Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Time	Event
8:00a	They Study Authoritarianism. And They’re Leaving the U.S.: Why Three Yale Professors Have Moved to U. Toronto Three Yale professors—Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Marci Shore–have spent their careers studying fascism and authoritarianism. They know the signs of emerging authoritarianism when they see it. Now, they’re seeing those signs here in the United States, and they’re not sitting by idly. They’ve moved to the University of Toronto where they can speak freely, without fearing personal or institutional retribution. Above, they share their views in the NYTimes Op-Doc. It comes prefaced with the text below: Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities. In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto. Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said. Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.” She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment. Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States. “I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave. Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy. To delve deeper into their work, see Stanley and Snyder’s respective works: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Related Content  Actor John Lithgow Reads 20 Lessons on Tyranny, Penned by Historian Timothy Snyder Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Victimhood and More Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Century Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995) (Comment on this)
9:00a	The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian Math Homework from 4,000 Years Ago Homework has lately become unfashionable, at least according to what I’ve heard from teachers in certain parts of the United States. That may complicate various fairly long-standing educational practices, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute drop in standards and expectations. Those of us who went to school around the turn of the millennium may remember feeling entombed in homework, an intensified version of what the generation that came of age amid the early Cold War’s pressure for “more science,” would have dealt with. But late baby boomers and early Gen-Xers in the sixties and seventies had a much lighter load, as did the generation educated under John Dewey’s reforms of the early twentieth century. We can follow this line all the way back to the times of the Babylonians, 4,000 years ago. In the video above from her channel Tibees, science YouTuber Toby Hendy shows us a few artifacts of homework from antiquity and explains how to interpret them. Inscribed in a clay tablet, their simple but numerous marks reveal them to be examples of math homework, that most loathed category today, and perhaps then as well. (Even when interpreted in modern language, the calculations may seem unfamiliar, performed as they are not in our base ten, but base 60 — shades of the “new math” to come much later.) That the Babylonians had fairly advanced mathematics, which Hendy demonstrates using some clay of her own, may be as much of a surprise as the fact that they did homework. Not that they all did it. Universal schooling itself dates only from the industrial age, and for the Babylonians, industry was still a long way off. They did, however, take the considerable step of creating civilization, which they couldn’t have done without writing. The ancient assignment Hendy shows would’ve been done by a student at an eduba, which she describes as a “scribe school.” Scribe, as we know, means one who writes — which, in Babylon, meant one who writes in Sumerian. That skill was transmitted through the network of eduba, or “house where tablets are passed out,” which were usually located in private residences, and which turned out graduates literate and numerate enough to keep the empire running, at least until the sixth century BC or so. From certain destructive forces, it seems, no amount of homework can protect a civilization forever. Related content: An Ancient Egyptian Homework Assignment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Truly Timeless A 4,000-Year-Old Student ‘Writing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Corrections in Red) 3,200-Year-Old Egyptian Tablet Records Excuses for Why People Missed Work: “The Scorpion Bit Him,” “Brewing Beer” & More Archaeologists Think They’ve Discovered the Oldest Greek Copy of Homer’s Odyssey: 13 Verses on a Clay Tablet Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC Hear the Earliest Recorded Customer Complaint Letter: From Ancient Sumeria 1750 BC Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. (Comment on this)

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