Professor Nutella
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jpnudell.bsky.social
Professor Nutella
@jpnudell.bsky.social
2.3K followers 1.2K following 4.1K posts
Pizza appreciator, ancient historian, reader, writer, baker. In some order.

Blogging here: https://joshuapnudell.com/blog/
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jpnudell.bsky.social
The Dude: yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
November 24, 2025 at 3:36 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Not fast, just stubborn.
Screenshot of a two hour Strava run that went 8 miles—my longest.
November 15, 2025 at 6:00 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Tonight’s movie is Riefenstahl (2024). In a world of Leni Riefenstahls, be an Elfriede Kretschmer.
On the right, Leni Riefenstahls, getting loudly defensive about her collaboration with Nazis. On the left, her contemporary Elfriede Kretschmer who has just called her out for said collaboration on a German talk show in the 1970s and is not interested in hearing Leni’s protestations.
November 15, 2025 at 12:12 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
More vivid in a digital picture, but the colors are visible with the naked eye. This is taken from my driveway.
The blues and greens of the aurora atop a darkened tree and telephone pole skyline.
November 12, 2025 at 4:46 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
I guess a meta-cinematic take on a 90s B-movie is preferable to a remake?
ANACONDA - ? - Action Adventure Comedy Thriller - Starts on Thursday, Decembrrr 25 Movie trailer PLOT: Doug and Griff have been best friends since they were kids, and have always dreamed of remaking their all-time favorite movie: the cinematic "classic" Anaconda. When a midlife crisis pushes them to finally go for it, they head deep into the Amazon to start filming. But things get real when an actual giant anaconda appears, turning their comically chaotic movie set into a deadly situation. The movie they're dying to make? It might just get them killed. CONTENT: Rated • LENGTH, including previews: . STARRING: Jack Black, Paul Ruud, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn. Yes, my local cinema has a website looks like it is from 2002, and it is perfect.
November 11, 2025 at 3:57 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
One of the random things I collect are yeast advertisements from the 1800s. So many "yeast cures" that promise to cure all kinds of things, including death.

digital.lib.ecu.edu/20998
On the reverse: "Warner's Safe Cure cures congestion of the kidneys, backache, inflammation of the kidneys, bladder and urinary organs, catarrh of the bladder, gravel stone, dropsy, enlarged prostate gland, impotency, Bright's Disease, heart disease, rheumatism, apoplexy, paralysis, insanity and death"
November 9, 2025 at 9:16 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
A little light weekend baking. I didn’t proof these quite enough last night so they took longer to float in the boil this morning. I tested this with the one on the bottom left, which is a little denser because the others got an extra ten minutes on the counter before going into the water.
Five bagels arrayed on a cooling rack.
November 9, 2025 at 2:03 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Steamrollers really is a great name for a sports team, and the fact that the team was terrible only makes it better.
The logo of the Providence Steamrollers, a train engine with steamroller wheels on a red field.
October 22, 2025 at 5:44 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
This reminds me that I need to finally fire up Reign: The Conqueror one of these days.
Bucephalus from Reign: The Conqueror Antigonos Monophthalmos from Reign: The Conqueror
October 20, 2025 at 7:40 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
A little pizza to celebrate reaching Friday.
A cheese pizza. An olive/tomato/spicy pepper pizza.
October 18, 2025 at 12:54 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
New review from me over at CJ-Online, about Ory Amitay's new book Alexander the Great in Jerusalem.
One of the most enduring scenes involving Alexander the Great is found nowhere in the extant histories of his reign. Other than describing the siege of Gaza in 332 bce, the Greco-Roman Alexander histories are conspicuously silent regarding his activities in Southwest Asia, but historiographical silences provide fertile soil for myth to germinate—especially when they involve Alexander. From this particular silence emerged an invented relationship between Alexander and the Jews. By far the most well-known of these stories, as told in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (11.317–345), involves Alexander and his entourage traveling to Jerusalem, where he meets a delegation by the High Priest Jaddus. Overwhelmed by the sight and recalling that this god had visited him in a dream, Alexander abases himself before the high priest, perhaps in an echo of proskynesis, recognizes the power of the Hebrew god, and grants privileges to the Jewish people. This scene has received the bulk of scholarly—and artistic—attention, despite being in Amitay’s telling a synthesis of the earlier stories (5), reworked to make this Alexander a model for an educated Roman audience who might find Judaism “alluring and attractive,” as some allegedly did in the time of Domitian (157–61). The chronology here is complicated by Josephus’s version being both the last composed and the first published in its extant form, but this discontinuity offers Amitay an on-ramp to untangle the deeper roots of this earlier material. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem contains five chapters, the first four of which offer philological studies for each body of evidence. Amitay moves progressively in these chapters from the stories with the earliest date of composition in a likely Seleucid Romance that he believes developed between the Fifth and Sixth Syrian Wars (195–170 bce) through Josephus’s account in the late first century ce. These four chapters share a common structure. Legends are “ahistorical” and “demand explication” (1), Amitay writes, so each chapter first introduces the story in its extant version before dissecting that story using contextual clues and the tools of philology. In each operation, Amitay exposes the thematic elements at play that both offer clues as to the date of composition and reveal the evolution of the Alexander legend in the region. After all, Alexander is only rarely Alexander in these stories. Instead, Alexander becomes a cipher for Jewish authors to explore the relationship between dominant foreign powers, the Judean religious leadership, and the Judean god. The first four chapters require Amitay to delve deeply into the manuscript traditions of the Greek Alexander Romance, Rabbinic literature, and Josephus. He provides both translations of the Greek and Hebrew passages and copious commentary on specific terms that make these chapters more accessible than they otherwise might have been, but there is only so much he can do without compromising the project. Despite this bar to entry, these chapters reward background knowledge by revealing how live issues like the conflict between the Jewish community centered on Jerusalem and the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim became written into the Jewish legends about Alexander. Amitay pivots from the literary tradition to a historical reconstruction in Chapter 5. The silence from historical sources has caused scholars to reject the mythological tradition that Alexander visited Jerusalem, but Amitay argues that we should not be so quick to accept this argumentum e silentio. ...The most compelling argument Amitay makes for the silence in the narrative histories of Alexander is also the most pedestrian: that the diplomatic exchange and events of the hypothetical visit were simply too unremarkable to warrant treatment by the canonical sources. That is, a diplomatic exchange repeated innumerable times throughout this fragmented region evolved into a myth that imbued the exchange with religious overtones and created a special relationship between Alexander and the Jews. Throughout this final chapter, Amitay repeatedly concludes speculative reconstructions by admitting their tenuity—even while offering them in sufficient numbers to give the impression that some exchange was more likely than not to have occurred. At the same time, Amitay also allows the legendary material to creep into his reconstructions. On Alexander’s alleged awe, for instance, Amitay says that such niceties were called for by diplomacy, but also that “it may well have been authentic” (180), whether by Alexander himself or by “one of his minions” like Parmenion whose “overly positive reaction” was transferred to Alexander in oral tradition (179). Why these men would have been any more impressed than Alexander is left unexplained. Setting this bit of armchair psychological analysis aside, Alexander in Jerusalem is a tremendous accomplishment that offers the most thorough study to date of the legends about Alexander that formed in Hellenistic Judea and, through those legends, captures some of the complexity of this time and place.
October 10, 2025 at 2:52 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
George Sears Greene. Served in the US army in the 1820s and reenlisted at age 61—earning himself the nickname Pap.
An old man with long, flowing mustaches and a long beard, in a Union general’s uniform.
October 2, 2025 at 12:09 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
My latest baking experiment: Apple honey sourdough challah, twisted into a circle for the new year. I macerated the apples to remove the liquid and then reduced the juice with honey and cornstarch to make a jelly that I coated the apple pieces with before adding them to the challah strands.
Four loaves of round challahs in cooling racks.
September 27, 2025 at 1:31 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
I have a cousin librarian who sends me titles from time to time. This physical book belongs in a museum exhibit. Or maybe an art one.
A brown hardback book titled _World War II Resources on the Internet_
September 11, 2025 at 10:16 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Neither here nor there on the project, but people do understand that the specific complaint lodged by the luddites was that the machines were disrupting their work, right? They wanted more work, which makes them definitionally not lazy.
A Hollywood Reporter article about an AI podcast factory in which Jeanine Wright claims "I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites."
September 9, 2025 at 9:27 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
I had a too many cherry tomatoes to eat myself, so I roasted them for sauce. One thing led to another and here’s the pizza I made to use the sauce.
A tray of sliced cherry tomatoes and pieces of onions on aluminum foil. The same tray after roasting at 400 degrees in the oven for 45 minutes. A circular pizza with turkey pepperoni, olives, and pickled jalapeños.
August 30, 2025 at 11:45 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
“Good Night and Good Luck” came out in 2005 as an appeal to a “golden age” of upstanding journalists, but Murrow’s first lines are more than a little painful in 2025.
Edward R. Murrow: We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
August 22, 2025 at 11:46 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Tonight’s menu:

(1) basil from the garden, jalapeños we grew and pickled, olives from a can, mix of cheese and a red sauce.

(2) heirloom tomatoes some friends grew, mix of cheeses, and bleu cheese crumbles
Pizza (1) Pizza (2)
August 10, 2025 at 11:51 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Also historians, collectively:
Kitty from That 70s Show pouring a bottle of alcohol into her drink.
August 7, 2025 at 1:02 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
You don't say?

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
"While there is no allegation that Vance’s office did anything illegal, the ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served in the George W Bush administration, said it seemed hypocritical and “pretty outrageous” for Vance to be receiving these particular accommodations for his family holiday when the administration’s cuts have led to drastic cuts in the National Park Service (NPS)."
August 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
"Conversation."
Nightclub meme of a man talking at a woman while she stares into space, bored.
August 4, 2025 at 3:30 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
This section of Brian Aldriss's "Super Toys Last All Summer Long" published in 1969 (and later the basis for Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence) is incredibly on the nose.
"Our serving-man will be, in many senses, a product of the computer. Without computers, we could never have worked through the sophisticated biochemics that go into synthetic flesh. The serving-man will also be an extension of the computer - for he will contain a computer in his own head, a microminiaturized computer capable of dealing with almost any situation he may encounter in the home. With reservations, of course." Laughter at this; many of those present knew the heated debate the had engulfed the Synthank boardroom before the decision had finally been taken to leave the serving-man neuter under his flawless uniform. "Amid all the triumphs of our civilization - yes, and amid the crushing problems of overpopulation too - it is sad to reflect how many millions of people suffer from increasing loneliness and isolation. Our serving-man will be a boon to them; he will always answer, and the most vapid conversation cannot bore him. "For the future, we plan more models, male and female - some of them without the limitations of the first one, I promise you! - of more advanced design, true bio-electronic beings. "No only will they possess their own computer, capable of individual programming; they will be linked to the World Data Network. Thus everyone will be able to enjoy the equivalent of an Einstein in their own homes. Personal isolation will then be banished forever!"
August 1, 2025 at 3:53 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
Which brings me to my very exciting discovery: The Vermont Lake Monsters collegiate summer league team sells classic Vermont Expos hats!

I may have thrown in a Vermont Creemees alternate mascot hat for good measure.
Champ the lake monster swimming through a red V on blue baseball cap.
July 31, 2025 at 1:35 AM
jpnudell.bsky.social
The whole collection of Tanagra figurines at the MFA is great.
Two more Tanagra statues, one with two figures, perhaps a mother and daughter cooking over a pot, another grating something into a vessel
July 27, 2025 at 7:39 PM
jpnudell.bsky.social
12. Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
The cover of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
July 27, 2025 at 3:00 PM