Eleanor Konik @eleanorkonik@scholar.social

I don't personally want to debate this, but if anybody is aware of any high quality academic articles addressing the similarities and differences between Bronze Age slavery and modern prison labor, I'm interested in reading them and would appreciate a link.

Is there a special name for female spiders, like how we have "bucks" and "does" for deer and rabbits?

I just scheduled a newsletter for Monday. It's about armor, from the origins of horse barding to why Amazons only protected half their bodies.

I'm excited because it's a chance to include scholarship from @bookandswordblog who I met specifically through scholar.social & would not have known about if not for this community.

Sean has done fascinating work on ancient warfare, & tho I am not of his caliber, I'm excited to share his work.

Sign up to get it Monday: https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/membership/

"Teachers’ ability to absorb and transmit information quickly, manage stress and multitask are high-demand skills"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/teachers-are-quitting-and-companies-are-hot-to-hire-them-11643634181

Can confirm, I am good at these things <.<

Not sure where I'm going to land in the summer, but I'm looking around... 👀

Since publishing my newsletter that touches on some weird jewelry history,

including how a fibula is a brooch that functions as a giant safety pin; unlike other brooches, it has a practical purpose, like securing a cloak.

https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/jewelry/

my father has reached out to me with a bunch of texts about my grandmom's brooch-wearing habits.

Apparently she used to wear a brooch made out of walnuts to church, like, all the time?

This is one of the reasons I love writing my newsletter.

Do we know anything about ancient governments performing censorship of communications? Was that even a thing? Or, conversely, was it so normal and expected no one even really cared?

I'm trying to get a sense of how mass communication options impacted censoring efforts.

I've been thinking about the tension between free speech and censorship and other than a brief mention of Socrates (which somehow feels like muddying the waters?) I wasn't able to find anything about the history of this tension.

What forms did government censorship typically take before mass communication tech like the printing press and the internet, beyond leaders getting mad at dangerous popular speakers like Socrates?

One of the cool things I learned recently from the folks over at Classical Wisdom is that in Ancient Greece, most of the known female painters were themselves the daughters of artists.

Here's some other neat stuff I learned about art history lately:

https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/art/

Thanks to following the @ScienceDaily@newsbots.eu bot on mastodon, I recently learned that Mexican food, with its many uses for different hot peppers, may be one of the world's oldest cuisines.

Plus, most pre-Columbian protein apparently came from easy-to-harvest insects like ants, grasshoppers, manuey worms, & jumil bugs. There was also super useful blue algae that was harvested with nets.

I collated more information about the history of food for my newsletter if you're curious: https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/cuisine/

Update: I found https://accessible-colors.com/ which worked great!