A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

The A Collection of Unusual Pedantry blog which the author references is an amazing introduction to this work of thinking (the challenges of military operations, and the forces that shape warfare and civilization). [1] If you're already familiar with ACoUP, or find Cataphracts fascinating, you might also enjoy Edward N. Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire of which one review says (and which I find a quality summary): "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire is written with a profound knowledge of the field, a thorough mastery of the sources and secondary literature, and a lively and engaging style that both specialists and general readers will appreciate." —Peter B. Golden, Rutgers University 1. https://acoup.blog/

Color me doubtful. Under the Romans, very few people got actual luxury. The best historical expert I'm familiar with ( https://acoup.blog/ ) certainly does not describe Roman "social recruiting" in such terms. And how does this theory cope with groups such as the Amish?

The US (and even the UK) are a lot better at integrating immigrants than most of Europe. > Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire! You might like https://acoup.blog/ for a few more nuanced takes. > The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing [...] The same logic can apply to western culture. People already living in the west are the 'priests'.

For me Bret dereveaux is the Matt Levine of classical, Hellenistic, roman, and medieval history. https://acoup.blog (Never miss a chance to promote him, when I can!)

I haven't found any channels quite like his one. That being said I do find toldinstone to be quite good regarding ancient history. Outside Youtube, https://acoup.blog/ is a great history blog.

The article was written by an historian who is well aware of Thucydides. He's written a lot about him on https://acoup.blog/ including a discussion of why we shouldn't take his views on Sparta without a grain of salt. "To put it bluntly, these guys are all snobs. Thucydides and Xenophon were both aristocratic Athenians (they got to be generals, rather than common soldiers), frustrated that democracy – in their view – let the fickle, uneducated and poor ‘masses’ make decisions that ought to have been left to their ‘betters.’... These men conclude that Sparta is fantastic because Sparta seems fantastic for men like them – rich, educated, adult citizen men."

Bright Ages (The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe https://a.co/d/0axSFSi) is a fantastic book on this. It highlights the growing, current historical view of continued European growth and development and not the post-Roman ruin. Basically it’s an anti-dark-age view that talks through specific examples or art, culture, science, etc through the period that’s typically called the dark ages (~400-1300AD) It was recommended by the always excellent ACOUP (https://acoup.blog) who’s often linked on HN too. This was the specific post covering Rome’s decline and fall and discussing the contrasting positions in academia on bright vs dark vs just continuing ages: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i…

Bret Devereaux's https://acoup.blog/ is a fantastic weekly read. I was drawn in by some of the comparisons between Lord of the Rings and historical battle practices [0][1]. Right now, he's in the middle of a series on how Paradox Interactive games portray history, what things are accurate/inaccurate, and how to best connect with students whose interest in history was sparked by Paradox games [2]. [0] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/siege-of-gondor/ [1] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-battle-of-helms-deep/ [2] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/teaching-paradox/

It‘s not a book, but Bret Deveraux‘ history blog is so comprehensive I‘ve probably read several books‘ worth of pages on it: https://acoup.blog/ Also, it pointed me to a number of the „real“ books I read this year. Aside from that, the book that I enjoyed the most was probably Chernow‘s „Washington“.

I am happily addicted to NetNewsWire 5.0 + Feedbin I get extremely high quality content and no advertisements, tracking or pop-ups. Also, NetNewsWire is blazing fast. If you're looking for some RSS recommendations: [1] An extremely good blog for the latest in Covid related pharmaceutical research: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ [2] Math with bad drawings: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/ [3] A blog that analyzes military details in fictional battles: https://acoup.blog/

The best history blog on the web: https://acoup.blog/

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write…

This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together. Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical. Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data? [0] https://acoup.blog/

I was asking seriously. Other than that student newspaper editorial, I have not found any other coverage except news articles blindly restating Dr. Jones' comments and outraged editorials predicting the end of university standards. And naturally, most of the online comments follow the lead of those editorials. That student newspaper editorial is the only source I've seen for important parts of the story, including the nature of the spring 2022 class, the increased class load, and Dr. Jones' previous evaluations. I, too, have anecdotes; I spent many years around UTAustin's CS dept and had several friends in the dept undergrad office. I take as dim a view of faculty evaluations as anyone, but one of the things my friends always told me was that something is seriously wrong if any significant proportion of a class comes in to make official complaints. From the start, this story doesn't smell right. In fact, I know of one instance where an adjunct faculty was asked not to come back for another semester: he was in the process of failing almost everyone in a required computer architecture course because they weren't the EE grad students he was familiar with. (The growth of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty is a wildly concerning trend that has quite a few faculty, particularly adjuncts, upset. If you're familiar with Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog), he is currently looking for a new position because his current contract has not been extended.)

I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful. I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere. I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%84ski "Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication. (for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)

The US also arguably lost the Iran war. So far it can't claim any minor fraction of a victory, at least; seems to be the general consensus. I like to read Bret Devereaux (from the frequently HN posted https://acoup.blog/) takes on this in his Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social)

My favorite recent read on the topic was from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peas… TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household

this guy is a huge dork. I love it. I read to the end and was treated to his analysis on BSG main batteries. https://acoup.blog/2019/11/29/collections-where-does-my-main-battery-g…

> That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all. I highly recommend...the author's blog for very in depth articles about this subject including - this one on mounted warrior cultures and how they often dominated https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iv-de… - this long series on why the legion ended up dominating the phalanx https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-tr…

Bret Devereaux has a great series of essays on nearly every aspect of Spartan society (https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/) that's also worth the read.

This entire blog post series is well worth a read: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peas…

Oh you haven't seen the four-part series on iron (https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-pa… that ended up with parts (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum). The Helm's Deep series ended up with 8 posts. Well worth reading.

common misconception: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revo… > As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship

Just want to drop this link to the excellent https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-a-primer-o… which discusses the different costs of war, including how significantly weaker powers can win by increasing political costs.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revo… Great article on why the premise doesn't make sense.

Oh, having a historian's "translation" of the essay is legitimately helpful for understanding how the the points relate in the current climate, thank you. And I love acoup.blog, separately (tangentially related, I was legitimately crestfallen when he linked the formations of the orc army to the enduring, permeating, trans-generational success of Nazi propaganda https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-iii…

Related to the definition of Battleship for the fellow pedantic: What is a tank https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not-a-tank/ Less humorously, the proposed Trump class "Battleship" is what a teenage armchair general would dream up. The kind of person who thinks Ministry of War sounds cool and cosplays as his favourite operator.

Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving. However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more. Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself. And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able. More here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peas… You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-brief

We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum. Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1]. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it…

> One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid. Or in some cases, "poor, not stupid" [0], where even geniuses had no power or resources to pursue great innovations compared to the immediate priority of Not Starving. [0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-p…