then fine, because in the Republic, certainly, they are running an empire. They might be doing it without an emperor, but that’s not actually a necessary criteria.

Right. I mean, just look at America.

If you want, like the British Empire, to be really honest about it and say, oh, I’m just interested in the period where Rome has loads of power, well, that actually doesn’t narrow it down. And if what you’re interested in is just the biggest and most badass empire, it’s still not Rome. Rome would arguably not be top 3. Go and find something else.

Yes, and then you could say, well, why not Genghis Khan? If it’s just based on number of people, we’d have to be talking about India, right?

A lot of Chinese history is just going to blow everybody else out of the water. I don't think we should be ranking empires on the size, just to be clear.

But definitely there is an element where Rome is the biggest empire that is “white,” which you did a really amazing job of addressing. Toward the end of the book, you had this bit where you were talking about how the Romans would have been quite offended to be called white, actually, because it would imply that they were effeminate and weak.

Can we take a moment there to just interrogate the assumptions and the implications? Which are not great. They weren’t white, and their buildings weren't white. This is a joke I made really early on when I was writing the proposal. I just texted my friends some snarky jokes, and I was just like, “the US is similar to Rome in a lot of ways. None of those are good, and none of those are the ones that they think are relevant. Yay for roads, yay for massive military violence, yay for enslavement and conquest!”

Being built on slavery. Exactly. It does mean, though, that the idea of what is Rome is so vague that it can be hard to pin down. There’s a book called Why America Is Not a New Rome. But I find the very concept of assessing whether someone is or is not like Rome to be a bit empty and pointless, right? Anybody is Rome, insofar as they want to make that claim. It just seems so beyond the point when looking at your book and the multitude of ways in which people have self-identified in conversation with Rome.

I don’t think it does anyone any good, really, to try to find the best claim. I think what’s useful is to say, one, why does this matter? What are the stakes of this claim being successful? And two, who isn’t being recognized at all? Why? I’m not really interested in litigating whose claim to Rome is better, although I do think it’s very funny that is a thing that has come up periodically throughout history. And people’s answers are really interesting.

There’s a moment in the book where Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan who is also ruling Constantinople, claims the title Kayser-i-Rum, Caesar in Rome. One of many titles, not his most important, but he claims it because he thinks ruling Constantinople gives him the right. And so he’s really annoyed at Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, for having staged a triumph with the Pope. So Suleyman does this whole absolutely ludicrously over the top, unbelievably extra series of triumphs to make the claim for himself. And as part of this, he gets the French, who are Ottoman allies against the Holy Roman Empire, to run around town telling everyone how much better the Ottomans are.

That’s such an amazing moment, where Suleyman decides that it’s worth it to just spend a fantastical sum of money. You’ve got to imagine we’re talking about on the order of billions of dollars in today’s money, right?

Properly ludicrous. There was a lot of research in this book that I would describe as not pleasant. A lot of moments that were really very difficult to read and think about, write about, tie in. And there were some that were just, like… this is excellent. This is just so absurdly fun. This huge, incredibly expensive, carefully choreographed, stage-managed performance of Roman-ness. And then everybody back at home gets kind of sick of this, so I’m just gonna melt down all this stuff.

I mean, that’s the thing about metal, right? You can reshape it to emphasize different parts of your identity.

What I think is incredibly interesting is this overt display of “Roman-ness” from Suleyman the Magnificent is just not that important in the grand scheme of his context, his empire. It’s a thing he puts enormous amounts of money and effort into doing, briefly. And then he moves on to more meaningful things.

To what degree is it always a sort of performance with conspicuous consumption built in? Look at Russia building the Kremlin. How much is being Rome, or being Roman, just about spending a ton of money to look a certain way?

I think it’s not even necessarily always the money, although it does usually cost a lot. I think this is a really key thing from my dissertation research, which is about how the Abbasid Caliphate engages with ideas about Rome, and very specifically see Constantinople as Roman. I can’t stress that enough. Whatever your position on how Constantinople should be interpreted, the Abbasids very much see them as Roman. They see Rome as an example of how to rule, of how to show that you are powerful. For them, they see Rome and Persia as the reference points for how to be an empire. And so they can take those and translate them into their own concepts, do them their own way, and make clear references. They’re not identifying as Roman, but they’re identifying as an empire. They’re identifying as powerful rulers. And for them, that reference doesn't have the baggage that we attach to it.

That must be it, right? Rome is not just about power, although it is about power. It is about a way of showing that you are powerful.

It’s such a recognized way to show that you are powerful, that it’s a perfect shorthand or starting point. I think Rome has been quite consistently this kind of shorthand for how to show that you are powerful. And in part because people keep doing it, so it just keeps being a reference point. It’s not that it’s necessarily the best reference point, it’s just that if people keep doing it, it will keep being a reference point.

It does seem that there’s a gendered element, right? It’s men who are thinking about the Roman Empire every day, according to the meme. Women are thinking about astrology or whatever. But one thing I found quite interesting in your book was that there are a number of times where the sort of cultural element of continuity of Roman-ness is transmitted through a woman. Both with Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, there’s a plan of, “I’m going to marry this indisputably Roman princess, or queen, and that’s how I'm going to solidify my claim.” So I do wonder how that plays into this gendered element, where men are always the ones who are trying to claim Roman-ness for themselves, and women are just the passive cultural carriers.

First of all, I’ve got to say — because if my mum reads this and I don't, she'll be very mad at me — my mum called me quite early on, and she said, “Darling, I just want you to know, I spoke to your dad earlier, and he does not think about the Roman Empire every day. He doesn’t even think about the Roman Empire every week.” I was like, “I’m not surprised, Mum. You know, I’ve met Dad. It's not really his thing.” And she was like, “I just need you to know that I do think about the Roman Empire every day.”

Okay, that is very funny.

And so I was like, “Actually, Mum, you know, I can’t stress this enough, I think maybe you should get some other hobbies. Think about something else.” But she was also delighted when she read the book about exactly this topic you mentioned. She was like, “oh, but there are so many more women than I expected!”

It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I think this goes back to the question of who we recognize and why. In a very practical sense, a lot of these women come from what gets called Byzantium. So they’re not recognized as Roman now by some in a way that really matters. And two, I think there is still an incredibly gendered framework for thinking about this stuff, that if you conquer something, great. If you marry into it, or if you diplomatically acquire it, it’s just… not as interesting, it’s not as significant, it’s not as important. And so the fact that people are more willing to take the early Ottoman claim seriously, because at least they conquer Constantinople. More than early imperial Russia. Because they’re just marrying these Byzantine princesses. As though that’s not hugely relevant.

And not the most European way of solidifying power and positioning yourself.

Right.

I do wonder if a Western European-American model of Roman-ness rejects a little bit both Russia and Byzantium because they had such robust traditions of female rulership. It can’t be a new Rome if women were in charge a lot of the time.

I don’t think it's the only reason, but I definitely think it’s a factor. Or it’s actively a way to orientalize them, or it’s just a consequence of a kind of an Orientalist framework. And again, in both cases, that’s really fascinating, because the idea that Rome is in some way Western, I find very interesting. Like, would you care to look at a map?

And also, it’s the wrong kind of Christianity. Although the “correct” kind of Christianity will definitely change over the years. But the wrong way of doing it is definitely Byzantium. Which I refer to as Romanland.

I loved that.

That’s what they called themselves. Byzantium is just not a relevant name for them. When we’re talking about whose claim gets acknowledged and whose doesn’t… Romanland’s way of maintaining its power, its tax base, its influence, its territorial integrity, for lack of a better phrase, is marriage. It’s diplomacy. And for that, they are consistently dismissed as “in decline,” or kind of weak and fragile. It’s still lasting for a thousand years. You cannot possibly apply the label decline or fragile to that. That’s a very long time.

And it’s tremendously wealthy.

But we just don’t really like the way that they do things, right? It just doesn’t seem as cool and impressive. I’m a real enthusiastic killjoy. That’s meant to be complimentary, I hope.

For a long time, I’ve really enjoyed telling people, “You know, when Constantinople falls, it falls to European, Catholic invaders. It’s not a Muslim, or a Turkish or an Ottoman invading force. They aren't the first ones to conquer Constantinople.”

The Russian example is so interesting. Especially the way that Russia now talks about Byzantium in sort of the same way that Russia under Catherine the Great talked about Rome. It really shows the ways in which these histories sort of rhyme, or I guess slant rhyme each other. And then in Germany also, the way that there’s Roman-German-ness, and then anti-Roman German-ness with the Holy Roman Empire, and then Martin Luther, and then with the Kaisers you have sort of a way to fuse both the Roman-German-ness and the anti-Roman German-ness. One thing about this history of being Rome is that people are really, really good at having their cake and eating it, too.

Because there’s so much cake there to be had, right? When you are talking about an entity in some way or another that survived for more than 2,000 years, there’s just a whole lot of options at that cake buffet for you to go and grab.

Exactly. There’s just so much cake! You can eat the cake, and there’s still plenty of cake left.

I joke a lot with people, I really do think that we should consider Rome to be slightly less important. I think we should all just be interested in some other things. I think we should diversify our hobbies a bit. And I realized that writing a book about Rome and why it’s historically been important is not the most obvious way to do that.

But I think it’s really fascinating to think about even when you’re trying to escape Roman-ness as an identity. It’s very difficult to not frame your next option, consciously or unconsciously, without it. The Germans are like, oh, we want to be less Roman. So, we’ll find a Roman historian describing a Roman enemy and identify with them. I’m not saying it's an illogical step for the German-speaking people to identify with Germania, but the way that they just cannot escape the Roman framework, I think, is so interesting.

And then the way that Russia now is kind of all in on Byzantium, and that’s the word they use. They’re responding to other people’s seizing of that Roman identity. Can you imagine sitting down with Aleksandr Dugin and Putin and asking, “So you’re just really accepting the USA’s terms of debate here? Can you just tell me why? I’m fascinated!” But you just can't really escape it. It’s not quite that Rome can be what you make it, but there’s a lot of ways to find Rome in what you want.

From a craft perspective, you made a number of choices that I really loved. One of them was the little epigraphs that you have, where you’re describing a historical scene in these extremely decontextualized and vague terms, so I have no idea what I’m reading about. As I read it, it becomes clear, but when I first start reading, it’s like, are you talking about present-day America? Are you talking about ancient Rome, are you talking about the Holy Roman Empire? And it takes a little bit for the fuzziness of the picture to resolve.

Talking about it from a craft point of view is actually a really interesting way to think about it. There’s one big thing and one small thing, and I’m pretty sure the small thing came first. Which is to sit down and be like, okay, I have to both keep in mind a reasonable, established narrative. Think about how that emerged. Contradict it where necessary. The point of this is not just to be a killjoy, as fun as that sometimes is.

I really like the idea of an enthusiastic killjoy. You said that earlier, and I’m going to steal that, if that’s okay with you, and just use it in my life. It really encapsulates my ethos. I’m going to kill your joy on this specific thing, but there’s so much more joy to be had. Like cake.

Oh, definitely! I'm very rarely deliberately trying to kill your joy fully, I’m just really enthusiastically trying to tell you something that's relevant and interesting that I know in, like, an incredibly autistic way. It’s really remarkable that I wasn’t diagnosed until quite late.

Oh, same. Cheers.

But basically, I both have to engage with the narratives that people have, because it’s very understandable and reasonable that they have them, while also kind of trying to challenge them, without ever getting away from the point. So I just thought, I’ll write a version I hate and see if that clarifies my thought process and where I want to go. And I did a couple of them, and I thought, I wonder if I can play around with this. It bugged me for a while, they’re not all exactly the same format. Some of them are actual just translations of text, some of them are more of a vague description. But I just really wanted to get people thinking about their preconceived notions. Not in an accusatory way. But make it quite an active process for the reader, rather than just being told they were wrong. There’s a difference between an enthusiastic killjoy and a scold.

I do have to ask you about tech bros. Early on in the book, you mention tech bros talking about Stoics, a topic I get asked about a lot. But you don’t really get to it in the book. You talk about American founding fathers modeling on the Roman Empire, but now American corporations are sort of empires in their own right, and they definitely seem to think of themselves as new Romes. So, I want to hear you talk a little bit about that, so that I can answer some of the press requests in my inbox.

I really strongly feel like if anybody asks me this question, I’d be like, you should go talk to Donna Zuckerberg. So that’s funny.

Oh man. We should just volley them back and forth. You tell them, “Go read Donna,” and I’ll tell them, “Go read Rhiannon.”

We could set up an email template, so it doesn’t even take up a lot of our time. Just copy and paste it and just keep sending them.

So, this was one of the things that I originally wanted to do a little bit more on, and then I felt it was a bit outside the scope of where I ended up. So I considered taking it out of the introduction, and only sticking to references that then appear. There’s a couple of others as well. I didn’t talk about the Catholic Church either, really, not in a meaningful way. But I felt like, actually, it’s quite good to remind people that there’s still just loads of stuff that’s outside even the ludicrously broad scope of this.

But this goes back to a little bit what we were saying about the Germans, right? If you want to see yourself as uniquely powerful… perhaps not uniquely, actually, but, like specifically, particularly powerful, then Rome is a very obvious reference point. It would be a little bit unusual if Rome wasn’t part of the conversation, just as a consequence of all of these endless repetitions of making it important. Especially in an American context, because of the very specific way that the Founding Fathers use Rome in their articulation of a new American identity. I’ve got to say, I live in Denmark, I’ve worked on a Danish startup, it is not my experience that Danish tech bros care very much about the Roman Empire. So I think the US context is a very important reference point for that.

And then… I would be really interested in your thoughts on this, actually, but I think there’s a layer of this very particular post-Enlightenment “Western” ideal of rationalism. And, frankly, a very particularly misogynistic ideal of a lack of emotions being a good thing that ties in pretty easily with a lot of late Roman Stoicism. I do think you could present Roman Stoicism to tech bros entirely devoid of the Roman context, and I think they would find that very appealing. And then it kind of becomes a gateway back in.

I do think there’s an element where the content itself is appealing, and then you get to sort of cosplay Gladiator. So, wins all around.

There’s an extra layer of this that I don’t really go into in the book, but yeah, the fact that you get to present yourself as both profoundly intellectual and seriously addressing the issues of the day, like a Roman senator — as though, you know, they weren’t all constantly really dramatic and making terrible decisions, and really selfish and self-absorbed or short-sighted, or whatever. But on the one hand, you get to kind of present yourself as a serious statesman, and on the other hand you can run around cosplaying Gladiator. You get to be both really serious and important and also dress up as a military hero.

I did wonder, as you were describing it, a thing which I always think about, which is: how much can we blame Cicero for this?

Oh, I think we should blame Cicero for so much. A lot, really a lot.

Thank you! Yes, that’s sort of my Roman Empire: I think every day about how we could blame Cicero for things. But I do think there’s an element that gets really picked up by the tech bros that we can blame Cicero for directly, which is the idea that Rome is a meritocracy.

Yes! Oh, yes.

That is something that Cicero really, really is obsessed with. The idea that in Rome, whoever’s the best man for the job is going to rise to the surface. His whole narrative is, “I was the best man for the job, and I was a novus homo,” and all of that.

Right. His whole self-composed narrative. Cicero’s version of his life story is that he dragged himself up by his bootstraps with his own personal brilliance.

Definitely. There was no family wealth or anything. He definitely wasn’t already a part of the senatorial class.

The fact that he could afford to train with all those amazing rhetoricians to learn how to do it, just completely by the by. They picked him up off the street.

A bit of a “Kylie Jenner is a self-made billionaire” kind of narrative. I do think that the tech bro obsession with Rome has to do with this, because the idea of meritocracy is very much a part of Silicon Valley’s self-identification, that the people who are the best and the smartest will be the ones who are in charge and are the most successful. Which I actually don’t think is as much a part of the legacy of Rome in the other examples that you cite in your book.

I’ve been exploring this point through the British Empire. There is an ideal of meritocracy. I’m from the UK, it’s one of the things that particularly irks me about the UK, that people seem very convinced it’s a meritocracy. It comes up in at least two, if not three or four different chapters of the book. And when people demonstrate according to a merit-based system that they are, in fact, good enough… the people in charge of that system do not like it. Don’t want to have it, aren’t interested.

You did mention that in your book, with the Indian system. Where Britain creates their version of the SATs that’s just about knowing classics, and then all the brilliant Indian scholars are like, okay, well, I can learn that.

I can learn that in English, by the way. They’re learning Greek and Latin in English, and then beating people on those tests.

And then the British decide to move the goalposts.

The immediate reaction is absolute horror. “We didn’t rig the test sufficiently to keep them out!” But it happens over and over again.

In the United States as well, with Black scholars.

A really great example, I think, is Phyllis Wheatley. She literally has to go to court to prove that she wrote these poems. But yeah, I do think a lot should be blamed on Cicero. The Roman system ties in quite nicely with the sort of individualistic idea of the world. It’s a really great series of historical events for anyone who loves a Great Man theory. Spoiler, I do not.

Shocker.

But also, Roman Stoicism has a very kind of individualistic bent. I think that really appeals to a lot of not just tech bros, but capitalists. The idea that you can just do it on your own and you don’t have to recognize anyone who helped you.

And it’s so frustrating for historians, because sometimes it feels like there’s just a giant Wheel of Fortune-style wheel back there with a bunch of random names on it. And they just spin the wheel and then Elon Musk tweets a quote that he attributes to Sulla.

Why? Wow! What a… what an interesting choice!

And then all the historians jump in, and they’re like, let’s talk about literally anything about Sulla. It just sends all the historians into a tizzy, of, here's any information about Sulla and why this is a terrible comparison. And then he just goes back and spins the wheel again, and it’s like, no, now it’s Constantine or whoever.

I think there’s actually something to that. It’s not about being right. But it’s so hard from an academic perspective to just be like, vibes-based allegiance is fine, and none of the historical details that I’ve dedicated my life to have any relevance. But I think we probably should get a little bit better at recognizing that, right? It’s not that I think scholarship doesn’t matter and historical detail doesn’t matter, but that’s not what it’s about for them. It’s about power.

I do want to get every scholar I know now a t-shirt that says “Your Vibes-Based Allegiance is Fine.” I was at Stanford the other day, and I said something like, for people who are modeling themselves on 300, it’s all about vibes. And the graduate students thought it was so funny that I said that. But it is! It’s all vibes.

Honestly, theirs is an entirely vibes-based analysis, right? I don’t think we should be mistaking that for good historical critique, or accuracy, or any of the rest of it, but there’s a reason they don’t care about the detail, because it’s not about that. They don’t care about being moral. You can’t point out that it’s immoral either, because that’s not what matters to them.

Just vibes.

And I think we have to get a little bit better at recognizing what the conversation is actually about and who we’re trying to address with our corrections. Because if you’re providing that information for other people, then that’s great! Everybody should have more opportunities to learn!

If some of Elon Musk’s fans want to learn about Sulla, then there are plenty of Roman historians online who are happy to teach them.

Yeah, good for them. But if you are hoping that you can convince Elon Musk, that’s a lost cause, and I think you should be redirecting your energies to something slightly more effective.

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If you want to read more of Rhiannon’s thoughts about thinking about the Roman Empire, she’s written about it here and here:

(Side note — why did I write about classical reception among horrible internet trolls when I could have written about beer and gotten invited to give lectures at breweries?! And for what other unexpected venues might that be possible? Could I write about stuffed animals in antiquity and get myself invited to lecture at Build-a-Bear?)

But not everyone is lucky enough to have a beer scholar in their contacts. These days, most people use AI for this kind of question. So I also asked ChatGPT for a fact check, and I was truly shook by how hilarious and bad and delightful its response was. I have a whole section of this newsletter dedicated to dunking on AI, but it still never fails to surprise me. It was so absurd that I decided I needed a Plato scholar to weigh in, so I wrote to Jackie Murray.

Readers may remember Jackie from my previous conversation with her about trans resonances in Odyssey 6:

I knew Jackie was working on a book about slavery in Plato — which, she then told me, has now manifested itself into three separate projects (a long book, a short book, and an article), which does have a way of happening in academia. She’s also working on a book about Apollonius and an art book. She graciously took time away from her extremely busy schedule to talk to me about the Theory of Forms and AI.

Jackie Murray is an Associate Professor of Classics at the State University at Buffalo. She grew up in Toronto. Her research areas and publications are in Hellenistic and Latin Poetry, Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity, and Black Classicisms, especially the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Her monograph, Neikos: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Poetics of Controversy is under contract with Harvard University Press.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Thank you for making time to talk with me. So I was in New York in a bar, and they had one of those neon signs up, and it said, “he was a wise man who invented beer. – Plato.” So I put it into ChatGPT and asked it for a fact check.

Right.

And ChatGPT wrote… you're not ready for this:

The quote, ‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ attributed to Plato, is widely regarded as misattributed. Plato didn't believe that anything could be truly invented, as he thought a form of beer always existed and could be discovered, not invented. This stance aligns with his Theory of Forms, where he posited that non-material abstract forms, and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Moreover, various online sources discussing misattributed quotes agree that this saying is not found in any of Plato's known works.

So as a scholar of Plato writing an article, a small book, and a large book on Plato, I'd like to hear what you think of this use of Plato's Theory of Forms by ChatGPT to critique and fact check this sign in a bar in New York.

Okay, we can agree with the fact that he never said that. It's hilarious. Well, I think it's an ingenious approach to the Theory of Forms. But just because something is a form doesn't mean it can't be invented.

If you're literally talking about like Latin invenire, it's to find, right? Almost like to discover. Which is completely consistent with this idea that invention is just like the first person to realize, to see, to find something that is recognizable as beer in a “Theory of Forms” sense.

This is why, because it assumes then that you can have invention without humans. Which I guess AI would think is possible. Because they're trying to create a world without humans, right?

A post-human world or inhuman world.

We could give ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt. Sure, something that always existed cannot be invented. Okay, that's step one. However, that's kind of not what's being asked. Because something can always exist, but we never have access to it. And so someone has to bring some kind of copy of it into the world. And that's what we mean by inventing in English.

Does Plato ever explain how invention works with the Theory of Forms? I mean… the Theory of Forms is not a big part of Platonic philosophy, right?

No, he's not interested in invention.

I mean, he might be interested in inventors and people who invent and craftsmen.

I think maybe what they're doing is mixing up how he understands learning. Because learning is remembering the forms. So if inventing is a form of learning…

All right. So he was a wise man who first remembered that beer was a thing.

Yeah, but in terms of, like bringing a beer to the table, making it possible that somebody could drink it.

To be fair. That was GPT-4, and I asked GPT-4o today and it responded much more succinctly:

No, Plato did NOT say, ‘He was a wise man who invented beer.’ That quote is widely misattributed to him. There is no record of it in any of Plato's dialogues or writings.

I like that it distinguished there between dialogues and writings. Like, okay, sure, ChatGPT. It continues,

The quote is more of a modern, humorous saying that people have falsely credited to various historical figures like Plato or Benjamin Franklin. So while Plato had plenty to say about wisdom and moderation, praising beer wasn't one of them.

Not a very grammatical sentence as I look at it. So the bigger problem with this, of course, is that there is no record of beer being widely drunk in Greece.

But in Egypt, right?

I mean, it had been invented in Egypt and Thrace. There's a reference to drinking something that sounds like extremely strong beer in Xenophon, at Anabasis Book 4.5.24-36.

Okay, so… what does he say here? So he says, “there was also meat, barley and beans, and barley wine in large bowls. Floating on the top of this drink were the barley grains. And in it were straws, some larger and some smaller, without joints. And when one was thirsty, he had to take these straws into his mouth and suck. It was an extremely strong drink unless one diluted it with water. And extremely good once one got used to it.” This does sound like beer. It probably is.

It sounds sort of like a Belgian tripel ale. One of those really strong beers. I do like how he describes that the straw is not jointed, which immediately made me think of those straws that you get with the bendy thing at the top. Or some kind of like fantastical twisty straw. Just Xenophon drinking beer out of a krater with like one of those crazy straws.

Well, it might be because you're not filtering it, right? So the barley and stuff is at the top.

Exactly. So the straw helps you get the stuff that's at the bottom, so you don't get a mouthful of barley.

I'm trying to see where the hell they are in this.

Great question. They are in Armenia. They're making some progress, but they've got a ways ahead. Miles to go before they sleep.

This is very cool though.

But it does seem like the degree of explanation required here suggests that it was not something that people would be familiar with.

Exactly. Precisely the point is that they didn't drink beer. They drank wine. These other folks over here in this wheat culture.

And Xenophon and Plato, you're really talking very, very close to contemporaneous.

They're contemporary. So much so that they're probably in the school together with Socrates. Even if Plato could have said something about drinking something, it wouldn't have been that. It wouldn't have been beer because he didn't know what it was, because Xenophon is surprised about this interesting drink.

The bar might as well have said, “‘In vino veritas.’ -Plato.” Relatively speaking, that would be as accurate. In Latin. At least we know Plato drank wine, unlike beer.

But Xenophon, we might be able to give him that credit. Probably after having that first drink he could have said, “hmm, the man who invented beer was very wise.”

There you go. He also gave really detailed descriptions for how to use a straw in case that is a thing that you need. At any rate, ChatGPT did a thoroughly mediocre job assessing this.

Right. But folks that are working on digital translation and all of that stuff, working on using AI in Homeric reconstruction of papyri and things like that, were actually talking about how they can get the AI to generate a reasonable Homeric line. And that was a year ago.

I'm sure it's only gotten better. It does raise a question of Lucian's Homer in the underworld. So, for context for our readers, in the Dialogues of the Dead Lucian goes down to the underworld, and there he meets Homer. And he tries to ask him about some controversies in Homeric textual criticism, because scholars have been athetizing lines, claiming that some of them weren’t authentic Homeric lines but instead later interpolations. But when he gets to the underworld, Homer says, “No, I wrote all the lines, even the athetized ones.”

So my question is, did he write all the lines, including the ones that were made up by ChatGPT?

That’s a great question. I'm actually using that passage in my Apollonius book to point out that this was controversial. The new Lucian would say, “Did you write those?” “I totally wrote that. I wrote them from here in the underworld.”

Exactly. “I am the Homer bot.” Incredible. So, you're at the Center for Hellenic Studies. You don't have any students right now, right? So you haven't been getting just piles of essays that were entirely written by ChatGPT recently?

Not yet, no. I expect next semester I'm going to have to come up with a strategy where that isn't the case. What I have been doing is getting them to write the essay in class. I wouldn't have any problem with them making ChatGPT write the essay and then memorizing the essay and then spitting it out in class. It's okay because at least they've done some brain work there. They sat there and memorized the essay. I'm okay with that.

It's really interesting that you say that, because my first Latin teacher used to tell us, “just go home, translate this passage from Cicero,” and then nobody would do it. And he would translate it in class, and we write down his translation and we would memorize his translation and we would regurgitate it on the test. So it was kind of like what you're talking about.

Only that they would be getting it to write the essay, memorizing the essay and then spitting it back. But at least there's some mental energy being spent on memorizing.

And then writing it by hand. When you have to write something by hand, you learn a lot.

So that's my way of thinking about it. Like, okay, fine. If you're going to do it, do it that way.

Yeah, although… let’s go back to the Homer bot for a moment. It does feel like you should be able to make like a GPT Homer. Because essentially what you're talking about is… well, one of the things classicists romanticize about, as you know, is “O for the lost 19th century classicists who had memorized all of Homer.”

The golden age.

“There was a time when classicists were much better than we are.” And obviously, you know, decline and fall narratives are part of how classics is taught. It’s baked right into Homer, with Nestor complaining that heroes used to be so much stronger than they are in the Trojan War era. But it is true to a certain degree, classicists used to know Greek and Latin much better than we do now.

They could definitely spit out all of Homer, but they couldn't think creatively though. There's some losses and some gains.

I mean, I think that our version is much more interesting in a lot of ways. But it seems like with our technology, it should be relatively easy to create a bot that's as familiar with Homer as the best 19th century Homeric scholar and is so steeped in Homer and nothing else that it could fill in those papyri. You know, there are LLMs that are really trained on just the bible. Really specialized ones.

We should try that. We should try to see it.

I think that there are a lot of potential uses for that kind of tool and unfortunately, it feels like most people in academia when they think about AI go to sort of an existential dread place.

Oh, yeah. Well, mainly because, well, there's a loss of some kind of mental faculty that's happening, right? Because the students aren’t thinking for themselves. In the same way that back in the day, people could memorize all their friends’ phone numbers, and nobody can do that today. I mean, that may not have been a great faculty, but the point is that you've lost it.

Which brings us back to Plato, right? Because Plato wrote about this concern that writing as a technology was going to hurt people's memories.

So that's the first real worry about it, and like the ancestor to this particular technology. You have the technology and then you immediately have the worry of but… we're losing something. And indeed, we are.

I'm sure that when Plato learned how to write he stopped remembering all of his friend's phone numbers.

Yeah. Once you get a smart tablet. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. He's also using it, right? Because he is obviously writing.

He's writing quite a lot. He's writing a huge amount.

What's interesting is that you wonder to what extent they are offloading a lot. Because, well, who's doing the real writing? Is it really him, or is it an enslaved scribe that's doing that? Certainly the people reading it out loud are enslaved readers. We know that. There is a kind of, a using of enslaved human beings as your tools. As your smartphones, as it were. That's going on at that time.

One other interesting thing that nobody's really looking at is the fact that a lot of the searching for things and reading the text and writing the text is actually being done by the slave. And so there's an offloading of that kind of thinking onto the slave.

So the slaves were really elite knowledge workers in a way. They were the search engine.

I'm convinced of that because I can't see these guys doing it. They're too busy thinking.

Yeah, exactly. Drinking beer with crazy straws.

But given the glimpses we get of this… say you’re Callimachus, how would you run the Alexandrian library and write 800 books? Really? Did he really? Or did he have a bunch of slaves running around getting the data for him, writing the stuff down, which I think is the case. We could think about it that way where it's like, there's always scenarios where not all of your actual production or creation is actually done by Michelangelo, another example where half of the stuff is being produced by his assistants.

His workshop.

But he gets all the credit. So the new thing is that this thing we are co-producing with is not a human.

Right. Although there is a lot of unwaged human labor that goes into creating it.

Oh, yeah. That's the other thing that people are even more upset about than worrying about what's happening to our brains.

The theft of material.

The folks who are profiting from this have stolen work from all of us, academics and creators. Nobody's being paid for that. You couldn't have this thing if you didn't steal half of the information. But I think it all goes back to this idea of how we value, how we look at work, which has completely been a slavery model. Every kind of work is always in this slavery model and somehow we can't think outside that box.

Exactly. I feel a little uncomfortable equating slavery with theft of intellectual property, but there is that unwaged labor similarity, right? When you steal somebody's labor. Then that is sort of like a form of slavery.

Well, yeah, if you define slavery in terms of unpaid labor. And in that case, I'm free to go wherever I want. They're just taking my labor. Whereas the physical body is not necessarily involved. But the point, though, is that there's still a violation happening to my humanity, your humanity, everybody's humanity that is contributing to this unwillingly. They did not consent to that.

Jackie and I had that conversation in early April, and since then the conversation around students using AI has only gotten grimmer. But I hope that there are possibilities here to make students think about AI, and the kinds of knowledge it’s replacing — and also the long, rich history of the outsourcing of knowledge work onto unpaid labor, which has been happening for literally thousands of years.

If you’re an academic who has a creative approach for getting students to actually, you know, do work instead of just using ChatGPT to write all of their homework for them, please share in the comments! We could all use the advice.

One thing is for certain: that bar should rethink its neon sign. I wonder how fast I could get myself kicked out if I tried to give them an impromptu lecture on the Theory of Forms?

I’ve already written so much about what Eidolon was and what it meant to me. Much of that was in Eidolon’s editorials. Fun fact: the very first editorial — or “e(i)ditorial”, as I called it, the kind of touch that a lot of people thought was cringe but that I think was part of the overall irreverent vibe that made the whole publication sing — was written in a desperate attempt to fill a content hole one month into publication, because a few pieces I’d lined up in advance were taking longer to come together than I’d expected and the early pitches I’d gotten were still in the process of editing.

That kind of MacGyvering was part of what made it all feel magical. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, and I was making it all up as I went. I hired co-editors who were much smarter than I was. That helped a lot, because my leadership style is very, shall we say, consensus-driven (a nice way of saying that I hate telling people what to do). One of the editors, Yung In Chae, works for The Yale Review now,1 and we were comparing process notes on short-turnaround pieces done by a real-ass magazine as opposed to a bunch of grad students and recent PhDs fucking around in the dark. Their process is infinitely more polished and fine-tuned, but in retrospect, I think we actually did pretty well.

At one point we started hiring an extremely talented friend of mine from grad school to do custom art for some of our pieces, and it ruled. Other things, like a short-lived advice column, kind of flopped, and that was fine. Book reviews always — every. single. damn. time — had the most insanely disproportionate response of generating a ton of headaches and very few views. Humor pieces were always a delight, enough so that we spun them out into a separate publication, idle musings. We took our work seriously but not ourselves.

Thanks to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I feel like I’ve been reading a lot about the founding of the Hairpin recently. The Hairpin, for those who don’t know, is one of the lost, lamented websites that published a lot of amazing content a decade or so ago, along with The Toast and many others. Most of the content was written by women, and it was very voice-driven and weird and specific and beautiful. Jia Tolentino and Haley Mlotek discussed it in their interview about Mlotek’s recent divorce memoir No Fault:

It’s wild how close in time that was to Eidolon’s founding, and how much Eidolon was involved in the very same project — excavating the world through excavating the self — but paired with the (sometimes very literal, archaeological) excavation of the classical past.

In many ways, Eidolon existed in a perfect moment. Public Humanities was ripe for a change: the former way of doing things, with well-established dons and tenured professors writing op-eds, was ripe for disruption by the younger generation of classicists who had spent the last decade and a half on the internet and who wanted to connect with audiences from a place of self-aware aporetic legibility instead of expertise.

I was even more struck by a recent piece in the wonderful Evil Witches newsletter:

Evil Witches Newsletter

AIMing with old internet friends

I didn’t really AIM with the people I spoke with for today’s issue, but I hope I’m establishing a vibe here…

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a year ago · 47 likes · 16 comments · Claire Zulkey

One of the titular old internet friends was Edith Zimmerman, a founder of The Hairpin. So much of what she said in the piece hit me in my softest, tenderest spots. Especially this:

What made you decide not to keep the Hairpin going in some other form?

That still haunts me. I stepped away from The Hairpin because I was burned out. And I didn’t do much for about five years after that.

Sometimes I think, “Oh man, I wish I had just taken a vacation instead of quitting, because I’ll never have a job that’s as perfect a fit for me as that one was.” But I don’t think it could have gone any other way. And I like where I’m at now.

OUCH. Just @ me next time.

But there was another part that gave me pause:

Do you think of those Hairpin days as good old days or just “that was a younger time in my life”?

I think of it as the good old days, because it was so fun. But it’s also utterly incompatible with any adult version of my life. There’s no grown-up Edith who’s a mom and a wife who also lives online like I did when I was 25. Before I had children, I had a lot of free time and spent an enormous amount of it just refreshing my email. I guess I still do that, though.

When I launched Eidolon, I was only 28. But I was already a mom and a wife. Reading Zimmerman’s words, I wondered how those roles had left an invisible impression on the publication and helped dictate its shape. Two out of the four of its editorial team were moms, and we both were pregnant and gave birth during our time with Eidolon. Sarah worked literally while in labor, although I swear I in no way encouraged or asked her to do that. In fact, that last clause there is symptomatic of my compulsive need to reiterate over and over how very much I didn’t need her to do that, a discomfort so palpable that my team came to relish poking at it and made it a running joke that I forced Sarah to work through contractions. That, and one time I told Tori to “do her thang,” and they’ll never let me live it down.

If two of our four editors hadn’t been mothers, I don’t think we’d have published our special issues on childbirth and parenting. But I wonder if the influence of parenting on Eidolon is also detectable in less obvious ways. I certainly thought of Eidolon as one of my children. You can parent your children, but you can’t really control how they experience the world and the impact they have on others. That’s part of how I see the legacy of Eidolon — it’s something I had a part in, but it’s also something I’ve had to let go of. That’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Sometimes I wonder what I’d like to say to Donna from ten years ago, visualizing Eidolon’s stillbirth in between retching. I had no idea that it was going to get millions of views and launch several books, including my own. That it was going to lead to so much joy and pride and also pain and heartbreak. And so, so much work. More work than I possibly could have imagined, another thing it has in common with parenting. Maybe parenting taught me to run a publication, and running a publication taught me to parent. Fucking around and making it up as I go.

Reflecting on that first day, I see that I was much more emotionally and mentally prepared for Eidolon’s failure than I was for its success. There’s a lesson there, I’m sure. A lesson I definitely haven’t learned, because I can already see the same thought patterns coalescing in my brain around the memoir I’m working on and how I’ll metabolize and minimize the embarrassment of its inevitable failure. Maybe I’ll have figured it out in another decade. But if my history can teach me anything, it’ll be an experience richer and wilder than anything I could anticipate or imagine.

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I am 100% book nerd, but I wish more of my fellow book nerds also played video games. It feels like there’s less overlap between video game nerds and book nerds than there should be. I’m writing this even though Substack’s impossible-to-hide metrics have shown me that my video game-related content gets significantly less engagement than anything else I write here, and I’ve probably already lost a solid half of my readers. People even seem kind of proud of not being into video games, as though that made them a more serious person.

It’s really unfortunate, because there are video games that are intensely, profoundly literary! They are the kind of art that will deeply move you and stay with you. They will improve your craft.

I think a lot about this passage in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s essay “This Kind of Animal” about the 2019 game Disco Elysium in the essay compilation Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games:

I’m not here to tell you to play the game. I’m here to say that Disco Elysium is a magnificent literary experience. Literary is a slippery and sometimes problematic word, but in this context I mean: via the precise use of language, it changes the reader. It makes you grow, gives you a new way of looking at the world, which is a mirror of all of us together, and it asks you really, truly, honestly, Who are you?

Adjei-Brenyah wrote Chain-Gang All-Stars, one of my favorite books of the past few years, and I would definitely consider him an authority on magnificent literary experiences. Listen to him, even if I haven’t convinced you yet.

There are a lot of video games I could write about that have moved me to think more deeply as a scholar and writer. I truly believe every classicist and medieval historian should play Pentiment, a 2022 game about a 16th century artist training to illuminate manuscripts and also solving a murder mystery that kind of has to do with Christian absorption of pagan mythology. Also, the characters talk in different fonts depending on their level and type of education. The whole game is a masterpiece. Relatively early on there’s a scene where the protagonist is debating a librarian nun about the role of women in the Aeneid WITHIN A MANUSCRIPT OF THE AENEID, and I remember thinking, how on earth did this game ever get made??

I’d also love to discuss 2023’s The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a visual novel I played recently where you’re a witch who makes a pact with a demon and designs her own oracle deck. It’s absolute catnip for Tarot lovers. And at one point you have the chance to work with another witch who is something called a “cosmic poet” and write a poem based on the cards you draw in a reading, and I swear, the poem I wrote through procedural generation feels like a magic spell.

But all three of the games I’ve mentioned so far are text-heavy experiences. The game I really want to tell you about is Blue Prince, which came out just a few weeks ago and is available on Steam, Xbox, and Playstation. Light spoilers follow, but I don’t want to share too much because this is really a game where the magic comes from discovery.

I fell in love with Blue Prince at first sight. Six months ago, my partner, a game developer, was watching a YouTube video on games that make you get lost, and I caught a glimpse of his screen and asked him, “What game is THAT?” Distressingly, it turned out to be footage of a game that was still a ways out from being released. The demo wasn’t even available! But I could tell just from a glimpse how special it was.

In Blue Prince, you play as Simon, who recently inherited a manor house from his eccentric great-uncle. The catch is that you only get to keep the inheritance if you find the 46th room in the 45-room house. I loved this conceit immediately.

The game has no easily categorizable genre. Essentially, you’re building a version of the Winchester Mystery House over and over again, while also trying to solve escape room-style puzzles and solve the bigger, deeper mystery of the disappearance of your mother, a children’s book author who was also maybe a political dissident. It feels like The Westing Game in video game format, if it was also a jigsaw puzzle.

Compared to the other games I’ve mentioned here, there’s not a lot of text in Blue Prince. But the text is incredibly high-impact. Early on, you discover a book written by the protagonist’s mother called Red Prince. It works remarkably well as a children’s book while also giving you a bit of a metaphorical map for how to approach the bigger game and its approach to text and color.

Then, a little deeper into the game, if you choose to draft a rarer room, you find the rejection slip from a publisher for the original version of Red Prince, which mentions that the ending is too obviously a political allegory. So you realize that the first version you read is the new, cleaned-up version. At that point, I became obsessed with finding the original manuscript.

How obsessed? I have a whole-ass notebook just dedicated to my 30+ pages of notes on this game:

All of the most recent photos in my iPhoto library are just pictures of things that might be clues. It’s turned me into a full-on conspiracy theorist. Yesterday my partner joked “Maybe the carpets have a secret message woven into them!” and honestly, I can’t rule it out. I immediately took pictures of the carpets to add to my growing photo library of every piece of text I’ve come across.

But the game isn’t just literary in its approach to the books within the game (although I strongly suggest that you read every letter and book you interact with and buy out the bookshop ASAP). It’s also a masterclass in environmental world-building. It takes place in an imaginary kingdom, and piecing together the politics of that kingdom is a gradual, subtle joy. Just look at this heavily redacted introduction from a book about the world’s history:

It almost reminds me a bit of one of ’s blackout poems. In a world where many games begin by hitting you over the head with a massive infodump of backstory and lore, I found Blue Prince’s approach to world-building soothing and beautiful.

This is a game that really trusts its players to figure it out in a way that many aren’t brave enough to do. That’s a lesson many writers could learn, too.

Writers are often told “show, don’t tell.” But the best video games go one step further and artfully conceal, making the reader work for their knowledge.

IGN’s review of the game begins with, “I’m not entirely convinced Dogubomb didn’t develop Blue Prince as a personal gift to me, specifically.” I felt the same. And that made me think: that’s the dream! To create a piece of art that’s so weird and specific that people out there feel like you made it especially as a gift for them! Isn’t that why we write, even though it hurts sometimes?

I can’t recommend enough that you stop doomscrolling and play this game. You will learn so much. I can’t guarantee that it will make you grow and give you a new way of looking at the world — ultimately, that’s on you and what you bring to the experience. But I do know that it has a lot to teach writers about how to construct a world that your reader will find it a delight to inhabit and discover.

If you like reading literary approaches to video games, visit the “video game” section of my archives here!

If you are a writer, this message is not for you. Being a writer isn’t measured in how much you’ve published or how many people have read your work or how big your advance is or a number of ratings on Amazon or Goodreads. You’re a writer if, whenever something big or hard or funny happens to you, you think, someday I’ll write about this. You’re a writer if you get itchy and irritable when you go too long without writing something. You’re a writer if playing with words is simultaneously both the most delightful thing you can imagine and the hardest, most painful slog. If that’s you, I regret to say, you may have to write a book at some point. I’m so sorry.

But if writing a book just seems like the kind of thing you could or should do, like a fun project, like something that would be cool to cross off your bucket list — I’m begging you to reconsider. Because writing a book will break your heart.

Obviously I’m not actually telling people not to write books. Go for it! Follow your dreams! I love reading books, and I want there to be more of them. I do recommend that you seek a strong, supportive community of other writers to help if things get hard. And by “if,” I mean “when.” But maybe approaching writing a book as a fun cool project is actually the secret to having a healthy, manageable relationship with it, and none of what I’m about to write will apply to you. If so, I love that for you, truly.

For many of us, though, on any imaginable scale, the ROI for writing a book is LOL. I mean that financially, of course — even if you get a six-figure advance, it’s hard to imagine that when you add up the hours put in that you’ll end up at minimum wage. But the financial part, while seriously important (especially in this economy), might be the least significant element here. I don’t know if anyone really gets into writing books because they think it’ll lead to fat sacks of cash money.

But the calculus looks even worse when you look at how much of your heart and soul gets poured into a book. The amount of drive and passion it takes to produce one and shepherd it through the publication process is monumental. And, in my experience, it seems like writing a book that will really move people and touch them requires so much soul-searching, introspection, painful honesty, and bone-deep empathy that it leaves you feeling scraped raw and wondering whether the whole world can see that you’re covered with dripping emotional wounds.

And that’s the fun part! I’m not even kidding. Writing a book is so painful and difficult, and it’s also the most joyful element of the whole process. When you’re in the weeds of literally any other part of the book process — the promotion, the hustle, the long waiting periods — you’ll find yourself thinking, I wish I’d enjoyed the writing part more when I was in it, because it was so much better than this.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many pieces of art about making art? It’s because making art is so traumatic and difficult that the only way we can process it is by making more. It’s a psychic pyramid scheme. And also kind of an actual pyramid scheme, because the economics of it are so bad that the only way to make a living writing is to teach classes and bring more writers into the fold.

There are things you can do to make it easier to write a book. I cannot recommend the following enough: sleep, exercise, therapy, sharing snarky thoughts with your group chat, petting a dog. The community part also really is key, which is why I’m writing this here, desperately hoping someone reads it and it makes them feel seen (and then maybe leaves a comment that makes me feel heard).

If you are writing a book, and the process feels like coughing up phlegmy globs of your soul, I feel you. I won’t tell you not to write it, because we both know that would be pointless. People have told me versions of that many times, but you can’t tell someone, “Hey, have you considered not coughing?” Thanks so much! What actionable advice!

So I’m sending you love and sympathy and the emotional equivalent of buckwheat tea with a touch of honey. I can’t wait to read your words. Knowing how hard they were to write just makes the gift of them that much more precious.

1. man wants to exploit woman for her knowledge/skills/access and covers it up with a thin veneer of romance for double the exploitation, double the fun (see: Jason and Medea, Theseus and Hippolyta, Theseus and Ariadne, Aeneas and Dido)

2. actually sort of hot, but built on a foundation of lies (Cupid and Psyche, Aphrodite and Anchises)

3. whoops, not a love story at all, definitely a rape story (Zeus and anyone, Apollo and almost anyone, Hades and Persephone in most versions)

4. this couple genuinely loves each other, so someone’s going to die a horrible, senseless death (Hector and Andromache, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Orpheus and Eurydice)

Nevertheless — in spite of the total lack of good models — tropes about mythic and epic romances abound in a way that I find kind of baffling. Take it from me, a person whose ex proposed with a quotation from the Odyssey that gets more and more problematic the more you look at it.

But there is one pickup line from antiquity that I think might have a decent chance of working on me.

No, it’s not from Ovid. I wrote an entire chapter in my book Not All Dead White Men about Ovid and pickup artists, excerpted here. The TL;DR is that Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, in spite of ostensibly being an ancient pickup artist manual, is pretty lacking in anything seductive. A big part of the problem there is that both Ovid and the modern pickup artist community have internalized the idea that women are inherently inferior, and the point of seduction is actually to raise your value as estimated by other men. Be still, my heart.

But there’s one line from ancient poetry that I find pretty sexy. It’s in Theocritus’ 11th Idyll, a poem written from the perspective of the cyclops Polyphemus in his youth, when he fell in love with the sea-nymph Galatea. The whole poem is delightful, both playful and clever in a way that is completely my jam.

Theocritus was writing in the early 3rd century BCE, and he spent some time in the Great Library of Alexandria (you know, the one people are still sad burned down). This period of poetry, the Hellenistic period, is a particularly rich and varied period, but some of the best-known works can be classified as, essentially, extremely highbrow fanfiction. Now, you can kind of say that about pretty much all Greek poetry, if you want to; Athenaeus actually quotes Aeschylus saying that his tragedies were “scraps from Homer’s feast.” Which sounds a lot like Alfred North Whitehead, millennia later, saying that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The anxiety of influence is real.

But I’d like to think that we’re in a place now culturally where we know that while fanfiction can be formulaic, derivative, badly written, and cringe, it doesn’t have to be. A lot of great writers honed their craft writing fanfiction.

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Theocritus 11 uses a formula that will be familiar to people who have read fanfiction: he takes a well-known story (the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey) and writes a prequel to it with a lot of knowing winks toward the original. Also, the idea of a teenaged cyclops in love is just pure gold. You can (and should) read the whole thing here, in translation by Diane Arnson Svarlien.

The sexiest part, in my opinion, is this part (11.30-7):

Delightful girl, I know why you run away.
My looks are frightening. I know it’s true,
One long shaggy eyebrow runs from ear to ear
With one huge eye below. My nose is flat
And wide. Yet, as I am, I keep a thousand head
Of cattle, and from them I fill a vat
Of the best milk to drink. All year round
I never run out of cheese, not even in
The coldest winter. My baskets are always full.

Enhance on that last bit:

τυρὸς δ᾽ οὐ λείπει μ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἐν θέρει οὔτ᾽ ἐν ὀπώρᾳ,
οὐ χειμῶνος ἄκρω: ταρσοὶ δ᾽ ὑπεραχθέες αἰεί.

cheese never leaves me, not in the summer nor the harvest
nor the depths of winter: my baskets always overflow.

HELL YES. Is there anything sexier than a man who promises to provide an infinite amount of cheese?

Hollywood thinks we want Brad Pitt in Troy, oiled up and ready to kill the hell out of some people. But I would argue that image is more attractive as an ideal for other men than it is to women. It’s a tired retread of the Ars Amatoria problem, where men are performing masculinity for each other and claiming that it’s making them more desirable to women. Pass. This SMBC sums up the issue perfectly.

Sure, there are women out there looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes. But I think most of us would rather have a self-aware, self-deprecating guy whose baskets overflow with cheese year-round.

Of course, Polyphemus’ pitch — and his desire in general — is the butt of the joke in this poem, because men under patriarchy have always been too incurious to actually pay attention to what women want.

It’s kind of funny that the poem with the best pickup line is fanfiction of the original text that my ex used to propose to me. It makes it seem like we weren’t that far off the mark. And maybe that’s true! We’re still good friends, and our partnership was mostly pretty great, even if it was doomed from the start by an overreliance on tired, misogynistic tropes about what a heterosexual partnership is supposed to look like. We might have had a chance if we’d been able to meet each other with more authenticity and vulnerability and tell each other what we really needed. Which, again, was cheese.

There’s an endless amount of discourse on this topic, and a lot of it revolves around the question of what responsibility you have to the people in your life to let them see what you’ve written in advance. There are several camps on this issue, and writers I adore have written in defense of every possible position.

I really love what wrote a while back in her post “What my ex thinks about the book”, which amounts to “I don’t know and it’s not my business or yours.” Philosophically, in general, I’m pretty aligned with that position: your memoir represents your own experience, and you shouldn’t try to speak to the experiences of others, so they shouldn’t really have a say on your narrative.

And there are risks to sharing. My favorite part of ’s wonderful memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful is the absolute gut punch of a chapter ‘The Edits’, about the experience of seeing her ex’s requested changes to her Modern Love piece:

His edits on the piece—I’m tempted to put edits in air quotes here—were more psychologically revealing than almost anything he said in couples counseling or to me privately. The recycling at the curb became “the recycling my husband took to the curb.” The cotton spiderweb stretched across our tree for Halloween became “the spiderweb my husband and children stretched across the tree.” He redlined—deleted—that he worked long hours, that I packed his things, that the money clip was a birthday present I gave him, that we had kept our wedding dishes in the dining room cabinets he took when he moved out. Most importantly, he redlined any instance of me crying.

It’s an incredible piece of writing. Part of me says it was worth her sending it to him just to get those notes, because damn. Fortunately, her editor encouraged her not to accept the changes.

On the other hand, you have Lilly Dancyger’s LitHub article “Why You Should Let Your Family Read Your Memoir in Advance.” Dancyger’s argument — which I also found extremely compelling — is that you can’t predict what people in your life will find upsetting in your memoir, and it often isn’t what you’d think. Letting them read it in advance gives you a chance to smooth out tiny, low-stakes (for you!) details:

When she finally read the book, my mother was hurt by some of the bigger elements of the story I told, as I expected she probably would be. But she was also hurt by some little details that felt almost insignificant to me. An example that sticks in my mind: She didn’t like that I referred to my loft bed in the studio apartment we shared when I was a teenager as being “above the kitchen.” It was next to the kitchen, she argued. Yes, I could sit up in bed and look down at the top of the fridge, but the space directly under my loft bed was not the kitchen—I had a desk under there, and a little storage bench. She felt that I was exaggerating how cramped the space was (and how poor we were) by saying that my bed was “above” the kitchen. I laughed when she pushed back on this little detail. Of all the fraught, painful things in the book, this was what she had a problem with?

But I also felt a twinge of regret. It would not have compromised the integrity of my story to change “above” to “next to.” I would have been happy to make that change, in fact, if it made her more comfortable with the story as a whole. But because I didn’t share the manuscript with her ahead of time, it was too late to make that adjustment, or any of the other small edits that might have softened the blow of the larger, hard-to-read story.

This is SUCH a good point. You truly, truly do not know what people will have an issue with. Most people who have read my memoir agree that my mother comes away from it looking pretty great, and she is. But it also has a scene with a very fraught conversation with her in the car before a personal training session. I share both the conversation itself and some deeply traumatic family history about a violent incident that forced my mother out of a job she was great at and proud of. My mother had no problem with any of that, but she disputed a somewhat throwaway line about how the reason we were going to the trainer together was because she didn’t like that I’d gained a bunch of weight recently.

I haven’t decided whether to keep that context or not — my mother’s attitudes toward weight and health have changed in the past decade, but I feel pretty confident that I accurately depicted what I thought she thought back in 2015. I think a lot of women my age have a lot of baggage around how diet culture impacted how their mothers felt and talked about their bodies (and maybe still do), and it’s worth calling it out and naming it, even in mothers who are wonderful and supportive. But my book is still very much in edits, so who knows what will happen.

But sending a draft of my divorce memoir to my mother, a minor character in the book who mostly comes away from it looking pretty good, is a different question than sending it to my ex, a major player in the central drama of the story who (I hope!) comes away from it looking like a complicated person who, like me, is often sympathetic and often an asshole. Like Lyz, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what my ex thinks about my memoir. But my position is a little different.

While I don’t in general think people should feel that they need to share their divorce memoirs with their exes in advance, my situation is pretty specific. (I guess that’s true of every situation.) My ex and I are still close friends who joke about Sappho pickup lines together (although for the past 24 hours we’ve mostly been sending each other memes and satire about group chats, of which my favorite is this one from Reductress). She bought me one of my most prized possessions, this pillow:

We also co-parent not just amicably, but collaboratively as a team with my partner and his ex. More than that, I’m trying to tell a story about being an ally to trans people like her and our daughter. While I’m certainly not trying (and, indeed, not able) to tell the story of her transition, I can’t imagine not seeking her perspective on that very difficult time.

The key word there is “seeking.” Because, as I mentioned in the title: I can’t get her to actually read it.

In theory, she is very supportive. Sure, the first ten or so times I told her I was working on a divorce memoir, she nodded blankly and seemed to enter a fugue state — an impression reinforced a few weeks later, when she asked, “So, what are you working on these days?” When I said, “Still the divorce memoir,” she responded, “Divorce memoir?”

Honestly, who can blame her? If she told me she was going to write a divorce memoir about me, I’d probably endeavor to block the knowledge of that out of my head so I didn’t spiral into an anxiety Möbius strip. I’d also desperately hope that it wasn’t going to actually happen. Most book ideas don’t.

But eventually, as it became clear that this was really happening and as I explained bits and pieces of it to her and described how I planned to frame some of our stories, she warmed to the idea. I told her, basically, that I was hoping it would be read by the wives and mothers of trans people and might help them process some of the messy hard shit that people don’t talk about so they could come out on the other side as the supportive allies they want to be. Gender is hard. And if I can make the world a little better for trans people by helping cis women who want to be allies work through some of the harder parts, then I’ll feel good about that. I think she found that pitch pretty compelling.

But she still hasn’t read it.

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Several times, I’ve asked her if she wanted/was willing to take a look, and she’s said that she was. The first time was probably when I sent her my proposal right before I went out on submission a year and a half ago. I think my thought process was something like, “This is the most stressed I’ve ever been in my entire damn life, so whatever she thinks can’t possibly make it worse.” Truly, everything people have said about how submission is a goddamn nightmare is true. I refer you to this piece by my wonderful agent :

How to Glow in the Dark

Common Author Freakouts, Part 2: Toward the End of the Editorial Development Process

Above all else, the process of writing, selling, and publishing a book is slow. Everything about this industry takes about ten times as long as you worry it will in your worst nightmares…

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5 years ago · 1 like · Anna Sproul-Latimer

In that piece, Anna briefly mentions her “frenzied rabbit/frightened turtle” dichotomy. I definitely have some frenzied rabbit tendencies, although sometimes I can avoid a task for six months with the best of them. My ex, on the other hand, is pure frightened turtle when it comes to my book, because not only did she not read the proposal then, she didn’t read the manuscript draft when I sent it to her a year later. It’s been six months now. She promised me over the winter holidays that she was going to read it in January after she left her very stressful job, but then she didn’t end up leaving, so I can only assume it remains unread.

I’m sympathetic. Being a single mom with a demanding job is hard, and being a trans person and mother to a trans kid in the U.S. right now is extremely hard. And her avoidant tendencies aren’t exactly coming as a surprise to me, a person who has written a book in which those exact tendencies figure prominently. So it isn’t a shock that she’s somewhat reluctant to read a divorce memoir about one of the stickiest, most vulnerable times in her life.

But also: how can she not??? Maybe this is the frenzied rabbit in me talking, but: if I knew someone was writing a memoir about me, I cannot IMAGINE not wanting to read it. Well, “want” might be a strong word, but certainly I would feel compelled to read it as soon as I could. If they offered to send it to me, I would be continuously refreshing my inbox until it arrived, and then I would stay up all night combing through it. And if they didn’t offer to share it with me, I’d be even worse. I would be biting my fingernails down to the quick imagining what it said. I would be obsessing about it endlessly to my therapist. I would be trying to hack into their email to access it. I would be dressed up in a ghillie suit, standing outside their window, hoping to catch a glimpse when they typed in their system password.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t thought about this at all. I definitely haven’t thought about this 20x more than my ex, the person it is actually happening to.

Ultimately, there isn’t a single right answer to the question of whether you should share your writing with the people it’s about. And there isn’t a right way to feel about their reactions (or non-reactions, as the case may be), either. You can’t predict what those reactions will be, and you certainly can’t control them. Letting go of what I can’t control is still a work in progress for me. But I think that’s ultimately why we write memoir, isn’t it? Because people are so strange and unpredictable and bizarre and wonderful? The alchemy of the choices you make and how people respond: that’s humanity, and that’s what we write about.

Also, just so you all know: I sent my ex a link to a draft of this piece before I published it. She initially asked for a week to get back to me but then ended up reading it right away. We’ll see if that changes the timeline on her reading the manuscript.

To set the stage, I want to clarify that my ex and I weren’t always in a place where we could tease each other about Sapphic pickup lines. For a while after she moved out in summer 2019, things were pretty much the way you’d generally imagine the vibes to be post-separation: tense smiles and the occasional passive-aggressive barb traded at custody handoff, copious sobbing and ranting about her various failings to my best friends and therapist.

In my experience every divorce has a few extra-special fun added ingredients that crank up the temperature to make the atmosphere even more combustible than it already is. Ours were my ex’s transition, the fact that our son was less than a year old, and my somewhat questionable decision to tell her the literal day before we signed our divorce papers that I was seeing someone new and it appeared to be getting serious.

In my defense, I hadn’t meant for it to happen. It was supposed to be a fun rebound fling with an old college flame I’d stayed friends with throughout the years. It had seemed so perfect: I liked and trusted him, and we definitely had chemistry, but he was also a married polyamorous vegan who lived in Berlin and only visited the Bay Area for work a few times a year. It was the perfect recipe for a casual situationship to dip my toes back into the dating waters. Except for how stupid into each other we immediately were.

In no time at all, we were flying all over the place to see each other during the brief windows when my ex had custody. And then, after just a few months, he and his wife decided they were interested in bringing their one-year-old kid (!) to the Bay Area for a few months in early 2020 to contemplate a more permanent move. Almost before I knew it, they were in an apartment in the city, and I was arranging brunch dates with his wife, who I’d vaguely known back in college.

It was exciting, but I was also hugely ambivalent about the whole thing. Being with him felt amazing, but it was so much so fast. I already had to manage the feelings of a transitioning ex and neurodivergent six-year-old (thankfully, the one-year-old was chill as hell). I had zero interest in or bandwidth for the feelings of some man, no matter how good we were together. I was also adjusting to living alone for the first time in my entire damn life, because at the age of 20 I’d moved directly out of my college apartment and into the graduate school apartment I shared with my future spouse and even further future ex. I had a lot to learn about being a grown-up outside of a serious partnership, and I was determined not to let anything happening with my new old guy stop me from becoming the person I wanted to be post-divorce.

Everything was so new and strange and disorienting. My primary coping skill was an almost pathological amount of compartmentalization. All my bad feelings about my ex and our divorce I kept tightly locked in a box, only to be opened with close friends and in therapy, because I knew it was better for the kids to keep a good relationship with her. I dealt with my guilt about missing so much of my kids’ lives by focusing on work when I didn’t have custody and throwing myself into parenting when I did. And I kept my new relationship resolutely separate from everything else, shoving any discomfort I had with how to operate in the brave new world of ethical nonmonogamy into a metaphorical garage in my brain to deal with later when I was better resourced or something. A very plausible scenario.

And then the pandemic came, and I immediately decided to throw out my tidy compartments altogether.

I don’t remember exactly how I came to the idea of having us all live together. My first priority was my kids, and I knew right away that joint custody wasn’t going to work for us without any childcare help. My ex simply couldn’t manage her job, Zoom school for a kid with ADHD, and a rambunctious toddler all on her own. That’s not shade: literally nobody could do that. So our options were basically for me to take sole custody or for us to move back in together. But I was pretty worried that if we moved back in together, I would murder her. Meanwhile, I wanted to be with my partner, because I felt stronger and safer when were together. But obviously he needed to be where his wife and child were.

In retrospect, I think the reasoning sort of went like this: maybe my two problems could cancel each other out, and the boyfriend and his wife would sort of serve as buffers to keep me and my ex from killing each other. And I hoped that inviting both my ex and my boyfriend’s wife would sort of split the vote for which part of this plan was the craziest when my friends and family inevitably voiced their very reasonable concerns.

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That’s all in hindsight, of course. At the time, I was very focused on convincing people that this choice was extremely sane and rational and normal. The four of us all knew each other from the University of Chicago, so it wasn’t like I’d randomly plucked a polycule out of mid-air! Didn’t a ratio of four adults to three kids sound preferable to weathering lockdown alone? Wouldn’t it be good for my one-year-old to have another same-aged kid around for socialization? Did they have a better solution, or were they just going to criticize my very logical reasoning?

Five years later, I’m willing to admit that they were right, and it was an absolutely ridiculous decision. Most ridiculous of all is how well it worked. That doesn’t mean that all of my rationalizations were correct — that’s the outcome fallacy — but the four of us all do really look back on those lockdown months with fond nostalgia. We spent so much time being terrified, of course, and obsessively reading the news, and there was a lot of freaked-out crying. But we also cooked so much, wiped down so many groceries with Clorox, went for so many walks in the neighborhood with a double stroller, played so much Fibbage. We called ourselves Quarantine Brady Bunch.

It was a bit of a honeymoon for me and my partner, but it was also a very healing time for me and my ex. I’d asked for a divorce in part because I was exhausted from feeling like the two of us had decided that I was going to be the one to solve all of her shit for her, and I was done. But during those months of gleefully freedom from having to snowplow the road for her, I pushed away the squirming realization that we both needed each other’s support. Our divorce had torn out some mushrooms, but we’d left all the mycelium in the substrate.1 It was during that time that we started to build on that interconnected network to create the relationship we have now, which is informed by our deep knowledge of each other but lightly held. That framework leaves a lot of room for both hard conversations and jokes about Sappho.

After about six months, my house started feeling a little bit cramped with seven people and a large dog and we moved on to the next chapter in our queer modern family. My partner and his now-ex separated, and she and my ex moved in together to a house a few miles from mine. We share joint custody of all three kids, who go from one house to the other on the same schedule, and the four of us make parenting decisions together and share a nanny.

A lot of people have expressed surprise to me that my ex and my partner’s ex have lived together for so long. But I’ve come to believe that an arrangement like ours, with a bunch of single moms having each other’s backs — my ex once referred to it as a “mommune”, a name I both want to roll my eyes at and also adore — might just be the most stable and supportive setup that exists for raising kids. Certainly it’s more stable than the heterosexual monogamous nuclear family.

The mommune (we’re counting my partner, a non-normative cis man who our son sometimes calls “Mama Baba”, as one of the moms) gives each mother the chance to be herself and to both get and give support. I feel more confident than I ever have in expressing my boundaries, needs, and preferences. It rules. Everyone should be part of a mommune.

I wonder what it would look like for me to feel less uncomfortable with being crazy. Five years ago, I took great pains to explain to myself and everyone else in my life that all of us living together was an entirely sane and rational and reasonable choice. I still feel the urge to justify it in those terms, to be honest. But I’m curious what it would be like to let go of my death grip on the appearance of rationality.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, if you pick the Wild Magic sorcerer subclass, then when you try and cast a spell your sorcerer might accidentally start flying or turn everyone on the battlefield into a cat or something. Some of these effects are helpful, some suck. A lot depends on what you make of it. Life can be kind of like that, too.

Sometimes it feels like all of us moving in together was less a smart, rational choice we made as adults with agency and more of an accidental magical effect that we found ourselves in the midst of and decided to work with. One minute I was making very structured plans for how to gradually introduce my partner to my kid, the next minute my kitchen island was absolutely covered with bags of groceries.

When I was at the Romantasy convention a few weeks back, I went to a panel on magical worldbuilding. One of the themes that came up with all the authors was the idea that magic has to have a price. It exacts a cost. It obeys rules, but it doesn’t have to make sense, at least not in the way the logical part of my brain wants to categorize rationality. It doesn’t come for free, it doesn’t make the hard parts of life suck any less, and it definitely isn’t easy to explain to concerned relatives who think you’ve gone insane. It just is, and it works. Maybe that’s enough.

Shade has been written about a million times: the challenges of pinning it down, its roots in 80s LGBTQ ballroom culture and drag, its popularization through Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The art of shade is in the delicate balance of insulting and non-insulting elements. You want it to be clear that it’s an insult, or else the shade will totally go over everyone’s head — but, as Ru Paul tweeted in 2012, “Throwing shade takes a bit of creativity, being a bitch takes none.” Alas, the glory days of Twitter shade are now long behind us, and now everyone there is just awful, which isn’t conducive to shade.

The essential elements of shade are subaltern identity and wit, so even though Sappho pre-dates the height of shade by a few millennia, she’s got all the ingredients for a true master.

Please note that I’m interpreting shade pretty freely here. There are plenty of non-shady interpretations of these poems. Those are actually better, more grounded readings, if we’re being honest. If you want to do new historicist readings that take into account the cultural and literary milieu in which Sappho operated, you’ll probably see a lot less shade and a lot more references to archaic Greek marriage rituals. For the literary criticism nerds among us, I guess what I’m doing here is more of an extremely online queer new criticism thing. Which, now that I write it out, seems self-contradictory. But that’s fine.

What I’m saying is, if you want to read shade into the fragmentary remains of Sappho and imagine her trading barbs with Drag Race contestants… it’s definitely there. Just imagine, like the classic Key & Peele “Obama’s anger translator” recurring bit, a drag queen standing behind Sappho, acting as her shade translator. I can’t unsee that mental image now. I long for a redo of the famous Alma-Tadema painting of Sappo and Alcaeus where the woman next to her is a drag queen giving side-eye.

Poem 1

This poem is about Sappho, in the throes of a debilitating crush, calling on Aphrodite to help her out (not for the first time, it seems). She imagines Aphrodite coming to her, then dunking on her:

But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?

A masterclass already. Anne Carson’s translation (which I’m using throughout) really gives the full shady force of the repeated δηὖτε in the text — although it’s possible that the “(now again)” is just a touch heavy-handed? A simple “now” might work just as well to convey that Sappho being so completely obsessed with a new girl that she summons Aphrodite is a regular phenomenon.

But really, the true *chef’s kiss* here is that Sappho has shade thrown at her by the goddess Aphrodite, suggesting a sort of easy camaraderie between the two. What a flex! Aphrodite wouldn’t bother to appear, or throw shade, at someone beneath her notice.

Poem 5

And all the wrong he did before, loose it.
Make him a joy to his friends,
a pain to his enemies and let there exist for us
not one single further sorrow.

This poem is begging for the safe return of her brother from a sea voyage. It’s a true artist who can convey both genuine distress and longing for a lost sibling and also imply that the sibling kind of sucks. Goals.

Poem 22

]for when I look at you
]such a Hermione
]and to yellowhaired Helen I liken you

“You know who you remind me of? Hermione! No, not the Harry Potter one who rules and is the true hero of those books, the Greek myth one. Oh, you don’t remember a Hermione from myth? She was the daughter of Helen and Menelaus. I guess there really aren’t any stories about her. She shows up in Euripides’ Andromache and is a total bitch. Anyway, she probably looked sort of like her mom, the most beautiful woman on earth, so I guess what I’m really saying is that you look sort of like the much-less-famous daughter of Helen of Troy! Aren’t you flattered?”

Poem 57

what country girl seduces your wits
wearing a country dress
not knowing how to pull the cloth to her ankles?

Borderline whether this is shade or just a straight-up insult, but I think the repetition of ἀγροΐωτις/ἀγροΐωτιν (translated here as “country”) tips it over. Sort of like Mariah Carey saying “I don’t know her,” it implies that the literal only thing the speaker knows about this girl is that she has no sophistication and she’s not even going to bother to think of a second adjective.

Poem 106

outstanding as the Lesbian singer compared to those
elsewhere

Know your worth and the shade will flow.

Poem 115

Carson does a whole calligram thing with this poem:

But no amount of weird, artsy spacing can hide what real ones know to be true: that comparing a bridegroom to a slender sapling is the most basic, uninspired comparison in Sappho’s whole arsenal, and she knows it. It implies that this dude could become a huge impressive tree, maybe? I guess? Only time will tell! In the meantime, he has no real defining features that suggest a different, more evocative comparison!

Poem 120

but I am not someone who likes to wound
rather I have a quiet mind

Suuuuure you don’t, Sappho.

Poem 165

For this one, I’m going to include the Greek:

φαίνεταί ϝοι κῆνος

that man seems to himself

This is a lot like the beginning of Sappho’s most famous poem, fr. 31 (φάινεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν), about a man who seems to Sappho to be equal to the gods (because he’s sitting across from her crush). I wrote about it a bit here:

Probably it is the same poem, actually, and the digamma is a result of a monk who wrote a μ so badly that it looked more like a ϝ. Whomst among us, etc. But I like to think this poem is about a mansplainer with a drastically overinflated impression of himself.

If only we had the complete, Odyssey-sized corpus of Sappho’s poems. Imagine all that glorious shade, lost to the sands of time! Yet another reason to be mad about the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. Although the sad, hard truth about the burning of the Great Library is that although it did burn, it had already declined to a shell of its former self through lack of funding for the arts and political cronyism, two things that luckily are no longer problem today. Sigh. At least we have The Verge’s The Great Scrollback of Alexandria archiving the best tweets from the pre-Musk glory days.

The list included no oracle/tarot decks, which several commenters picked up on. But since then, I’ve been leaning into a little bit more witchiness. Last summer, I started doing meditation circles with my kids every morning and night and bought a pendulum. And then in the past few weeks, a friend got me this beautiful moon journal, and then wrote about his tarot practice on his wonderful newsletter, and I thought: you know what, it’s time. Also, I loved the aesthetics of the Modern Witch deck he shared.

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Heart in the Stars, Feet on the Ground

Last summer, I was going through some heavy stuff. A good friend had just gotten her first tarot deck and offered to give me a reading…

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a year ago · 28 likes · 1 comment · Ben Greene

I’m already loving this new practice as a way to start my day. Also, over the weekend, my almost-twelve-year-old daughter asked if she could draw a card, too. After shuffling herself — she asked me to shuffle for her, and I explained that I literally could not, because the shuffling is inherent to the practice — she drew the six of swords, a card that is all about being in transition. As a trans kid on the cusp of puberty, that was pretty powerful for her. She’s a scientist at heart, but she’s completely sold on the idea of using tarot to access inner wisdom, which I love for her.

I’ve been thinking about my witchy turn, and it led me to the conclusion that there might be a bit of an adult neurodivergence diagnosis to witch shit pipeline. It makes sense: it’s easy for undiagnosed neurodivergent kids to spend so much time masking and trying to fit themselves into boxes that they don’t belong in. We learn that it’s easier to fit in if we tune out our emotions and don’t follow our instincts, because when we follow our instincts people look at us like we’re weird and bad and wrong.

It takes a lot of time and finding your people and therapy to realize that, whoops, it’s much better to be weird and authentic. Trying to be who I think the world wants me to be is an inherently doomed and unhappy endeavor. I’ll never be good at it, and people will know that I’m faking and sense that uncanny valley and recoil from it. It’s so much better when you run out of fucks to give for who others wish you were. You might make some people uncomfortable, and that’s ok! Good, even! And witchy stuff can be a powerful tool for relearning how to connect with your brain and feelings in a way that allows you to surprise yourself. If you’re reading this and you’re on that journey: my heart goes out to you. Go buy yourself a tarot deck.

BUT NOT ONE OF THE ONES I’M ABOUT TO SHARE.

As I understand it — and I’m very much a newbie here, so please, more experienced tarot practitioners, feel free to educate me! — the most important feature of a tarot deck is that it speaks to you. So if you feel really called by a deck with art inspired by pulp illustration, or one with kawaii cats, or one that appeared on the Agatha All Along show: power to you.

But, with that said, some tarot decks that I saw did seem straight-up cursed. Be warned: what you see here will haunt you.

I found all of these on Amazon, the most cursed place to shop.

Tarot del Toro

This deck, with art inspired by the filmography of Guillermo del Toro, is actually stunning and beautiful and would be very cool to use. But it WILL give you and anybody else who draws a card from it nightmares. They went with the eye-hand monster from Pan’s Labyrinth for the damn cover!

Ceccoli Tarot Deck

Another beautiful and haunted deck, with illustrations that seem to be exclusively of Victorian doll-girls who come alive at night and attack you with a butcher knife. Again, I could see this deck being amazing for the right person, but that person is not me. It terrifies me.

Funko: Disney Villains Tarot Deck

Moving immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, I can only ask: what fresh hell is this? Who asked for this? What series of decisions led someone to say: yes, there’s probably a market for a tarot deck with Funko Pop Disney villains on the cards? (There’s also a Funko Nightmare Before Christmas deck, but that one feels slightly less cursed to me for some reason.)

NYC Tarot

Maybe the deck itself isn’t that bad, if a little overly sanitized, but the Amazon preview contains this card which I deem cursed:

Clever art choice, but you had one job, and it was not misspelling “emperor.”

The Housewives Tarot: A Domestic Divination Kit

I am so exhausted by the tradwife discourse, but: those patriarchy-courting faux feminists had better stay the hell away from my witch shit.

One of the cards is literally a woman who is a dishwasher!

Houseplant Tarot: A 78-Card Deck of Adorable Plants and Succulents for Magical Guidance

I am not personally a plant mom, although I have nothing but respect for the witches who can keep something green alive. However:

I just can’t get behind “updating” the suits to succulents, cacti, potted trees, and flowering plants. What the hell? Like, I ASSUME cacti are swords, but… why?

Especially as a wedding gift for the lovely , here’s the extremely cursed VI of Succulents, whatever that is:

Just no.

Good Omens Tarot Deck

I’m absolutely sick with disgust and rage at Neil Gaiman right now.

The Official Sonic the Hedgehog: Amy Rose's Fortune Card Deck

What the

I can’t

And, finally, because this is Myth Takes:

Mythos Tarot: Guidance from the Greek Gods

The tagline says “Travel under the shadow of Olympus and walk your personal Odyssey through traditional tarot,” which should tell you everything you need to know about this deck. The art really hammers it home:

I definitely don’t need a yassified Persephone making sultry eyes at me in my tarot, ok? Also, divination was a huge part of Greek religion, and this feels like such an inauthentic mashup of different divination practices. Just visit the Pythia, cowards.

As I said, any tarot deck that speaks to you is the right deck. If the Disney Funko Villains deck really feels like it will help you create the life you want to live, go forth. And, actually, it’s kind of generative and interesting to draw a tarot card and feel resistance to it! If it made you mad that I dunked on any of these, then that’s a useful signal for you, too. Maybe you feel like the housewife deck will help remind you of what we’re fighting against, or maybe you really love the idea of drawing a Knight of Flowering Plants. That’s between you and the universe.

I’m mostly just being silly here. Except about the idea of giving money to Neil Gaiman. Don’t do that.

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Romantasy isn’t really my genre — last year, reading the first two Fourth Wing books back-to-back sort of sent me into a reading slump — but I’ve been trying to lean into choosing chaos, so when she asked me if I wanted to go to a conference full of people obsessed with fairy/dragon/witch smut, I was like, yeah, obviously. Also, at the time February 2025 sounded super far away and hypothetical. Which is the true story of how, three weeks ago, I found myself desperately buying last-minute plane tickets, browsing this Buzzfeed list of fast fashion to buy if you’re “in your fairytale era”, and speed-reading the recently-released third Fourth Wing book (I’m not done yet, so no spoilers). And then, last Thursday, I stuffed my carry-on suitcase with far more tulle than usual, as well as some fingerless lace gloves that the Amazon algorithm correctly guessed I would want to add to my order, and headed to the con.

I learned a lot from the experience. Like: don’t go to a con without a collapsible rolling basket full of books to get signed, you absolute rube. That was pretty interesting to me, because I assumed that, like me, everyone else there mostly read their smut in ebook format so they could pretend they were reading anything else. But no! Everybody else was proudly displaying signed hardcovers.

It makes sense. People who choose to go to a romantasy conference are already in a more enlightened state than I am, because they’ve done some of the work of shedding their shame about liking genres that prioritize the female gaze, female badassery, and female pleasure.

The room was full of absolutely gorgeous women of all sizes wearing corsets. As I left my hotel room the first night, I told my younger sister, “I’m not sure I have the main-character energy to pull off this outfit.” But nobody else looked like they gave a single fuck whether they were pulling off their look. They all had amazing hair — my sister’s friend came with us to the con, and she said she’s never been at an event with such a high proportion of fellow redheads. And everyone was so nice and positive! I got a ton of compliments. But also, people were friendly but not overly so, because I suspect a lot of them were fellow introverts. Nice introverts who were happy to let you sit at their table but felt no need to fill the conversation with small talk. It ruled.

It also activated SO many of my insecurities. Because I went to grad school, one of my worst nightmares is to be in a room of people and feel like everyone knows I haven’t done the reading. And that was exactly how I felt.

I’ve read more than my fair share of fantasy and YA, but that was ages ago. I am not up on the fake-sounding names of most popular romantasy authors and the even faker names of their heartthrob heroes. I haven’t even finished the Fourth Wing books, and I haven’t touched ACOTAR because I heard it’s kind of bad. I’m strongly considering reading some of the Greek myth-inflected romantasy because I think it would make for an entertaining newsletter article or two, but I haven’t done that yet. Every time I met someone new at the con, they’d ask what I was reading, and I’d mumble that I was reading The Blood of Hercules — technically not a lie, I’m 10 pages in — and they’d say, “Oh, I really liked that one!” because of course they’d read it already. Which contributed to my feeling of being a bad student.

That feeling came to a head at the last panel I went to, which was about lore and myth in romantasy. In short: exactly my jam! Except the moderators of the panel — who did a terrific job, which makes me want to listen to their very successful podcast — asked the writers on the panel about what kind of research they did for their books. And the first writer1 said this:

“I feel like I just absorbed Greek myth as a kid! Even though, like, it’s always changing, according to scholars. Like, my mom’s book club just picked The Odyssey, and I guess scholars now think the same person might not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey? Which is a pretty huge thing! And when I was a kid, it was like, Apollo is the god of the sun, and now they’re like, oh, it’s really Helios. But anyway, I just absorbed it as a kid, so I didn’t really need to do any research, except when I wanted to find tiny details, like who would tend Dionysus’ bar.”

I literally choked on the croissant I was eating when she said “scholars now think the same person might not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey.” A of all: that’s not new news. Milman Parry died nearly a century ago. Even the word “written” is pretty problematic in this context.

I would also typically hope that people who are writing books heavily inflected with Greek myth would have a more complex and nuanced understanding than to ask questions like “is Apollo or Helios the god of the sun?” I encourage people to read Helen Morales’ Very Short Introduction, which I discussed here, but the short version is that there was no “god of the sun”, an anachronistic later interpretation. Helios was the Greek word for “sun”, so stories about him are sort of about the sun personified. And yes, Apollo and Artemis are associated with the sun and moon, but Apollo’s associations are also varied and complex. He was worshipped with cults emphasizing different aspects of his divinity in different locations. Delphi was more about prophecy, for example, but Mt. Parnassus nearby was associated with the muses and music. And so on.

But I snapped out of my pedantic doom spiral as soon as the next author started speaking. She had also written a book that drew from Greek myth,2 but her approach was different. She said, “The research part can be hard, because there are so many conflicting myths. I was really worried about picking just one aspect of the Medusa story. I don’t really know why I stressed about it so much. Did I think that, like, Classics professors were going to read my YA book and leave comments on GoodReads saying I’d gotten Medusa wrong?”

That, I thought, was an excellent point. First of all, I appreciated that she’d done the research, even if it led her into a bit of an anxiety tailspin, because nothing could be more relatable to me as a scholar. And Medusa is one of my favorite figures from myth, which is why my header image for Myth Takes is her taking a selfie. (Who cares if other people turn to stone when they look at her? The only gaze that matters is hers, and she felt cute.) But also: yes, classicists might well read a YA romantasy book, but I will personally publicly shame any classicist who leaves a “you got myth wrong”-type comment, because wow is that a useless, pedantic, gatekeeping approach to myth and antiquity.

I’d like to think that my colleagues are familiar enough with the freedom that reception allows for variation and reinterpretation that they would know that saying that a version of a myth is “wrong” makes you sound like you’re the uneducated one here. But, as always, it depends on context. Pedantic nitpicking is often a bit of a coping mechanism for traumatized scholars. They’ve convinced themselves that everyone else thinks their work is meaningless — not unreasonably, a lot of people DO think that — so they fall back on a “I know something you don’t know” stance to justify their life’s work. It’s not a great strategy, honestly, but it is a legible one.

And really, isn’t that what I was doing? I felt insecure about my level of competency at the con — just witness my lack of a rolling cart — and everyone there knew more than I did about the actual subject matter, people who can do magic having hot sex. So I defaulted to feeling proud that at least I knew more about this one, much less sexy thing, Homeric scholarship and minutiae about Greek myth. That way I didn’t need to think about how inadequate it made me feel that, not only was I in a room full of people who knew more than me, I was looking at five women onstage who had all written, like, fifteen books by the age of 35, had rabid fanbases willing to wait on hour-long lines to get hardcovers signed, and were seemingly able to wear fake eyelashes without blinking constantly. They made me feel like a small, jealous, pedantic troll. Which was at least situationally appropriate, I guess.

I left the con with several new books in my bag — one of which is loosely based on The Scarlet Pimpernel, a story paradigm I’m an absolute sucker for — and a determination to try to bring the spirit of the event into my life going forward. I want to wear a flower crown if I feel like it and dress in sillier clothes and absolutely geek out telling my favorite writers how much I adore their work. (EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS. Writing is so hard, and I have never once felt anything other than so grateful and happy when someone tells me that something I wrote meant something to them. My homework for you this week is to tell one writer you like — not me, this isn’t about me fishing for validation3 — that something they wrote is good. You will make their day.)

Just remember: there’s no wrong way to Medusa, except to tell people that they’re Medusa-ing wrong.

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The first few chapters are pretty light on myth elements. Instead, they focus on Percy’s feelings of not fitting in as a so-called “troubled” kid. His dyslexia makes it hard for him to study for his classes, and he’s also been diagnosed with ADHD. That part has been unexpectedly resonant for my kids. My oldest was diagnosed five years ago, and honestly, I wouldn’t rule the younger two out either. I’m really appreciating how the book gives us an opportunity to talk about these issues. Rick Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books, wrote them in part because he really wanted to have disability and neurodiversity representation in heroic narratives so that his son could have heroes who looked like him. And I love that.

Except that Percy Jackson doesn’t really have ADHD. Well, it’s ambiguous. As his friend and fellow demigod Annabeth explains it:

“Diagnosed with dyslexia. Probably ADHD, too.”

I tried to swallow my embarrassment. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Taken together, it’s almost a sure sign. The letters float off the page when you read, right? That’s because your mind is hardwired for ancient Greek. And the ADHD—you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s. Of course the teachers want you medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are.”

“You sound like…you went through the same thing?”

“Most of the kids here did. If you weren’t like us, you couldn’t have survived the Minotaur.”

So, while Percy roughly fits within the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, his symptoms are actually part of his being a superhero. And many advocates for neurodivergent people have cautioned against the “your brain is actually a superpower” kind of narrative, which often contributes to kids feeling weird and defective. In the Percy Jackson books, his difference is what helps him find a place he belongs, but things aren’t so simple IRL.

I can’t WAIT to discuss all this nuance with my kids, who I absolutely predict will be bored senseless by it and will plead with me to please get back to reading the books. But because they’re tiny pedants, I’ll also make sure that they understand that there’s no reason to think that the heroes of Greek myth would actually have been diagnosed with ADHD today.

Or IS there??

Although my particular flavor of neurodivergence is autism and not ADHD, my daughter, partner, and ex have all been diagnosed with it. So I have a pretty good idea of some of the most common features. And in my informed-yet-also-completely-facetious opinion, there are definitely a few heroes from myth who have some suggestive traits.

I’m writing this during a scary time for neurodivergent people. RFK Jr. and the Trump administration have already issued an executive order targeting SSRIs and hinting at a coming crackdown on ADHD medication. It’s just so fun to have yet another thing to worry about when it comes to getting my daughter (and others) the medical care she needs. But that also makes it more important than ever to resist the subtext of these orders, which are trying to convince the entire country that if you’re trans or neurodivergent or an immigrant, there’s something wrong with you.

Which is not to say that the heroes of Greek myth are a great model for anyone to aspire to. But they are kind of fun. And we need that fun and joy more than ever.

Theseus

I’ve argued before that Theseus is the main model for Percy Jackson:

To nobody’s surprise, he’s one of the heroes I think you can make the strongest case for here — although, interestingly, that case revolves around his inattentiveness, one of the traits that Annabeth specifically flags as not a problem for demigods (“you see too much, Percy, not too little”). There are two separate stories about how Theseus’ inattentiveness led to disaster. In one, he inadvertently led to the death of his own stepfather Aegeus, because he’d promised to switch out the black sails on his ship to white ones if he survived his encounter with the Minotaur but completely forgot to do so. When Aegeus sees the misleading black sails, he jumps off a cliff. Whoops.

The lesser-known story is about Ariadne, the woman who helped him defeat the Minotaur. After they flee from Crete, they stop on Naxos, where Theseus just… forgets about her. Seriously. Here’s how Roberto Calasso writes about it in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (one of my favorite myth books!):

Theseus has no particular reason for deserting Ariadne. There wasn’t another woman. It was just that she slipped his mind for a moment, a moment that might be any moment. And when Theseus gets distracted, someone is lost.

As anyone who has lived with somebody with ADHD knows, that “out of sight, out of mind” element is one of the most persistent challenges. And Theseus really exemplifies it.

Achilles

Achilles, on the other hand, absolutely displays the hyperfocus that Annabeth describes to Percy. Books 18 through 22 of the Iliad are basically one prolonged battle rage for him, and if you’ve ever seen a kid with ADHD work on a Lego project you know that the hyperfocus can last for hours and completely block everything else out. Achilles also has one of the features of ADHD that gets talked about less in popular culture: rejection sensitivity. I think you can absolutely read his withdrawal from battle in the first three quarters of the epic as a particularly RSD-heightened response to Agamemnon’s insults. See also: Ajax, who exhibits both extreme rejection sensitivity (basically the whole plot of Sophocles’ Ajax) and also extreme demand avoidance, which overlaps with both autism and ADHD.

Odysseus

When you first read the Odyssey, did you think to yourself, “Odysseus, you fucking idiot!! Why did you go to all that trouble to use that clever ‘Nobody’ trick on Polyphemus, only to then tell him your actual name at the last minute? All you had to do was keep it to yourself, and Poseidon would never have dedicated the next ten years to making your life hell!”

That’s definitely what I thought, and honestly, it still bugs me. But after watching my daughter, who is both a trickster and incredibly impulsive… it checks out. Honestly, many heroes are impulsive in violent, destructive ways — Heracles is the most obvious example here — but impulsivity doesn’t always present as violence. Sometimes it’s self-destructive. Also, Odysseus’ entire journey kind of looks like a man who keeps getting distracted by the next adventure.

Bonus Round

While we’re on the topic of neurodivergent heroes, I have to shout out the most obviously autistic character in Greek myth: Hippolytus, Theseus’ son. His obsession with hunting definitely falls into the “special interest” category, and every time he interacts with another character in Euripides’ Hippolytus he exhibits both social anxiety and a total inability to follow social cues. Also, he seems like he might be asexual/aromantic, which isn’t uncommon for people on the autism spectrum.

Obviously, I’m just meaning this as a kind of funny thought exercise. I’m not seriously trying to put forth an argument for diagnosing any of these characters as neurodivergent. Unless it would be meaningful to you to see them that way! If so, then: go to town.

It’s easy for scholars to nitpick the anachronism of projecting contemporary concerns onto antiquity. As always, Helen Morales is wonderful on this topic in Antigone Rising (emphasis added), although her focus is on reading myths through a trans/genderqueer rather than neurodivergent lens:

The myths of Teiresias, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Iphys and Ianthe, and Caeneus all have aspects that jar with modern sexual politics and might even be thought to be queerphobic. When I read the responses to the Queer Youth survey, my first reaction was puzzlement. My inner philologist wanted to cry out, “You are misreading these myths!”

But if the myths are meaningful to genderqueer people, then that in itself is worth heeding. Interpreting myth is always a selective business. As Kathy Acker, quoted in the preface to Ali Smith’s novel Girl Meets Boy, puts it, “There is the need for narrative and the simultaneous need to escape the prison-house of the story—to misquote.” As we’ve seen repeatedly in this book, myths are read selectively, re-created, adapted, cut and pasted, and they always have been, especially in antiquity. The different versions of myths operated collectively as a kind of conversation, later versions responding to earlier, like contributions to a long-running debate. What I found when I went back to the ancient myths and looked at them afresh is that my inner philologist was wrong. Some contain more trans-affirmative elements than I had realized; looking at myths with a “queer eye” unlocks levels that would otherwise remain hidden.

So it turns out that even though the neurodivergence of the heroes in Percy Jackson is a little more problematic than it initially appears, it’s totally valid for it to open up a bigger, more complex and nuanced conversation about neurodivergence in myth and literature. I can’t wait to bore my kids to death with it.

I don’t know how everyone else is doing, but I’ve fully given up on any and all resolutions to be a better, more productive, more actualized me. Not that I made any resolutions of that kind to begin with. But we’re barely into February and I’ve fully returned to my default state of “as long as the kids are fed, loved, and safe, it’s ok to go full goblin mode as much of the time as I can.” Which means: my softest pants, early bedtimes, long baths, and zero shame.

Goblin mode has been the only thing insulating me from the onslaught of terrible news. There’s so much happening that I hate that I can’t even begin to process it all. I can barely even process all the anti-trans news that directly impacts my family, which has been heroically reporting on her terrific newsletter, which you should subscribe to:

Erin In The Morning

News and discussion on trans legislation and life.

By Erin Reed

Several of the newsletters I subscribe to (like this one and this one) have addressed this week the physical toll that this kind of misery can take on your body and the pressure to bounce back from it. It takes an emotional toll, too. I’ve felt waves of icy rage flood my body in moments that definitely don’t call for it, like when I step on a toy a kid left on the ground or when the only parking spot left is one I have to squeeze into because some asshole parked his Tesla over the line. Both of which are frustrating, sure, but typically not blindingly infuriating. My emotions have no proportion right now. I respond to terrible news with numbness and minor annoyances with apocalyptic anger.

Which is why, when I saw this email from Bon Appetit, I was nearly incapacitated by incandescent fury:

What the fuck, Bon Appetit? When I saw the subject line “Massage your kale with avocado” in my inbox I said — out loud! — “Go to jail.”

It’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, offended me so deeply about this. Is it the aggressive healthism of it, which I’d sort of hoped we’d left behind in January? The commanding tone, which immediately activated my demand avoidance? The way it sounds gross, bordering on actionable,1 from a tactile perspective? The fact that raw kale always sucks — I said what I said — and even in California, most of the avocados you can get this time of year are pretty inedible?

And then, horror of horrors, I looked at the recipe that the technique article linked to, and it sounded… good:

I’m not sure why they didn’t lead with “adobo-marinated chicken salad with caramelized red onions”, because that sounds approximately 1000x better than “Massage your kale with avocado”. In fact, I wanted that salad. So I went out and got the ingredients and squeezed every avocado in the store until I found some that weren’t as hard as rocks. And then I scooped out their flesh and massaged some goddamn kale with it.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof:

I’m so glad the Substack gallery feature made those last two pictures bigger, because you can really see how gross my hands felt at that point. And I’m a person who’s pretty ok with getting my hands into my food. I actually enjoy the part of the scone-making process where you rub the butter into the flour. This was so, so much worse.

From a purely sensory standpoint, it was even worse than making meatballs by hand. Although I’d give it a slight edge over meatballs overall because, unlike with raw meat, you don’t need to worry about contamination of surfaces and how you’re going to turn the sink on without using any hands to wash off the ground meat paste that leaves a thin coating on your skin. The avocado also washes off your hands more easily than that paste, which is nice. But the sliminess during the massaging process is really, really unpleasant.

But then I got to eat this beautiful salad:

I regret to say that the massaging process really did distribute the avocado, lime juice, and salt throughout the salad in a way that ensured there were no bites of nothing but raw kale, a thing I still hate. It was delicious AND earned me a full day of shame-free goblin mode, the thing my heart most desires. Not that you have to earn freedom from shame. But it really does suck how much better I feel when I eat some vegetables and go outside and take a walk.

I wish I could say that this salad solved all of my problems and now my emotions are all fixed and that I didn’t lose my entire mind when I found out that my kid who was staying home from school because she’d spent the morning puking hadn’t showered or washed her hands and was now playing with every single toy in our playroom. But it’s only a salad, and I’m only human. There’s a lot of 2025 left — an email I got today that I can only assume was meant as a personal attack said we’re 11% of the way through the year — and I predict it’s going to be a slog. My plan, roughly, is to embrace my unexpected and inappropriate rage as a path to potential absurdity, fun, and chaos. I’m actually kind of excited to see what other “massage your kale with avocado”-type adventures the other 89% of this year might hold. And it’s kind of nice to feel excited about anything right now.

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What’s bringing you unexpected rage or excitement these days? Share in the comments!