Carlos Noreña

@carlosfnorena.bsky.social

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Humanist | 🇪🇦 | Ancient Historian at UC Berkeley | 🎛🎹🎛🎚🎚🎚 🖥 | He/Him

https://history.berkeley.edu/carlos-f-norena

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In classical Athens, the word for a person who voluntarily chose not to participate in the institutions of the democracy -- who chose, for example, not to vote -- was *idiōtēs*, which is in fact the etymological root of our word "idiot." Maybe the @nytimes.com should publish a piece about THAT.

"Whatever he considers to be beneficial to the commonwealth and the dignity of divine, human, public, and private affairs, he shall have the right and the power to do and to execute." From the statute that conferred absolute power on the Roman emperor (*Lex de imperio Vespasiani*, section 6). 😬

My two-year term as Head Graduate Advisor (DGS) for my department has concluded. This was very important work, and I did my best, but wow, there were long stretches (nights, weekends) where this position -- in a department with 115 PhD students -- felt like a full-time job all by itself! Phew.

Orlando Cepeda (1937-2024). Another Giants legend. RIP.

We're in trouble. I'm an eternal optimistic, and November is a long way away, but we are in trouble.

Sunday evening: high summer sunset.

Front-page news in the newspaper of record. 🤦‍♂️ Next week: "Department Chair at Yale Criticized For Overly Long Meeting" Then: "Harvard Professor Disciplined for Leaving Office Hours 20 Minutes Early" This is SO DUMB.

Be right back, just adding "GPT-5-Level Intelligence" to my CV.

WILLIE MAYS THE prototype 5-tool player. An all-time great (in the discussion for #1 all time, in my view). Career stats: .302, 660 HR, 1903 RBI, .941 OPS. Legend.

I have been down this long and lonely road, too (c. 2007-2021, the last 4 years of which essentially on my own). It was unimaginably hard. The inescapable feelings of helplessness, guilt ("shouldn't I be doing more??") and isolation were devastating.

Eldercare, something I spent a LOT of time on in the last 13 years as an only child & the subject no one wants to talk about. Until it hits them. So many friends reaching out to me now b/c they saw what I went thru, and they're only now realizing how hard it is. 🎁 shorturl.at/npCyS 1/

The Berkeley campus on a Friday morning in summer: the Platonic Form of tranquility.

Adding a new book to the shelf of first books by former students -- a shelf that is starting to become formidable 😎 -- is one of the true rewards of this profession. What a privilege.

"How can we skate to where the puck is going, and if we overshoot, how do we deal with the hard cheese?" From today's FULL-VOLUME business/tech/investment conversation taking place over Zoom in this otherwise quiet and peaceful cafe. please send help

Two books I have been meaning to read for many years now. Finished *The Leopard* last night (beautiful, meditative, as good as promised) and begin *Christ Stopped at Eboli* tonight. 📚

Time to write. 📚 📖 💻

Real Madrid 🇪🇦 wins its 15th Champions League title (over Borussia Dortmund 🇩🇪, 2-0), more than twice as many as the second most successful club (AC Milan 🇮🇹, with 7). Most of the teams I follow are (very) bad. It's nice to have one gargantuan dynasty in the mix! ⚽️

Tried my first iced strawberry matcha in Munich and *loved* it, so was delighted to find it in Berkeley, too. Is this a "thing" now? Am I late to the party??

34 BCE: Antony invades Armenia, celebrates triumph, issues Donations of Alexandria 34 CE: Philip's "tetrarchy" incorporated into Roman province of Syria Super Bowl XXXIV: Rams 23, Titans 16 Best to wear #34: * football: Walter Payton * baseball: Nolan Ryan * basketball: Shaq 34th state: Kansas

"Where we start our story shapes what we see." YES An excellent statement. If we fail to look back past the 1800 horizon, we condemn ourselves to a collective myopia in which our current world seems inevitable and the future already settled. Defamiliarization through deep historical awareness!

The premodern world held possibilities and imagined futures: the physical and metaphysical systems that were actively built and contested then continue to inform the world in the present. Read our statement on the value of Renaissance & Premodern Studies: www.rensoc.org.uk/statement-on...

I was not a regular reader of *Ramus* -- it was on the periphery of the sorts of topics that I normally work on -- but whenever I did come across an article in this journal, it was always trenchant and stimulating. This feels like . . . not good news for the field.

So sad to farewell _Ramus_ - daring, risk-taking, and influential. And a start-up in Melbourne in 1972. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Memorial Day, 2024. And as for you, @icpetrie.bsky.social, your boys are goin' DOWN* * then again, Blake Snell, the most disastrous acquisition of 2024, is pitching for the Giants, so maybe, just maybe, *we're* going down. 😬

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Carlos Noreña

this tendency to take unimaginable things and place ourselves at the center in order to make them imaginable — it’s essentially the kantian sublime — anyhow watch or don’t watch the videos it doesn’t matter — you don’t matter

Roman emps 27 BCE-235 CE, ranked on Roman criteria of the "good" emp: 17. Elagabalus 16. Commodus 15. Caligula 14. Nero 13. Caracalla 12. Sev. Alex. 11. Tiberius 10. Sep. Sev. 9. Claudius 8. Titus 7. Hadrian 6. Nerva 5. M. Aurelius 4. Ant. Pius 3. Vespasian 2. Trajan 1. Augustus

email and the kitchen sink locked in a deadly battle to see which one can exact a higher penalty for being ignored

Conservatism, at its deep core, is the defense of inherited privilege. The commitment to privilege transcends and is prior to the commitment to democratic politics. What this means, in the US context, is that Republicans will continue to do *whatever it takes* in order to secure their goals.

Formal recognition of Palestinian statehood by Spain, Norway, and Ireland is not a "reward" for terrorism, as Israel's foreign minister claims ("Terrorism pays"). It is, rather, a long overdue response to a brutal and illegal occupation. In any case: I am proud today of my Spanish heritage. 🇪🇦 🇵🇸

In which we are left to ponder, after every algorithmic utterance, "Can OpenAI speak?"

What voice should OpenAI use now that ScarJo’s is off-limits? Wrong answers only.

Do we still believe that historical scholarship can be the pursuit of knowledge about the past as an end in its own right?

A simple takeaway from this workshop: quantification has its limits (if you'll allow the expression), and qualitative approaches to ancient economies have a lot to offer, including for historical comparison.

Heading to Munich next week for a lecture in the LMU ancient history seminar and then part II of a workshop I have co-organized with John Weisweiler, "Uneven Development in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East," drawing on the ideas of A. Sen (capabilities approach) and B. Milanovic (inequality).

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The new #PastsImperfect is out, and I review a brilliant new book by Caroline Cheung on storing ancient wine 🍇—with help from @carlosfnorena.bsky.social. Then, Rita Lucarelli on protests at Berkeley, AAPI shout-outs, new ancient world journals, & more! pastsimperfect.substack.com/p/pasts-impe...

Pasts Imperfect (5.16.24)pastsimperfect.substack.com Storing Ancient Wine, AAPI Shoutouts, Campus Protests on the West Coast, and More