seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
This final section examines what the Greeks achieved with the intellectual tools they developed — and where those tools fell short.
It discusses Greek science through figures such as Archimedes and the Antikythera Mechanism, highlighting both technical brilliance and flawed cosmology. It then turns to Greek art, explaining why Greek sculpture represents a decisive shift towards realism, embodiment, and the truthful representation of the human body.
The section concludes with an assessment of Greek democracy: its radical nature, its severe limits, and its enduring influence.
The lecture ends by drawing together the central argument: the Greeks were not morally exemplary, but they were intellectually revolutionary.
June 7, 2026
The Ancient Greeks: 01 – What Made Them Special? (e) Science, Art, and the Limits of Greek Freedom
QotD: Undergrad writing
The other problem undergrads typically have is a concern with “style”. That’s almost harder to break than any other habit, because the fix sounds so robotic: Subject-verb-object; five sentences per paragraph; five paragraphs per paper. Back when I first started teaching, I had a lot of students just back from the Sandbox, giving college a try on the GI Bill. I enjoyed having them in class for lots of reasons, but a big one was that the military at that time still taught the basic five-paragraph essay (maybe they still do). Your basic After Action Report ain’t great literature, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, efficiently.
I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?
But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:
This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.
Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.
Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …
Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.
In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.
