Yesterday I hosted a lunch-dinner ("linner") in honour of the anniversary of the screening of the classic 1933 Marx brother's film "Duck Soup", which was not only prescient at the time but also has some serious parallels for contemporary times; "Hail, hail, Freedonia, land of the brave and free". The movie, except for the title scene, doesn't actually feature any ducks because, in the idiomatic language of the time, it meant something easy rather than a literal soup (see also the Laurel and Hardy film of the same name in 1927). However, that didn't stop me producing an international feast spanning the day using ducks from Thailand to produce Mexican Gazpacho with Duck, Kerala Duck Masala, Cantonese Duck Soup, Malay Peranakan Duck Laksa, French Garbure Duck Stew, American Roast Duck Song, Polish Czernina Duck Blood Soup, along with Senegalese Duck Chocolate Dates and, of course, Fluffy Duck cocktails, with the evening concluding with a screening of the film.
With about a dozen attendees, there was one moment where I realised I had more guests than chairs, and I was concerned whether I had made enough food (my guests would disagree). Despite my errors in calculation, the company and conversation were absolutely superb, scintillating even, probably because I have mostly followed Seneca's advice for selecting friends (albeit unconsciously) for most of my life. Special thanks are due to Anthony L., for producing the Catonese duck soup (he is both Cantonese and really knows how to cook), whereas he American Roast Duck Song (not a soup) is derived from the famous Youtube song; I'll probably make my own video in the near future of this recipe. Maybe I can find a friendly musician to add a tune to it. In any case, the sufficient variety has led me to put up a series of recipes and photos to honour this day.
In other international news that is not duck-related, I have completed the skill tree for Duolingo Spanish, just as the final section's units increased from 34 to 180 units, which is frankly a bit much. Still, it must be said that Spanish is a language in which Duolingo does a pretty good job, partially because of the geographical proximity and the number of learners, ergo the corporate effort. According to their CEFR values, completing the course puts on in the high B2 category, which is possibly true on the written level but also requires a great deal of spoken exposure to the experience, which hopefully I will be getting in a few weeks with my inaugural grand tour of South America.
The address that I use for this newsletter has long since been overrun by nonsense. Seemingly every PR and marketing firm in existence has gleefully added it to the various mailing lists that they use to convince their clients that they offer global reach. I recently received, for example, a message announcing a new uranium mining venture. Yesterday morning, someone helpfully sent me a note to alert me that “CPI Aerostructures Reports Third Quarter and Nine Month 2025 Results.”
Here’s the problem: this is also the address where my readers send me interesting notes about my essays, or point me toward articles or books they think I might like. I want to read these messages, but they’re often hidden beneath unruly piles of digital garbage.
So, I decided to see if AI could solve my problem.
The tool I chose was called Cora, as it was among the more aggressive options available. Its goal is to reduce your inbox to messages that actually require your response, summarizing everything else in a briefing that it delivers twice a day.
Cora’s website notes that, on average, ninety percent of our emails don’t require a reply, “so then why do we have to read them one by one in the order they came in?” Elsewhere, it promises: “Give Cora your Inbox. Take back your life.”
This all sounded good to me. I activated Cora and let it loose.
~~~
I detail the story of my experience with Cora in my latest article for The New Yorker, which is titled “Why Can’t A.I. Manage My E-Mail?”, and was published last week.
Ultimately, the tool did a good job. This inbox has indeed been reduced to a much smaller collection of messages that almost all actually interest me. The AI is sometimes overzealous and filters some messages that it should have left behind, but I can find those in the daily briefings, and nothing that arrives here is urgent business, so the stakes are low.
The bigger question I ask in this article, however, is whether AI will soon be able to go beyond filtering messages to answering them on our behalf, automating the task of email altogether. This would be a big deal:
I’ve come to believe that the seemingly humble task of checking e-mail—that unremarkable, quotidian backbeat to which digital office culture marches—is something more profound. In 1950, Alan Turing argued in a seminal paper that the question “Can machines think?” can be answered with a so-called imitation game, in which a computer tries to trick an interrogator into believing it’s human. If the machine succeeds, Turing argued, we can consider it to be truly intelligent. Seventy-five years later, the fluency of chatbots makes the original imitation game seem less formidable. Yet no machine has yet conquered the inbox game. When you look closer at what actually goes into this Sisyphean chore, an intriguing thought emerges: What if solving e-mail is the Turing test we need now?
Cora, as it turns out, cannot solve the Inbox Game – it can organize your messages, but not handle them on your behalf. Neither can any other tool I surveyed, from SuperHuman to SaneBox. As I go on to explain in my article, this is not for lack of trying: there are key technical obstacles that make answering emails something AI tools aren’t yet close to solving.
I encourage you to read my full article for the entire computer science argument. But I want to emphasize here the conclusion I reached: even with their current constraints, which limit AI-based tools mainly to filtering and summarizing messages, there’s still much room for them to evolve into increasingly interesting and useful configurations.
In my article, for example, I watched a demo of an experimental AI tool that transforms the contents of your inbox into a narrative “intelligence briefing.” You then tell the tool in natural language what you want it to do – “tell Mary to send me a copy of that report and I’ll take a look” – and it writes and sends messages on your behalf. The possibilities here are intriguing!
Here’s how I ended my piece:
“Although A.I. e-mail tools will probably remain constrained…they can still have a profound impact on our relationship with a fundamental communication technology. …Recently, I returned from a four-day trip and opened my Cora-managed inbox. I found only twenty-four new e-mails waiting for my attention, every one of them relevant. I was still thrilled by this novel cleanliness. Soon, a new thought, tinged with some unease, crept in: This is great—but how could we make it better? I’m impatient for what comes next.”
This is the type of AI that interests me. Not super-charged chatbot oracles, devouring gigawatts of energy to promise me wise answers to any conceivable query, or the long-promised agents that can automate my tasks completely. But instead, practical improvements to chores that have long been a source of anxiety and annoyance.
I don’t need HAL 9000; an orderly inbox is enough for now.
The Kwan Dao—also written Guan Dao, Kwan Tou, or Kwan Dao—is one of the most iconic and culturally charged weapons in the Chinese martial tradition. Its sweeping blade, heavy iron ring, long wooden haft, and unmistakable profile make it stand out immediately on any weapons rack. Yet the Kwan Dao [Read More]
Fragment of an Attic Black Figure pot with a duel, painted around 550-545 BCE. Getty Museum, Malibu, object
86.AE.112 under a Creative Commons license.
Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.
First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics without claiming that these theories have some profound implications for ancient cultures. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument. Many scholars argued against a massed push by whole lines of hoplites without arguing that Greek warfare varied from place to place and time to time.
Second, I think that the debate about hoplite battles is undecided, while the debate about revolution or gradual change ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.
Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.
Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations other than Greeks had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.” Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.
On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.
Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about Greek hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.
Good scholarship takes time! Help keep me blogging at least once a month by supporting this site.
Further Reading
Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)
Edit 2025-11-16: added image, linked review of Bardunias’ book, added one sentence about how doubting massed pushing does not imply doubting other aspects of the California school/English orthodoxy
We did Mikey and Teddy from @jl8comic by Yale Stewart - if you haven’t read it, do it! We guarantee you, you will fall in love with it like we did 🥹
Also on that matter - without this amazing webcomic we would have never been able to do these cute versions of Booster and Beetle-
So please support the series and ensure it’s future! 🫶🙏
Get prints, consider being a patreon or support it in any other way you can ♡
Aaand now the pics :D
(Also…I noticed too late that we got a wig that would have been a better match for JL8 Teddy instead the here used adult!Ted wig XD next time I guess haha)
I don’t generally repost to the JL8 Tumblr because I try to keep it as close to a “webcomic website” as possible so you can just read through the comic uninterrupted but I had to share this for at least a little while. This is absolutely amazing and nearly brought tears to my eyes. I absolutely love it.
Yuletide gift ideas for Sword History maniacs, Pt. 1
Good news.
Bad news.
Bad news first: The Freirean Central Committee for Cultural Appropriation and Redistribution, formerly known as Netflix, thus far has no plans to showcase HEUSSLER. Remaining untold: The story of a modest Massai who began his post-pastoral life as a humble printer of liberation theology , overcame lactose intolerance, met Schöffer, then Fabris, then began a military career that saw him rise through the ranks of various colonial potentates in Germany and Denmark during the Thirty Years War, before renouncing the patriarchy and founding an environmental advocacy for organic Prince Valiant haircuts in Sweden. And, of course, “became a fencing master”.
The good news: I can point you at a great, albeit not brand-spanking-new book on Sebastian Heussler—a modest but entertainingly irresponsible Franconian who started out as a humble printer of theological treatises at Nürnberg, met Schöffer, then Fabris, unceremoniously abandoned wife and kids to enter into a military career that saw him rise through the ranks of various potentates in Germany and Denmark during the Thirty Years War—and who, in his old age, ran away with a 29-year-old woman aus gutem Hause to settle in Sweden.
Long faces all around: Heussler was just another Old White Male after all...
Despite the sheer girth of their respective books, Heussler and Schöffer have been marginal figures in the historiography of German fencing, for a number of reasons: First and foremost, our friend Joachim Hynitzsch, the Rosetta Stone of the Fabris School of Fencing in Germany, wrote off Schöffer as merely having been Fabris’ mantenitore, not his Scholar. And Heussler merely was Schöffer’s Vorfechter, same as a mantenitore. As such they, says Hynitzsch, never were taught the theoretic underpinnings of the method, resulting in two helter-skelter compilations of hundreds of Stücke, mixed in with and diluted by non-Fabris material.
Adjusting for the “Significance of the Passage of Time” between Hynitzsch’s (1677) and Heussler’s book (1616)—61 years!, and Hynitzsch and Schöffer’s book (1620)—57 years, the second-hand transmittal of the information via Velde, and some additional information I have come recently across, I am now tempted to weigh both Vorfechter more heavily than is usually done.
Which isn’t all that ambitious, considering more recent mainstream sages have mostly been looking at the pretty pictures, “the kicking, punching and stabbing antics of the thugs in Heussler” and Schöffer’s “badly executed plates”.
In our paper on Fabris, we’ve tried to flesh out both German masters’ rather meager biographies. We drew reasonable inferences from the extant sources to place Schöffer in Denmark with Fabris between 1602 and 1605, and Heussler with Schöffer (probably at Marburg) around 1609—narrowing the window of time for Heussler’s direct instruction by Fabris to 1609-1610 (perhaps in Paris) or before 1615 in Padua.
(More material has surfaced even in the four short weeks since we posted: There’s more to come on SHotS la semaine prochaine (make that Spring ’26) dans cette salle!)
I was greatly assisted in my research by the labors of Kevin Maurer, who has done yeoman’s work on Heussler’s background in his book, appropriately named Sebastian Heussler’s New Artful Fencing Book (2019). Maurer has gone through the available sources with a fine-tooth comb and put together a concise and detailed history of Heussler, his family, his military career, and of course his book on the Fencing with the single rapier.
I highly recommend it, both for the biographical and historical information (tying in Heussler with some of the greatest rulers in Northern Europe at the time) and for his translation of the practical instruction.
Click on the image of the book to order it!
VVVV
My unqualified recommendation should really be book-ended by one for a similar work on Schöffer:
Klein, Dorothee: Fecht-Lektionen: nach Hans Wilhelm Schöffer. Melsungen: Neumann-Neudamm, 2017.
Unfortunately, although excellent, the book is not easily obtainable any more. The one copy I was able to purchase will have to await in-person pick-up from my brother’s house in Berlin, as the Deutsche Post has discontinued sending packages to the United States—even books which never have been and currently are not subject to import tariffs. Shipment via DHL exceeds the reasonable purchase price by a factor of 3 or more. And some time you just have to put your foot down…
Expanding your Martial Arts Business Purchase market share or grow organically Is it time to grow the Business I once wrote a MA Success Magazine article about on the probable consolidation of the Martial Arts industry, which I wrote before the full onset of the COVID pandemic. We had seen [Read More]
Object permanence: Pirate code in Sony rootkit; Tim Wu on "New Monopolists"; Supersonic chirps in ads; Fordite; Sony's rootkit uninstaller leaves computers insecure; Anne Frank Foundation's copyfraud.
The most exciting thing about Biden's antitrust enforcers was how good they were at their jobs. They were dead-on chapter-and-verse on every authority and statute available to the administrative branch, and they set about in earnest figuring out how to use those powers to help the American people:
It was a remarkable contrast from the default Democratic Party line, which is to insist that being elected gives you no power at all, because of filibusters or Republicans or pollsters or decorum or billionaire donors or Mercury in retrograde. It's also a remarkable contrast from Republicans, whose approach to politics is "fuck you, we said so, and our billionaires have showered the Supreme Court in enough money to make that stick."
But under Biden, the trustbusters that had been chosen and fought for by the Warren-Sanders wing of the party proved themselves to be both a) incredibly principled; and b) incredibly skilled. They memorized the rulebook(s) and then figured out what they needed to do to mobilize those rules to makes Americans' lives better by shielding them from swindlers, predators and billionaires (often the same person, obvs).
They epitomized the joke about the photocopier repair tech, who comes into the office, delivers a swift kick to the xerox machine, and hands you a bill for $75.
"$75 for kicking the photocopier?"
"No, it's $5 to kick the photocopier, and $70 for knowing where to kick it."
One of Biden's best photocopier kickers was and is Lina Khan. She embodies the incredible potential of a fully operational battle-station, which is to say that she embodies the awesome power of a skilled technocrat who is also deeply ethical and genuinely interested in helping the public. Technocrats get a bad name, because they tend to be empty suits like Pete Buttigieg, who either didn't know what powers he had, or lacked the courage (or desire) to wield them:
Khan's role in the Mamdani administration will be familiar to those of us who cheered her on at the Federal Trade Commission: she is metabolizing the rules that define the actions that mayors are allowed to take, figuring out how to use those actions to improve the lives of working New Yorkers, and making a plan to combine the former with the latter to make a real difference:
There are many statute books that contain a law like this. For example, Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act bans "unfair and deceptive" practices, and this rule is so useful that it was transposed, almost verbatim, into the statute that defines the Department of Transportation's powers:
Now, this isn't carte blanche for enforcers to simply point at anything they don't like and declare it to be "unconscionable" or "unfair" or "deceptive" and shut it down. To use these powers, enforcers must first "develop a record" by getting feedback from the public about the problem. The normal way to do this is through "notice and comment," where you collect comments from anyone who wants to weigh in on the issue. Practically speaking, though, "anyone" turns out to be "lawyers and lobbyists working for industry," who are the only people who pay attention to this kind of thing and know how to navigate it.
When Khan was running the FTC, she launched plenty of notice and comment efforts, but she went much further, doing "listening tours" in which she and her officials and staff went to the people, traveling the country convening well-attended public meetings where everyday people got to weigh in on these issues. This is an incredibly powerful approach, because enforcers can only act to address the issues in the record, and if you only hear from lawyers and lobbyists, you can only act to address their concerns.
Remember when Mamdani was on the campaign trail and he went out and talked to street vendors about why halal cart food had gotten so expensive? It turns out that halal cart vendors each have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to economic parasites who've cornered the market on food cart licenses, which they rent out at exorbitant markups to vendors, who pass those costs on to New Yorkers every lunchtime:
That's the kind of thing Khan did when she was running the FTC, identifying serious problems, then seeking out the everyday people best suited to describing how the underlying scams hurt, and how they harmed everyday people:
Khan's already picked out some "unconscionable" practices that the mayor has "standalone authority" to address: everything from hospitals that price gouge on over-the-counter pain meds to sports stadiums that gouge fans on hot dogs and beer. She's taking aim at "algorithmic pricing" (when companies use commercial surveillance data to determine whether you're desperate and raise prices to take advantage of that fact) and junk fees (where the price you pay goes way up at checkout time to pay for a bunch of vague "services" that you can't opt out of).
This is already making all the right people lose their minds, with screaming headlines about how this will "deliver a socialist agenda":
In a long-form interview with Jon Stewart, Khan goes deep on her regulatory philosophy and the way she's going to bring the same fire she brought to the most effective FTC since the Carter administration to Mamdani's historic administration of New York City, a municipality with a population and economy that's larger than many US states and foreign nations:
One important aspect of Khan's work that she is always at pains to stress is deterrence. When an enforcer acts against a company that is scamming and preying upon the public, their private finances and internal communications become a matter of public record. Employees and executives have to be painstakingly instructed and monitored so that they don't say anything that will prejudice their cases. All this happens irrespective of the eventual outcome of the case.
Remember: we're at the tail end of a 40-year experiment in official tolerance and encouragement for monopolies and corporate predation. Those lost generations saw the construction of a massive edifice of bad case-law and judicial intuition. Smashing that wall won't happen overnight. There will be a lot of losses. But when the process is (part of) the punishment, the mere existence of someone like Khan in a position of power can terrify companies into being on their best behavior.
As MLK put it, "The law can't make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and that's pretty important."
The oligarchs that acquired their wealth and power by ripping off New Yorkers will never truly believe that working people deserve a fair shake – but if they're sufficiently afraid of the likes of Khan, they'll damned well act like they do.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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