On my conversion to Islam

Why did I convert to Islam? If you read my last blog post, you’ll know that I started thinking about this because I wanted to marry an Egyptian Muslim, and in order to do that it was a legal necessity. But we broke up, so that ceased to be an issue. Nevertheless, I converted. I

Fishing with my dad

Five photos

Travels in Italy

On my dad, “MC Hammer”, and Dikaiopolis

Before I begin this post, let me recommend an excellent video about Aristophanes’ historical context that focuses on Acharnians and Knights: I can’t find the name of the guy who made this video, but he knows what he’s talking about and has a great intuitive sense of where Aristophanes came from and what he was

On the manliness of mathematics, the death of AndrewAndrew, and (not) performing Aristophanes in the woods

Recently I wrote about the way my interests in nature and in ancient Greek and Latin developed and became linked as an evolving complex I call my “ecoclassicism”. In this post I want to reflect on how my involvement with one particular ancient Greek author, Aristophanes, has been linked to my struggle to reconcile my

On the manliness of fishing

I’ve written before about how my childhood experiences of gardening, camping, and fishing with my family, especially my dad (Michael) and granddad (Pawpaw), planted in me the seeds of my current love, worry, and (highly imperfect) care for the planet and all its critters. In this post I want to reflect on how those experiences

Dreaming of a post-pandemic conference in Cairo

This post is about a conference that the ECLT graduate students at AUC and I are organizing, and what we are trying to accomplish with it. The conference, “Dreaming of Antiquity and Its Global Futures”, will take place, in sha Allah, in Spring 2022. Here is the call for papers (CFP), or rather, one version

On “ecoclassicism”; or, how I started caring about nature and ancient Greece

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we humans come to care about the things we care about, whatever those may be: ancient monuments, endangered species, books, languages, family members, gender norms…. I was already thinking about that before I moved to Cairo last August, but living in a place where people care about

Who’s afraid of giving?

Thanks to conversations with Sarah Stroup, Maha Bali, and Mayara, I’ve realized that my recent post about “gender toxicity” did not address the really crucial point about toxic masculinity specifically–namely, the source of the “insecurity” that, I wrote, “latches onto symbols of male dominance in an endless, futile quest for reassurance.” Assuming that insecurity exists