N. Olya
banner
nsolya.bsky.social
N. Olya
@nsolya.bsky.social
Classical Archaeologist | Greek vases, ethnicity, & otherness in Mediterranean antiquity | Likes/Follows/Reposts =/= endorsements
Reposted by N. Olya
Almost every major news story this week is about how the entire economy is now gambling, scams, bribes and theft.
October 24, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
This is much more comprehensive than my own list, and reassuringly familiar from my experience of marking. I’ll be sharing the list with my students, both to think about writing for different audiences (encyclopaedia articles) and being aware of the weakness of LLM generated text.
Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
September 28, 2025 at 2:02 PM
I participated in this excellent conference a few years ago and I encourage anyone interested to submit an abstract!
September 23, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
companies make it difficult or impossible to disable ai in their products because it is an authoritarian project made from a stack of consent violations in a trenchcoat

they don't give you a checkbox for "i don't want this and will never use it" because they know many people would check that box
September 20, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
the person behind this unhinged, anti-factual editorial is set to decide coverage at one of the nation’s major news networks
September 12, 2025 at 10:33 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
There are so many unforgivable actions of capitulation being taken by the institutions most well-positioned to stand up to Trump’s authoritarianism if they wished to do so.

A must-read from @samtlevin.bsky.social:
UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move
Prominent professor Judith Butler among students and faculty investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’
www.theguardian.com
September 12, 2025 at 9:57 PM
"The president's laws"...they really aren't sending their best!
Student, to professor: "I'm not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there's only two genders... and I don't want to promote something that is against our president's laws as well as against my religious beliefs" www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...
A&M Dean removed following student complaints over curriculum
The Department of Justice has also acknowledged the situation and said it would be investigating.
www.kbtx.com
September 9, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Academics love to pretend to be busy as an excuse not to respond to emails but will constantly be posting on Instagram, Facebook, and the like. Get serious!
September 1, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
The University of Chicago “lost tens of millions investing in crypto around 2021” Hahahahahahaha
UChicago Lost Money on Crypto, Then Froze Research When Federal Funding Was Cut
While Stanford responded to the federal funding research freeze by halting administrative hiring and protecting research, the University of Chicago panicked. On January 28, hours after the Trump admi...
stanfordreview.org
August 24, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
When unis say “we won’t fire you humanities professors, we’ll just take your majors away and merge your department with two others and rename it all,” what they’re doing is they’re making humanities expertise increasingly invisible and inaccessible…
August 18, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
An R1 without languages programs isn't a research university, it's a joke.
August 13, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Wake up babe, people are posting on the Liverpool Classics Listserv that the destruction of the Humanities in the age of the neoliberal university has nothing to do with politics
August 13, 2025 at 11:42 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
Others have more robust comments, but UChicago deciding to forgo language education—the literal thing they’re known for—and hoping that GenAI can teach grad students Akkadian and Homeric Greek is horrifying
August 13, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.
3 crucial roles for the university: to preserve, transmit, and create knowledge.
This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
August 13, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
3 crucial roles for the university: to preserve, transmit, and create knowledge.
This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
August 13, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
fwiw, Virginia Tech isn't an impoverished school either and yet here they are, the dean of the college, cutting a signature interdisciplinary PhD program without giving a reason other than "bad vibes"
August 13, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
U Chicago "has undertaken extraordinary quantities of leveraged spending in ways that benefit select units, while others, who have achieved high international ranking with little aid, have instead suffered from a withdrawal of operational in order to finance those endeavors"
This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
August 13, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
Announcing our new forum, RHEA RECEPTIONS!

“We live in an Odyssey time.” —Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, 12 April 2025

Rhea Classical Reviews could not agree more with Ms. Higgins.
August 13, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
"The Mellon Foundation is no longer a source of funding for our applicants; neither is the Ford Foundation. The U.S. Fulbright program, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and other grantors are facing draconian cuts, restrictions or elimination."
The Wenner-Gren Foundation has made the difficult decision to halt the creation of new content for SAPIENS Magazine at the end of 2025. Read President Danilyn Rutherford’s letter to our community. wennergren.org/article/sapi...
SAPIENS to Cease Publication
wennergren.org
July 25, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Reposting to add that off the top of my head, other museums with public domain image collections include the Met, the Getty, Cleveland Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Princeton University Art Museum. There's also a longer list here: apollo-magazine.com/open-access-...
August 13, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
Going to keep saying: a society that wants to keep functioning needs to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities
Kids today are learning that the fastest and easiest way to make money—the key value that has been modeled to them in America society—is to scam others, cheat your way through, and attract negative attention online that can be monetized. My endless sympathy to parents
August 7, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.
I think Democrats should offer voters a broadly defined anti-fraud platform. Yes, obviously, start with Trump’s influence peddling, but don’t stop there. Online fraud is massive, almost every phone call you get is a scam, and the solution has to be federal or it just won’t work.
Still, more than 7-in-10 U.S. adults have been a victim of an online scam or attack like credit card fraud, ransomware or online shopping scams. www.pewresearch.org/...
August 7, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Reposted by N. Olya
We used to be a proper country
August 5, 2025 at 12:38 AM