When all of thay stuff between her and the black swan bloke (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) happened, I was amazed with how he sought to bully her with his opinion, how he tried to drum up hate towards her, and his utter contempt for field other than statistics. I realised then that this was exactly why she had to write 'Women and Power' etc.
Mary Beard is absolutely not "a fraud" just because you disagree with her view on diversity. (fwiw I also don't particularly like that tweet of hers, but come on.)
I wasn't aware there was a cult of Mary Beard: perhaps you have to be in Great Britain to be aware of it. The author certainly seems to be a paid-up member.
> The Guardian would only appear extreme to those who's world views have fallen off the other side.
Eeehh... I'm a long-time leftist and I used to think that, but over the last decade I've grown to be much more skeptical of the Graun. On issues of sexual identity in particular, it occasionally reads like some breathless pamphlet produced by university hotheads; and their treatment of Assange and Corbyn has been utterly shameful.
Her shows too easily slip into Historian's Fallacy.
It pays the bills I guess, but there's always something untowards about TV intellectuals. It's like getting your science news from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
is it just me or there is something off about The Guardian website? The 4 stripes borders that they have everywhere in their design, they look ugly and, as a webdev, creates the impression of a css bug, even though they're not.
There are two people who I've never met but who I would have loved to have had as my teachers, one is Mary Beard and the other is Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. What's amazing is that both of these remarkable teachers are from Cambridge University's Faculty of Classics. The Faculty and its students are indeed very lucky. Whenever they're on TV I'm always glued to my seat.
Beard's Pompeii and Wallace-Hadrill's Life and Death in Herculaneum are two of the best documentaries I've seen in many a year as they bring history to life in exciting ways that I've never seen before, Ancient Roman society is presented with such feeling, exuberance and authority that one can almost imagine being there.
I was thinking how truly exciting history has become in the hands of these consummate professionals in comparison to my own rather dull introduction to the subject many decades ago as school. Not that it was bad or lightweight, one of my history textbooks, A Brief History of Ancient Times — a rather nondescript book with a mustard/yellow colored cover, which incidentally I still have—was by the Univ. of Chicago's influential historian/archaeologist James Henry Breasted†. By the time I had to study it Breasted had been dead for many decades so its style was rather heavy and stodgy which didn't inspire much. Beard and Wallace-Hadrill's enthusiasm changes all that and they make a subject that has a potential to be boring to really sparkle.
Both are really engaging individuals but in some ways, they're very different. Wallace-Hadrill is polite and I'd reckon he'd go out of his way to never offend anyone, Beard calls a spade a spade and if you don't like what she's saying then it's tough titty. With the shambles the world's presently in, it seems to me we need many more people of Beard's caliber and outspokenness to put things into perspective.
24 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadhttps://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-ge...
pretty entertaining twitter thread https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892567659342114816
I don’t think he calls people frauds lightly.
It's also possible that there's more nuance to this than that.
I did recently read and enjoy SPQR.
Getting your news from multiple sources is a good thing, but exclude the extremes from all sides.
A simple question helps get things back on keel:
"Do you care about other people beyond those that directly benefit you?"
Eeehh... I'm a long-time leftist and I used to think that, but over the last decade I've grown to be much more skeptical of the Graun. On issues of sexual identity in particular, it occasionally reads like some breathless pamphlet produced by university hotheads; and their treatment of Assange and Corbyn has been utterly shameful.
It pays the bills I guess, but there's always something untowards about TV intellectuals. It's like getting your science news from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269954 - Jan 2018 (92 comments)
lol. You mean Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Who is probably better known than Ms. Beard?
Good Lord, is there any reason to even read a newspaper anymore? They're all just propaganda pamphlets.
Beard's Pompeii and Wallace-Hadrill's Life and Death in Herculaneum are two of the best documentaries I've seen in many a year as they bring history to life in exciting ways that I've never seen before, Ancient Roman society is presented with such feeling, exuberance and authority that one can almost imagine being there.
I was thinking how truly exciting history has become in the hands of these consummate professionals in comparison to my own rather dull introduction to the subject many decades ago as school. Not that it was bad or lightweight, one of my history textbooks, A Brief History of Ancient Times — a rather nondescript book with a mustard/yellow colored cover, which incidentally I still have—was by the Univ. of Chicago's influential historian/archaeologist James Henry Breasted†. By the time I had to study it Breasted had been dead for many decades so its style was rather heavy and stodgy which didn't inspire much. Beard and Wallace-Hadrill's enthusiasm changes all that and they make a subject that has a potential to be boring to really sparkle.
Both are really engaging individuals but in some ways, they're very different. Wallace-Hadrill is polite and I'd reckon he'd go out of his way to never offend anyone, Beard calls a spade a spade and if you don't like what she's saying then it's tough titty. With the shambles the world's presently in, it seems to me we need many more people of Beard's caliber and outspokenness to put things into perspective.
† https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Breasted