An Enchanted World: Interview
Now that I’ve concluded the first season of my podcast episodes on happiness, I can return to thinking about lived religion!An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 8: Worry, Control, and...
Most of the things I worry about never happen. This should be reassuring, but my mind draws the opposite conclusion: clearly the worrying worked. We are built to anticipate danger, […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 7: What Freedom is For
A restaurant with no menu sounds liberating. You can order anything you want, prepared any way you like. It also sounds exhausting. Every possibility remains open, and every disappointing choice […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 6: Virtue and the Elephant
We tend to measure a life by what it produced: the work completed, the recognition earned, the things left behind. Virtue asks us to use a different measure. What kind […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 5: Pleasure Under the Sun
Nothing lasts. The work, the worries, the possessions, the reputation, even the memory of having been here—all of it eventually disappears. Ecclesiastes does not answer this problem by discovering some...
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: Episode 4: What Pleasure Costs
Episode 4, “What Pleasure Costs,” was just released.Pleasure sounds simple until we try to name it. A piece of chocolate, relief from pain, a long conversation, intoxication, falling in love, […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: 3: What Does it Mean to Flourish?
Episode 3, “What Does it Mean to Flourish,” was just released.How are you different from a fruit fly? The obvious answer is that you can reason, plan, and ask what […]
View ArticleHappiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life: A New Podcast
I am delighted to introduce my new podcast!For the past several years I have taught a class at Brown University called “Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life.” The […]
View ArticleFrom Leiden to EpiDoc: Teaching AI to Encode Ancient Inscriptions
In my previous post, I discussed the field of “digital epigraphy” and the issue of structuring epigraphic data to make it more digitally useful. Much of the conversation at the […]
View ArticleHow Do You Teach a Computer to Read a Broken Ancient Inscription?
Extracting structured data from unstructured or semi-structured data has been a long-standing problem in the digital humanities. Humanities data is inherently, and in most respects I would say...
View ArticleAn Enchanted World: Podcast Interviews
I am happy to announce that a discussion that I had with Mike Motia my book, An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity has just been released. […]
View ArticleAI Is the New Revelation
Back in the day, we had Cliff Notes. These short pamphlets summarized the plots of great literary works and provided additional information (e.g., symbolism, themes) that one might expect to […]
View ArticleA Graduate Student’s Guide to Grants and Fellowships (Humanities Edition)
Most research in the humanities does not require much in the way of funding. Time, a basic computer, and access to a good library are frequently all that it takes […]
View ArticleExit Tickets in an Age of AI
For years, I have used “exit tickets” in most of my university classes. Usually, I hand out a 3X5 index card and ask them during the last five minutes of […]
View ArticleAn Enchanted World: The Official Publication (and podcast links)
I am delighted to announce that my book, An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape in Late Antiquity, will be released in the United States on February 3. The U.K. […]
View ArticleWhat is Jewish Studies?
What does Jewish studies “look like”? This:Let me explain.Last year I set out to try to understand what we might mean by the academic field of “Jewish studies.” I had […]
View ArticleThe Calendar Before Chaos
Everybody knows that according to the biblical story of Noah, it rained for forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12, 17). Less well-known is that the flood lasted for far […]
View ArticleA Full Citation Network of Jewish Legal Literature
I am delighted to announce that I was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant for three years to work on the project, “Knowledge Transmission and Cultural […]
View ArticleIs All Animal Slaughter in Antiquity Sacred?
I recently had an essay published at theTorah.com. It is connected to last week’s Torah reading, Re’eh (Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17), focusing on Deuteronomy 12, which allows for the consumption of...
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