Blogs of the Year 2018

It is perfectly possible that I spend too much time on the Internet, and on social media. But there is so much amazing stuff out there – insightful, informative, passionate, provocative, brilliantly written stuff, produced not for profit but for the sake of the ideas and the wish to communicate with others – and if it wasn’t for the Twitter I wouldn’t know a thing about most of it. My ‘best of’ list seems to get longer every year, perhaps because I’ve got into the habit of making notes as soon as I’ve read something, rather than relying on my ever more erratic memory to recall things from earlier in the year – and this is as much about reminding myself and revisiting things as it as about recommending that you should read them too…

January: Jonathan Saha on Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists; Rebecca Futo Kennedy on Black Achilles and white Dorians; Michael Cook on the limitations of games and complex messages; Henry Farrell on Philip K. Dick and the fake humans – this is not the dystopia we were promised…

February: Serene Khader on women’s empowerment (why has there been only the one post from her on Crooked Timber..?); Yung In Chae on classical whitesplaining.

March: Clive Barnett on the crisis of legitimation in higher education; the (for me, anyway, in desperate need of optimism) highlight of Maria Farrell’s excellent How to Cope with the End of the World series, even the world’s biggest problems aren’t hopeless; magicman on Charlie Parker and I.

April: Andy Kesson on reasons to love Kate Bush; Jo Quinn on Phantasmic Phoenicia; Harrison Troyano on ancient aliens and Schliemann in space.

May: Howard Williams on depictions of Vikings on Lidl lager; Rachel Moss on Unsexy History; the start of Paul Hayes’ powerful and moving blog on keeping oneself alive; Laura Sangha on the ethics of writing about very dead people; Liv Mariah Yarrow on peer review as (self-) pedagogy; the CREWS project on writing systems in Star Wars.

June: John Holbo on epistemically sunk costs; the excellent series of blogs on science fiction and empire from Exeter’s Centre for Imperial and Global History (I do regret not having had the time to try to contribute something to this…).

July: Adam Roberts on fantasy violence; Phil Edwards on demographic cohorts and their taken-for-granted attitudes.

August: Emily Henderson on whether conferences are holidays.

September: Penelope Goodman on Quatermass and the Mitheaeum; Peter Gainsford on the citation problem in that terrible article on social networks in Homer.

October: the first instalment of Isabella Streffen’s new gardening blog; Angry Staff Officer on what Star Wars teaches about mentoring.

November: Catherine Fletcher on word counts and writing targets; Natasha Reynolds on cognitive dissonance and decarbonising archaeology; sententiaeantiquae on Classics, class and identity.

December: busy month so I’ve got stuff to catch up on, but Xenogothic on Mr Blobby, Mark Fisher and Brexit is unmissable…