"In Minnesota, immigration enforcement is often framed as something that happens somewhere else. At the border. In distant detention centers. In communities separate from our own. It is discussed in abstract policy language and political sound bites, safely removed from daily life. But over the past few weeks, that distance narrowed with ICE activity increasing in the Twin Cities. And on Jan. 7, it collapsed entirely." Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Ka Vang on federal violence and the murder of Renee Nicole Good.
Here's the official trailer for the upcoming action acomedy The Wrecking Crew starring Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista. They play two estranged half-brothers who are forced to reunite after their father’s mysterious death. Together, they are ready to WRECK anything that gets in their way! Looks like fun, and it's written by Jonathan Tropper, the showrunner behind Warrior. I'm down for it. The Wrecking Crew hits Prime Video on January 28.
After a career playing glamorous, intimidating women, Lucy Liu finds her realest role yet in Rosemead. Liu talks bad tans, the rivalry of Daryl Hall and John Oates, and her early days as an omelet chef.
I recently got a heads up to the music of ARKAI, a genre-defying, electro-acoustic string duo that "bridges the classical and the contemporary, weaving cinematic soundscapes with electrifying virtuosity into epic performances around the world." Their sophomore album Brightside is nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for the 2026 Grammy Awards. Check out the video for the title track here.
The 2026 Korean Cooking Calendar by Cafe Maddy features hand-drawn illustrations of Korean dishes, highlighted year-round with Korean holidays, American holidays, and other historically significant Korean dates. Each month includes a QR code that points to a step-by-step recipe for the dish, a story about each holiday and tradition, and a blurb about the seasonal Korean flower. You can even customize the month that features the illustration of miyeokguk (Korean Birthday Soup), making it a great gift for the Korean cuisine enthusiast in your life. Order it from cafemaddyclub.com.
I HAVE FINISHED A GLOVE. Even I wove the ends in! So A now has one (1) glove, only... however long it's been since the 19th of March 2025... since I cast it on, and hey, maybe I'll even get the second one done inside the year. Maybe.
I have contacted a potential therapist. (I am very annoyed about the therapist who looked extremely promising until I visited their actual website, rather than just their listing on the directory, and discovered the weight loss hypnotherapy offerings. The person I've contacted instead is explicit about HAES.)
In partial reward for same, I have asked Oxfam to send me more books. Most of them are about food; one of them is about pain. (Probably Philosophy Of Pain, rather than my area of interest, and definitely Old, but it was A Landmark In The Field and it was £3.99, so.)
SEEDS arrived, by which I mean oca. V glad I ordered a specific bag of the variety I was most interested in as well as the Mixed Bag, because the variety I was most interested in is not represented in said Mixed Bag. Which is fine, the difference is Largely Colouration Anyway, but oca generally do well for me and they're tasty and they're also very low effort.
I am having a bad brain week, but this evening we got the internet to bring us pizza and we spent a bit of time curled up on the sofa playing two different games, except my brain wasn't really cooperating so mostly A played them and I watched, and between the food and the shared activity and the knitting it's a bit quieter in here now, for which I am very grateful.
The 1960’s through 1980’s saw so many popular anthologies and compendiums of vampire lore—often assembling pop culture, folklore, classic literature, psychology, and occultism together—that I have no memory now of where I encountered this story.
A pretty disgusting day today, with cold rain and sleet continuing all day and the overnight snow turning into a horrible, slushy mess. At least a few enterprising local children had got up early enough to make snowmen, as you can see here! I expect the slush will freeze tonight, which won't affect the bigger roads too much as they'll be gritted, but the pavements will be hell again tomorrow morning. :(
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Matchless signups (signups that cannot match on offer or request) will be deleted, so please check the Signup Summary to make sure you're matchable! If you're worried about your match, please contact me and I'll see what I can do.
If you've ever been intrigued by the mystery of a dusty cassette you found in a thrift shop—or if you're just looking for a new time-sink—you have to check out Intertapes, a website that digitizes "found cassettes" sent in by users all over the world, then posts them in full for anyone to listen to.
I love how each cassette is treated like an important archeological object, because in a way, they are—discreet time capsules made more poignant by the hiss and warp that speaks to the time that's passed since this audio was captured and the ephemeral nature of analogue recording. From musical snapshots to accidental field recordings, these tapes are fascinating for there mere existence in the modern day, where the question of who recorded them and why adds a layer of mystery to each one.
The ongoing cassette tape revival
Intertapes could be viewed as a reflection of the growing cassette tape revival, a movement that celebrates the outdated format. Since they hit the market in 1963, audiophiles have generally considered cassette tapes an inferior format to vinyl—tapes are more rugged than records, but the sound quality is markedly worse. The spread of CDs and streaming music pretty much killed off commercial cassette releases by the early 2000s, and it's easy to see why: Digital music doesn't hiss or degrade. Cassettes have a more narrow dynamic range. You can instantly select tracks on a CD or MP3 player, and it will never play at a slightly wrong speed, unspool, or melt on your car dashboard. Bonus: You never have to rewind them to hear a song again.
Most people didn't see it at the time, but when tapes slipped into obsolescence, we lost something real and tangible. Dropouts, distortion, and warp are evidence of life. Cassette tape compression is a unique sonic aesthetic that conveys warmth and nostalgia. And then there's the way they impart meaning into the act of "listening to music." Starting a Spotify stream is frictionless, optimized, and weightless, while cassettes are physical objects with histories that defy the disconnection of the digital space. You own the music on tapes in a way you never own information being served to you by a tech company. A friend handing you a cassette of their favorite songs is meaningful in a way a link to playlist will never be, and your Spotify playlist will never be found by the side of the road near Heraklion, to be pondered over by future people.
Yes, by digitizing them, Intertapes is removing some of the qualities that make these recording special—but it's also preserving them, at least for now (if you've ever tried following a decades-old weblink, you know the internet is ephemeral too).
How to submit your own tapes to Intertape
If you're of a certain age, you probably have a dusty cassette or two hanging around somewhere. Don't let it molder in a desk drawer. Describe the origin of your recording and a background story, scan a picture of your tape, and email connect@intertapes.net to arrange you submission to the site. This collection really deserves to grow.
The Best Laid Plans of Ye Xiaoxiao (1097 words) 侠探简不知 | Ancient Detective (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Hei Wu/Qian Mian Ren | Ye Xiaoxiao Characters: Hei Wu (Ancient Detective), Qian Mian Ren | Ye Xiaoxiao Additional Tags: Wound Care, Fever, Delirium, Declarations Of Love Amedia prompted: Ye Xiaoxiao/Hei Wu, a quiet, happy moment together.
All Good Things Come to Those Who Wait (972 words) HIStory3 - 圈套 | HIStory3: Trapped (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Jack | Fang Liangdian/Zhao Li'an | Zhao-zi Characters: Jack | Fang Liangdian, Zhao Li'an | Zhao-zi Additional Tags: Restraints, Vanilla is a complex flavour, Inexperienced but game Dishonestdreams prompted: "You never know, I might surprise you."
Badges of Honor (421 words) L'Oréal "Time Engraver" Commercials Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Time Engraver (L'Oréal "Time Engraver" Commercials)/original character Characters: Time Engraver (L'Oreal "Time Engraver" Commercials) Additional Tags: 12 Days of Christmas, The Dongzhi festival, First Time, immortal/mortal, Rebirth Trobadora asked for: A winter holiday ficlet for the Time Engraver, Sorry, Dora. I wandered off a bit.
The Joke Was on Him (300 words) 双夭记 | The Silent Criminal (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Long Yao/Shi Jingyao Characters: Long Yao (The Silent Criminal), Shi Jingyao Additional Tags: Triple Drabble, Oblivious, Unintended Consequences Dreamy_Dragon prompted: Unexpected change.
Getting Out of Their Heads (474 words) 猎罪图鉴 | Under the Skin (TV 2022) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Du Cheng/Shen Yi (Under the Skin 2022) Characters: Du Cheng (Under the Skin 2022), Shen Yi (Under the Skin 2022) Fangirlishness prompted: Shen Yi is overworked/stressed/gets in too deep and Du Cheng helps to get him out of his head.
A Transformative Evening (785 words) 阴阳师 | Yīn Yáng Shī | The Yin-yang Master (Movies - Guo Jingming) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Bo Ya/Qing Ming (Yin Yang Shi) Characters: Bo Ya (Yin Yang Shi), Qing Ming (Yin Yang Shi) Additional Tags: Transformation, Pining, First Kiss, Animal Transformation Shadaras prompted: Transformation.
The new insurance requires me to use a different specialty pharmacy for the Kesimpta. I asked for a new prescription last night via MyChart, and just had a productive conversation with the pharmacy (Optum):
they asked whether I'd been off Kesimpta, because what they can see is that they were sending it to me in 2024, and not last year, so I explained that
we went over my list of medications, which was missing at least one thing, and had one I'm no longer taking
the doctor wrote the prescription for a 90-day supply, and the insurance will only cover a month of this at a time
the doctor sent them a prescription for the initial 'loading" dose, and they need to go back to the neurologist and clarify that
However, so far this has been remarkably efficient: less than 24 hours from me messaging the doctor, to me talking to the pharmacy. Whether the insurance company will cause delays by demanding "prior authorization," I don't know.
AI is still the big thing in the tech world, but it's no longer the big new thing. It's been around long enough that simply integrating it into your product isn't enough to make it stand out anymore, especially at the biggest tech show in the world. While I attended this year's CES, the trend I noticed over and over again on the show floor was that AI is getting weird now. From personal hologram sidekicks to a gaming monitor that basically cheats for you, here are the five weirdest AI inventions I saw at CES 2026.
Razer is giving you your own personal anime girl
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
At last year's CES, gaming lifestyle company Razer introduced Project AVA, an AI esports coach concept that was just a disembodied voice that lives in your laptop. Yawn. This year, the company's expanding on that by bringing AVA into the real world.
In Razer's suite this year, I held a conversation with "Kira," an anime girl "hologram" that lives in a little USB tube you can plug into your laptop. She noticed my orange sweater thanks to a camera installed in the tube, before asking me about the show and prompting me to start up a round of Battlefield 6, where she gave me some generic loadout advice. I spoke with her using microphones also built into her tube, and she responded using her own speaker rather than the laptop's. Razer said this demo was more directed, hence why she brought up gaming right away, but that the end goal is to let the new AVA work as a convincing all-purpose AI companion, so you don't have to use it for only play.
To that end, the company says it's "AI agnostic," so you can plug your own model into it. The demo I ran through was clearly using Grok, and generally felt a lot like talking to the AI companions built into that app, right down to the cringeworthy jokes. But Razer said you could theoretically use ChatGPT or Gemini instead.
While we were chatting, Kira played animations courtesy of Animation Inc., which powers similar but more app-driven AI companions. In other words, the chatbot and the animations aren't really new here, so what you'd be buying would be the USB tube and the characters.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Kira isn't your only option for an AI companion here—she's a typical anime gamer girl, but I also got to briefly look at Zane, a tattooed muscle man in the deepest V-neck I've ever seen. You can kind of see the target audience for both of these characters right away, but if you want something more tame, you can also have your tube display Razer's logo surrounded by an audio waveform, which simply goes by AVA (even though the project as a whole is still called AVA). And the company's also working on celebrity likenesses, with esports star Faker and influencer Sao having already given their approval.
Razer said it's still working on figuring out how it'll distribute these characters, and I was told you'd get a bundle of them with your purchase, but would probably be able to buy more down the line.
As for pricing and availability, no word on that. This is technically still a concept, so it might go back to the drawing board again. But Razer's website does say it's hoping for a release in the second half of 2026, and that you can put $20 down now to reserve your unit.
In short, if you strip away the functionality that's already baked into apps you can download now, the new Project Ava is basically a talking hologram toy for your desk. That's still not a bad pitch, but unfortunately, I'm not sure if hologram is the right word for this. Kira looked pretty flat to me, less like that one Princess Leia projection and more like she was displaying on a normal transparent screen that just happened to be stuck inside of a cylinder. I don't think the novelty quite matches the pitch yet.
The gaming headset that uses AI to read your mind
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Whenever I play a competitive game, instead of hopping right into a match, I instead load up into a few practice sessions to warm up. It's helpful, but time consuming. The new Neurable x HyperX concept headset is hoping to change that by helping you lock in within just a few minutes.
Essentially, it looks like a normal gaming headset, but built into the earcups are various sensors that can supposedly read your focus levels. These are similar to the brain-computer interfaces you might have seen in sci-fi shows, the ones with a bunch of wires and discs attached to them, but shrunken down for the consumer market, with no creepy wires in sight.
That's where the AI comes in. Shrinking down the sensors so much does mean this headset gets fewer readings than the bigger ones in labs, but Neurable claims its models are still able to pick up on trends in those readings and translate them into useful data, while also throwing out junk data.
For gamers, that means it can run you through a quick focus exercise called "Prime," where you concentrate while noticing a cloud of dots shrink into a solid orb. Once this is done, which took about 90 seconds for me, you're supposedly focused up and ready to play.
Unfortunately, I actually did worse in a practice shooting game after focusing than beforehand, but that doesn't mean the data was useless. I ran through the exercise with a colleague whose score improved by maybe about a third after focusing, and with such a small sample size, there could be any number of reasons I choked after focusing up. The company said that it could even be helpful to practice choking in this way.
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
And at any rate, numbers are fun. That's why I'm most excited about the headset's plug-in for streamers, which allows them to show their focus levels on screen for their chat to see. I could easily imagine a community looking at that data and teasing their favorite streamer to try to distract them.
That said, it'll be a while until you can actually buy this. It's still a concept for now, with no pricing or promise of release. However, Neurable does already have a similar, non-gaming headset made with Master & Dynamic that will be shipping out soon, just without this software. For more, read my full article here.
Lenovo's laptop can nod when you ask it a question
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
This one is more of a hardware innovation, but it's a clever touch. This CES, Lenovo introduced a laptop with a motorized hinge that can automatically close, open, and even rotate from side-to-side. It'll be coming out later this summer, but while the company was demonstrating the unit to me, it also showed off a prototype chatbot app it's making for it. This uses ChatGPT for now, and is still just a concept and will not ship with the laptop. But it was cute.
Essentially, while I talked with the app, the laptop displayed a big pair of animated eyes on screen, and used its hinge to nod or shake its head no when I asked it questions. It also displayed small animations in response to certain questions, like showing an umbrella when I asked about the rainy weather.
It's still very early days, but I was impressed that the hardware was able to recognize what an affirmative answer was and trigger the laptop to respond accordingly. A lot of AI feels pretty disconnected from the real world, so anything that can give it a physical presence is probably a good idea if you want people to take it seriously.
The Lenovo AI gaming monitor that's basically cheating
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Also shown off at CES this year, Lenovo's AI Frame gaming monitor is probably the most practically useful item on this list, almost to the point where it feels like cheating. Essentially, this fills up most of the 21:9 screen with a regular 16:9 view of whatever's on your computer, and uses AI to show a zoomed-in look at critical game information on the rest.
For instance, in a demo showing a MOBA game (think League of Legends), the monitor zoomed in on the map. In a demo showing Counter-Strike 2, it zoomed in on the reticle. Personally, I didn't think getting a blown-up look at the map was all that helpful, but being able to constantly see what was essentially a sniper scope around my reticle was a game changer, since it worked with any gun and made targets much easier to see.
I could see Counter-Strike 2 developer Valve go as far as banning this if it ever makes its way to market, since it's taken similar actions before. But this is still just an idea for now. Still, it shows that companies are starting to figure out concrete ways AI can help you in your games, beyond just feeding you advice you probably already know.
XREAL's new AR glasses can automatically convert any 2D content into 3D
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Finally, probably my favorite AI invention at CES this year was XREAL's new REAL 3D technology. Built into its newest AR glasses and already added to an existing pair via a firmware update, this uses AI to automatically find depth in any 2D video source and convert it into 3D. And trying it out for myself, it practically looked official.
When I used it to play Mario Kart World, I would have believed you if you told me Nintendo had added this mode itself. It also worked great with James Cameron's Avatar, and there was no loading time to set it up or turn it off. There also wasn't any fuzziness, like there might be with glasses-free 3D screens like the 3DS.
It's a great option for people who like watching 3D games and movies, but might have trouble finding them now that 3D TVs and the Nintendo 3DS are mostly in the past. Now, you can just watch your existing 2D library, but in 3D.
The only issue you might come across is in content that doesn't have depth. For instance, XREAL's Ralph Jodice told me the software didn't quite know what to do when he tried playing the original 8-bit Super Mario Bros. with it, and would randomly emphasize only certain game assets without any rhyme or reason. An illusion of depth does seem to work, though. Super Mario Bros. is entirely flat, but when I tried watching the pen-and-paper animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with this technology, it correctly separated characters in the foreground from scenery in the background, even though everything on screen was entirely hand-drawn.
I just got back from CES 2026, and you can see my real-time reports on some of the best and weirdest things I saw in our CES 2026 live blog. I tried on six(!) different exoskeletons, perked up my ears whenever I heard about a new smart strap, and looked in vain for new models of familiar fitness tech like watches. Here are the biggest trends I noticed and some notes on what was conspicuously missing. I've included prices where possible; anything without a price is likely too far from market to have one yet.
The number of non-Whoop smart bands just doubled
Luna band (underside)Credit: Beth Skwarecki
This is a continuation of a trend that really got going in 2025. Whoop is no longer the only player in the screenless fitness strap space. Last year we saw straps from Amazfit ($99) and Polar ($199), plus a sleep band from Garmin ($169). At CES I learned about two more.
The Luna Band is likely to be the next one to market—the company’s reps said to expect it to ship sometime in the next month or two. (I plan to review it once units are available.) It will be $149, won't require a subscription, and it will use the same app as the Luna Ring, which I’m currently reviewing. Its maker, Noise, is new to the U.S. wearables market but is one of the leading smartwatch makers in India.
Besides the new hardware, Noise also announced that the Luna app will soon have a system to take voice notes to give context to your health data. (This is coming to the app in the next few weeks.) For example, if you tell the app that you had a few glasses of wine, it will remember this when it sees your poor sleep the next morning, and it will adjust its recommendations accordingly—say, reminding you to hydrate, rather than telling you to take a nap.
Speediance Strap prototypesCredit: Beth Skwarecki
Speediance also announced the Speediance Strap, although it doesn’t seem to be as close to market. No price has been announced, and the units at the show were clearly prototypes. The Strap will collect sleep and recovery data, without requiring a subscription to view it, although some more advanced metrics will require a premium subscription.
Rings are everywhere
RingConn gen 3Credit: Beth Skwarecki
Oura has had competitors for years (and has taken up suing them to stop sales), but it seems like the number of smart rings out there is just exploding—though not all of them are fitness or health oriented. Besides Pebble’s Index 01 ($75), which is charmingly simple, there are plenty of rings that pack in more functions—NFC payments, AI voice processing, haptic alerts, and more. There are so many I can’t give a full list, but to name a few: there’s the Muse Ring One ($323), the Dreame Ring, and the Vocci AI ring.
RingConn announced its third-generation ring, with blood pressure insights (I’m skeptical) and haptic alerts, including the ability to buzz for a smart alarm (I’m intrigued). This one isn’t on the market yet, and a rep at the booth asked me what price I thought it should go for. In the meantime, RingConn gave me a gen 2 ring to compare to Oura and others—watch for my review soon.
Watches (mostly) aren’t exciting anymore
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
The companies that make smartwatches and fitness watches tend to be on their own release cycles, not necessarily tied to CES. Apple certainly wasn’t going to announce a new Apple Watch; Google and Fitbit didn’t show up, either. Amazfit had a new watch, the Active Max ($169) in its lineup, but it was more of a refinement to the product line than a new exciting announcement.
The only real exception I can think of is Pebble, but you’ve heard from me already on why it bucks the trend. I got to go hands-on with the Time 2 (announced last year) and the Round 2 (announced last week), which was so thin and sleek it made the Coros on my wrist feel like a big ol’ hunk of plastic. As a reminder, the Round 2 doesn’t have a heart rate monitor and Pebble is trying not to be a fitness watch brand. (I’m still looking forward to reviewing its watches anyway.)
Pebble Time 2Credit: Beth Skwarecki
I think the main reason for the stagnation here is that watches alreadyhave everything they need to have for fitness and health tracking. There's not a lot of room left to innovate; either you give a device slightly better battery life (nice, but yawn) or you stick something else into it just to say you did—like a flashlight or a microphone. That's nothing against flashlights or microphones, which are both great in context, but we're hardly in game-changing territory anymore. Companies like Oura and Whoop are pivoting to services like blood tests that take the focus off their hardware. My colleague Stephen Johnson said it best: tech launches don't feel magical anymore, partly because we don't have many problems left that consumer tech can easily solve, and partly because every new advice adds a hassle to your life.
And so Garmin’s main announcement this weekend was a nutrition tracking feature in its Connect+ subscription. I thought at least there was a good chance of a new watch from Garmin—nope. Garmin announced the Instinct 3 at last year’s CES, but no new hardware this year besides a camera system for truckers (I’m happy for them).
A few other companies used the buzz around CES to announce non-hardware developments as well: Oura is finally shipping the charging case it promised last fall, and Ultrahuman announced a limited-time free tier of its blood testing service with 20+ markers. Its other tiers give you 50+ markers for $99, or a 100+ marker test followed by a 60+ marker follow-up test for $365. (Ultrahuman told me that the exact blood tests it's able to offer vary slightly by state, hence the vague numbers.)
AI was present, but not center stage
A prototype of Amazfit's V1TAL camera, which analyzes the food on your plateCredit: Beth Skwarecki
There were, of course, plenty of mentions that “AI” is baked into this or that fitness app. But the companies mostly seemed to understand that while AI might help to create features their users want, users don’t buy devices for the AI. (See also: Dell executives commenting that its customers don’t seem to want AI, and that it has adjusted the marketing for its computers to de-emphasize it.)
I heard at CES that apps are using AI to identify foods from photos (Garmin and Amazfit) or that AI is helping to find patterns in data (basically everybody). Merach did say it would let me try an AI-powered treadmill, but a rep apologetically told me the device wasn’t available in time to ship the prototype to CES.
They’re trying to make exoskeletons happen
The Sumbu hip-based exoskeletonCredit: Beth Skwarecki
Exoskeletons were the biggest new-to-me trend at CES. These are devices that you strap on to your body, and their motors give an added boost to what your muscles are doing. Several of the companies described them as being like an e-bike for walking.
I gave myself a side quest of trying every exoskeleton that was available to demo. That ended up being a total of six: four that assisted you at the hip, one at the knee, and one at the ankle. One device made by Ascentiz ($1,299-$1,848) can be configured with combined hip and knee action, but the knee module wasn’t available for me to test.
All six devices really did give me a boost while walking (or climbing stairs—several of the companies wisely included a mini staircase in their booths to try out). But I have to wonder who the exoskeletons are really for. If you’re not a serious hiker, an exoskeleton might help you hike up a mountain and keep up with your friends. But I’d think that only a serious hiker would have $1,000+ to spend on hiking gear like an exoskeleton—and that they would probably prefer to train harder and spend the money on something else.
If I had to predict where this tech is going, I think the rental market makes the most sense. Imagine if you could borrow the Ascentiz for a scenic hike on vacation without having to train for months ahead of time, or strap on Dephy’s “powered footwear” ($4,500) to get you through a day at Disneyworld.
2026 has consisted of a few events that have contributed to my ever declining faith in humanity. I’m sure it’s done the same for many of you, so I thought today would be a good time to tell you about some positive interactions I had with strangers this past week, to remind us that not everyone is terrible, and we can still have nice moments in our personal life, even among strangers.
Yesterday, I drove to the next town over to get a coffee, and en route saw a man sitting on his front porch playing the banjo. On my return journey home I was stopped at the stoplight in front of his house, and I rolled down my window to listen to him. He was very talented, playing the banjo beautifully. He looked up at me and I gave him two thumbs up out my window and smiled at him. He smiled and returned to his skillful playing. The light turned green and I drove off.
A few days ago I was at Meijer, and a couple walked past me while I was looking at the bagels. The girl said “oh, bagels actually sound really good right now,” to which the guy replied, “you should grab some bagels.” She came up next to me and started looking at bagels, too.
“You should totally get bagels,” I reaffirmed.
“Well I saw you looking at them and thought they did sound good!”
“Did you see the cranberry ones? That’s what I grabbed, they sounded delish.”
“Ooh, those do sound good.”
“I’m about to go grab strawberry cream cheese to put on them.”
“Yum what a good combo!”
“Have a good one!”
“You too!”
I walked away, smiling.
So often I am completely indifferent to (or even resent) everyone else that’s at the grocery store, but sometimes it’s good to remember that the other people at the store are also just girls who want a bagel, like you. And normally I don’t strike up conversation, because who wants to be talked to while they’re grocery shopping, but something in me just sought connection with my fellow bagel shopper in that particular moment.
Just a couple days ago, a stranger came to my house to buy a microwave I had listed on Facebook Marketplace, and she said I had the most beautiful home on the block, and we had a brief conversation about moving troubles and how the house looked great. It made me smile. I’m glad she said something so nice, it really brightened my day.
Multiple times this week alone, strangers walking down the street or driving past me have waved, or nodded, or smiled, and it’s such a good recognition of, “hello, other human, I see you.”
Such small acts of acknowledgement that you exist and everyone else is a person like you. I don’t know, it just makes me feel better, and I thought maybe it would make you think of the last time a stranger smiled at you, too.
Feel free to share nice interactions in the comments, I’d love to hear them. And have a great day!
candyheartsex assignments have arrived, and I got what I hoped I'd get!
In yesterday's poll, the majority of people work on one thing at a time when it's for a deadline, but on multiple things at once when it's not. Fascinating!
(Also, in tickyboxes, the majority said they'd tick whichever ones they like. More interestingly, 33,3% of respondents chose "tick them all", but only 11% actually did tick them all. *g*)
For me, I usually have multiple things going no matter what. When I'm in the very final phase of finishing a story, I need to focus on just that; otherwise, there may be a "main" thing I'm working on, but it's hardly ever the only thing. Creativity begets creativity, so the better the writing is going with one thing, the more ideas and snippets my brain produces for other things as well. *g*
Today's writing
Some more fandomtrees, but also, I had a brainwave and wrote some snippets plus a bunch of notes for an original fic WIP I hadn't touched since 2018. I think my writing brain is starting to function properly again if it's randomly throwing out things like that!
This is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission) on the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the phalanx formation in which they fought. We’ve spent the last two entries in this series looking at warfare quite narrowly through the lens of tactics: hoplite spacing, depth, fighting style, and so on. I’ve argued for what I regard as a ‘blended’ model that sits somewhere between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: no ‘shoving’ othismos, but the hoplite phalanx is a shield wall, a formation with mostly regular spacing that is intended for shock and functions as a shock-focused shield wall formation likely from a relatively early date.
This week, we’re going to now ‘zoom out’ a bit and ask what implications the hoplite debate has for our broader understanding of Greek society, particularly polis Greek society. Hoplites, as warriors, were generally found in the Greek poleis but of course not all Greeks lived in poleis and areas of Greece without poleis largely lacked hoplites as well. In particular, our understanding of the place that hoplites have in polis society has a bunch of downstream implications in terms of social structure, the prevalence of slavery and even the question of how many Greeks there are in the first place.
I ended up having to split this into two parts for time, so this week we’re going to focus on the social status of hoplites, as well as some of the broader implications, particularly demographic ones, of a change in our understanding of how rich hoplites were. Then next week we’re going to close the series out by looking at hoplite ‘discipline,’ training and experience.
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Via Wikimedia Commons, an arming scene showing hoplites and a young man being armed as a hoplite (c. 530-510 BC).
Orthodox Yeoman Hoplites
The key question we are asking here is fundamentally “how broad is the hoplite class?” That is, of course, a very important question, but as we’ll see, also a fiendishly tricky one. It is also a question where it can be unclear sometimes where scholars actually are which can render the debates confusing: heterodox scholars write articles and chapters against something called the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite‘1but it isn’t always clear exactly what the bounds of the model they’re arguing against is, in part because orthodox scholars are not generally proposing hard numbers for the size of the hoplite class.
By way of example, I want to take Victor Davis Hansen out to the woodshed on this point – because his half of this specific disconnect was brought up in the comments early in this series – in terms of the difference between how he sometimes imagines in words the size and social composition of the hoplite class and then how it looks when he uses numbers. In The Other Greeks, VDH’s preference for describing the hoplite polis of the late Archaic is ‘broad-based’ a term he uses for it about three dozen times, including on when he talks about the “broad base of hoplite yeomanry” and how “when middling farmers were in control of a Greek polis government it was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interest of most of the citizenry” and when he references “the yeomanry […] who had built the polis and created broad-based agrarian governments.”2 These references are, in my digital copy, all within 3 pages of each other. They certainly give the impression of a middling, yeoman-hoplite class that dominated the typical polis. And indeed, in his more pop-focused works, like the deeply flawed Carnage and Culture (2001) he posits Greece as the origin point for a western tradition that includes “equality among the middling classes” tied to the hoplite tradition, which certainly seems to suggest that Hanson thinks we should understand the hoplite class as broad, covering even relatively poor farmers, and with a great degree of internal equality.
But then flash forward three whole pages and we’re calculating the size of that ‘broad-based’ class and we get a line like, “the full-citizen hoplites […] composed about twenty percent of the total adult resident population of Boeotia.”3 And pulling out just that second quote, someone might express confusion when I say that the heterodox argue that the hoplite class is small and exclusive, a rejection of the ‘middle class’ yeoman-hoplite of the orthodox school, because look there is VDH himself saying they’re only 20%! But equally, one may question the fairness of describing such a rate of enfranchisement as ‘broad-based!’
Now on the one hand VDH’s argument in this passage is about the relative inclusivity of ‘moderate’ oligarchies (the ‘broad-based’ ones) as compared to radical Greek democracies and so the question of the relative breadth of the hoplite class itself is not particularly his concern. But I think he’s also hiding the ball here in key ways: Boeotia is a tricky test case – unusual and famous for both its significant cavalry (drawn from an unusually wealthy aristocracy) and light infantry manpower (drawn from an unusually impoverished peasantry). VDH notes the low property qualifications for citizenship in Boeotia but does not stop to consider if that might be connected not to the hoplites, but to the unusually large numbers of Boeotian light infantry.
Moreover, there is a lack of clarity when presenting these percentages as to exactly what is being included. VDH’s 20% figure is 20% of the total “adult resident population,” rather than – as we might expect – a percentage of the adult male population or frequently the free adult male population. So he is actually asserting something like almost 45% (really probably 43 or 44%) of free households serve as hoplites (once we adjust for women and the elderly), which, as we’ll see, I think is pretty doubtful.4 For the sake of keeping comparisons here ‘clean,’ I am going to try to be really clear on what is a percentage of what, because as we’ll see there is in fact, a real difference between the orthodox assumption of a hoplite class of 40-50% of free households and the heterodox assumption that is closer to 25% of free households.
So when I say that heterodox scholars generally argue for a smaller, economically elite hoplite class while orthodox scholars generally assume a larger ‘yeoman’ hoplite class, it can be tricky to pin down what that means, particularly on the orthodox side. We need apples-to-apples number comparisons to get a sense of where these folks differ.
And I think the place to actually start with this is Karl Julius Beloch (1854-1929); stick with me, I promise this will make sense in a second. Beloch’s Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886, “The Population of the Greco-Roman World”) is the starting point for all of the debates of Greek and Roman demography, the first really significant, systematic effort to estimate the population of the entire classical world in a rigorous way. Now if you recall your historiography from our first part, you will quickly realize that as a German writing in the 1880s, Beloch was bound to have drawn his assumptions about Greek society and the social role of the hoplite class from those early Prussian and German scholars who serve as the foundation for the orthodox school. They were, after all, writing at the same time and in the same language as he was. Equally useful (for us) Beloch’s basic range of estimates for Greece remain more-or-less the accepted starting point for the problem, which is to say that a lot of current historians of ancient Greece when they think about the population of the Greek poleis are still ‘thinking with Beloch’ (typically mediated by Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000)).
So analyzing Beloch’s approach – and because he is estimating population, he is forced to use numbers – can give us a sense of the society that the ‘orthodox’ vision of hoplites imagined at its inception and which it largely still imagines when it thinks in terms of raw population numbers. And that can help us lock down what we’re actually arguing about.
In very brief, Beloch had a problem to solve in estimating the population of Greece. Whereas in Roman Italy, he had census data to interpret, we have no equivalent in Greece (ancient reports of population in Greece are rare and almost invariably unreliable). So instead he adopts the method of estimatingfrom maximum military deployments, the one number we reliably get from ancient sources. Doing so, of course, requires squaring away some key questions: what percentage of adult males might be called up for these armies? Our sources often give us only figures for hoplites, so this question really becomes, ‘what percentage of adult males served as hoplites?’ And then following on that, what percentage of people were female, children, elderly or non-free?
Beloch answers those questions as follows: he assumes that roughly half of all free households are in the hoplite class, so he can compute the free adult male population by multiplying hoplite deployments by two, that he can compute the free population by multiplying the adult male population by three, and that the non-free population is around 25% of the total (significantly concentrated in Sparta and Athens), including both slaves and serfs. You can see the logic in these assumptions but as I am going to argue all of these assumptions are wrong, some more wrong than others. We’ll come back to this, but I think Beloch’s key stumbling block (apart from just badly underestimating the number of children in a pre-modern population – he should be multiplying his adult males by four, not three) is that he largely assumes that the Greek poleis look more or less like the Roman Republic except that the Romans recruit a bit further down their socio-economic ladder. And that’s…not right, though you could see how someone working in the 1880s might jump to that expedient when the differences in Greek and Roman social structure were less clear.
Greeks are not Romans and the Greek polis is not the Roman Republic.5
Nevertheless those assumptions suggest a vision, a mental model of the social structure of the typical Greek polis: wealthy citizens of the hoplite class make up roughly half of the free households (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite), while the landless citizen poor make up the other half. Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s The Other Greeks (1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of adults (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) households were hoplite households (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),6 which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class.
What does it mean for a society if the hoplite class represents approximately 40% of households (including non-free households)?
Well, this suggests first that the hoplite class is perhaps the largest or second-largest demographic group, behind only free poor citizens. It also assumes that nearly all of the propertied households – that is, the farmers who own their own farms – both served as hoplites and were members of the hoplite class.7In particular, this imagines the ‘typical’ member of the hoplite class (this distinction between hoplites and the hoplite class will matter in a moment) as a middling farmer whose farm was likely small enough that he had to work it himself (not having enough land to live off rents or enslaved labor), essentially a modest peasant. Moreover the assumption here is that this broad hoplite ‘middle class’ dominates the demography of the polis, with very few leisured elites above them and a similar number of free poor (rather than a much larger number) below them.
And I want to note here again there is an implicit – only rarely explicit (Beloch makes the comparison directly) – effort to reason from the social model we see in the Roman Republic, where the assidui (the class liable for taxes and military service) as a group basically did include nearly all farmers with any kind of property and ‘farmers with any kind of property’ really does seem to have included the overwhelming majority of the population. There’s an effort to see Greek ‘civic militarism’ through the same frame, with the polis a community made up of small freeholding farmers banding together.8I think scholarship has not always grappled clearly enough with the ways in which Rome is not like an overgrown polis, but in fact quite different. One of those differences is that the assidui is a much larger class of people than anything in a polis, encompassing something like 70% of all adult males (free and non-free) and perhaps as much as 90% of all free households. That is an enormous difference jumping even from 37.5% to 70%. What that figure suggests is both that Roman military participation reached much more robustly into the lower classes but also that (and we’ll come back to this in a moment) land ownership was probably more widespread among the Roman peasantry than their Greek equivalents.
In short part of what makes the Roman Republic different is not just where they draw the census lines, but the underlying structure of the countryside is meaningfully different and that has very significant impacts on the structure of Roman society.9Taken on its own evidence, it sure looks like the organization of land in the Greek countryside was meaningfully less equal10and included meaningfully more slaves than the Italian countryside, with significant implications for how we understand the social position of hoplites. And that brings us to the heterodox objections and thus…
Divisions Among Hoplites
The response to the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model of hoplite orthodoxy has been Hans van Wees’ assault on the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite.’11
What van Wees does is look specifically at Athens, because unlike anywhere else in the Greek world, we have the complete ‘schedule’ of wealth classes in Athens, denominated in agricultural production. He’s able to reason from that to likely estate size for each of the classes and from there, given the size of Attica (the territory of Athens) and the supposed citizen population (estimates from 40,000 to 60,000) the total size of each wealth class in terms of households and land ownership, in order to very roughly sketch the outlines of what wealth and social class in Attica might have looked like. Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was very big (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as quite strange), so the idea here is that insights in Athenian class divisions help us understand class divisions in other poleis as well.
What he is working with are the wealth classes defined by the reforms of Solon, which we haven’t really discussed in depth but these are reported by Plutarch (Solon 16) and seem to have been the genuine property classifications for Athenian citizens, which I’ve laid out in the chart below. Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in medimnoi, a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 medimnoi of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the zeugitai, though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear).
Name
Wealth Requirement
Notional Military role
Percentage of Population Following van Wees (2001)
Pentakosiomedimnoi (“500 Bushel Men”)
500 medimnoi or more
Leaders, Officers, Generals
1.7-2.5%
Hippeis (‘horsemen’)
400 medimnoi
Cavalry
1.7-2.5%
Zeugitai (‘yoked ones’)
200 medimnoi (possibly reduced later to 150 medimnoi)
Hoplites
5.6-25%
Thetes (‘serfs’)
Less than 200 medimnoi
Too poor to serve (later rowers in the navy)
90-70%
Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name (they were ‘yoked together’ standing in position in the phalanx), but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha12 or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory. It is, in fact, roughly enough farm for the owner to not do much or any farming but instead subsist entirely off of either rents or the labor of enslaved workers.13
In short, the zeugitai aren’t ‘working class’ ‘yeoman farmers’ at all, but leisure-class elites – mostly landlords, not farmers – albeit poorer than the hippeis and pentakosiomedimnoi even further above them. And that actually makes a great deal of sense: one of the ideas that pops up in Greek political philosophy – albeit in tension with another we’ll get to in a moment – is the idea that the ideal hoplite is a leisured elite and that the ideal polis would be governed exclusively by the leisured hoplites.14 Indeed, when a bunch of Greek-speakers (mostly Macedonians) find themselves suddenly in possession of vast kingdoms, this is exactly the model they try to build their military on (before getting utterly rolled by the Romans because this is actually a bad way to build a society). And of course Sparta’s citizen body, the spartiates, replicate this model as well. Often when we see elements in a Greek polis try to create an oligarchy, what they are intending to do is reduce political participation back to roughly this class – the few thousand richest households – which is not all the hoplites, but merely the richest ones.
Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy; they only barely crawl over half if we assume the property qualification was (as it probably was) reduced at some point to just 150 medimnoi. Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’ And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.
What the transition to the Athenian democracy meant was the full enfranchisement of this large class of thetes, both the fellows who could afford to fight as hoplites (but previously didn’t have the rights of them) and the poorer citizen thetes.
And of course this isn’t only Athens. The only other polis whose complete social system we can see with any clarity, of course, is Sparta and when we look there, what do we find? A system where political participation is limited to the rentier-elite class (the Spartiates), where there is another class of poorer hoplites – the perioikoi, who fight as hoplites – who are entirely blocked from political participation. It appears to be the same kind of dividing line, with the difference being that the spartiates had become so dominant as to deny the perioikoi even citizenship in the polity and to physically segregate themselves (the perioikoi lived in their own communities, mostly on the marginal land). It is suggestive that this sort of divide between the wealthy ‘hoplite class’ that enjoyed distinct political privileges and other ‘working-class’ hoplites who did not (and yet even far more poor farmers who could not afford to fight as hoplites) was common in the polis.
That leaves the notion of a truly ‘broad-based’ hoplite-class that runs a ‘broad-based’ agrarian polis government that consisted of ‘middle-class’ ‘yeoman’ hoplites largely in tatters. Instead, what you may normally have is a legally defined ‘hoplite class’ that is just the richest 10-20% of the free citizen population, a distinct ‘poor hoplite’ class that might be around 20% and then a free citizen underclass of 60-70% that cannot fight as hoplites and also have very limited political participation, even though many of them do own some small amount of land.
Once again, if you’ll forgive me, that looks nothing like the Middle Roman Republic, where the capite censi (aka the proletarii) – men too poor to serve – probably amounted to only around 10% of the population and the light infantry contingent of a Roman army (where the poorest men who could serve would go) was just 25%.15 So whereas the free ‘Roman’ underclass of landless or very poor is at most perhaps 35% of (free) households,16 the equivalent class at Athens at least (and perhaps in Greece more broadly) is 60% of (free) households. Accounting for the enslaved population makes this gap wider, because it certainly seems like the percentage of the enslaved population in Greece was somewhat higher than Roman Italy. It is suddenly less of a marvel that Rome could produce military mobilizations that staggered the Greek world. Greeks are not Romans.
This is a set of conclusions that naturally has significant implications for how we understand the polis, particularly non-democratic poleis. Older scholarship often assumes that a ‘broad’ Greek oligarchy meant rule by the landholding class, but if you look at the number of enfranchised citizens, it is clear that ‘broad’ oligarchies were much narrower than this: not ‘farmer’s republics’ (as VDH supposes) but rather ‘landlord‘s republics.’17 That is quite a different sort of state! And understanding broad oligarchies in this way suddenly restores the explanatory power of what demokratia was in Greek thought: it isn’t just about enfranchising the urban poor (a class that must have been vanishingly small in outside of very large cities like Athens) but about enfranchising the small farmer, a class that would have been quite large in any polis for reasons we’ve discussed with peasants.
Via Wikimedia Commons, a Greek funerary statute from Eleusis (c. 350-325) showing a hoplite being armed by his enslaved porter. One of the indicators that slavery may have been more prevalent in Greece and that the hoplite class was wealther than their Roman equivalents is that Greek writers often seem to assume that the typical hoplite has an enslaved servant with them on campaign to carry their equipment and handle their logistics, whereas famously in the Roman army, the individual infantrymen were responsible for this.
I think there’s also a less directly important but even more profound implication here:
Wait, How Many Greeks Are There?
The attentive reader may be thinking, “wait, but Beloch’s population estimates assume that the hoplite contingent of any Greek polis represent half of its military aged (20-60) free adult males, but you’re saying that number might be much lower, perhaps just 30 or 40%?”
I actually haven’t seen any scholars directly draw this connection, so I am going to do so here. Hell, I’ve already seen this blog cited quite a few times in peer-reviewed scholarship so why not.
If it isn’t already clear, I think when it comes to the size of the hoplite class, van Wees is correct and that thought interlocks with another thought that has slowly crept into my mind and at last become lodged as my working assumption: we have significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. Or, more correctly, everyone except Mogens Herman Hansen has significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. So good job to Mogens Herman Hansen, everyone else, see me after class.
Now these days the standard demographic reference for the population of Greece is not Beloch (1886), it is Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000). Unlike Beloch, they do not reason from military deployments, instead they reason from estimated population density. Now I want to be clear, they are reasoning from estimated rural population density, which is not the same as reasoning from built-up urban area18 The thing is, we can’t independently confirm rural population density from archaeology (unlike urban area estimates) so this method is entirely hostage to its assumptions. So the fact that Corvisier and Suder’s estimates fall neatly almost exactly on Beloch’s estimate (a free population of c. 3m in mainland Greece) might suggest they tweaked their assumptions to get that result. And on some level, it is a circular process, because Beloch checks his own military-based estimates with population density calculations in order to try to show that he is producing reasonable numbers. So if you accept Beloch’s density estimates at the beginning, you are going to end up back-computing Beloch’s military estimates at the end, moving through the same process in reverse order.
But you can see how we have begun to trouble the foundations of Beloch’s numbers in a few ways. First off, we’ve already noted that his multiplier to get from military aged males to total population (multiply by three) is too low (it needs to be four). Beloch didn’t have the advantage of modern model life tables or the ability to see so clearly that mortality in his own day was changing rapidly and had been doing so for a while. Adjusting for that alone has to bring the free population up to support the military numbers, to around 4m instead of 3m (so we have effectively already broken Corvisier and Suder (2000)). Then there is the question of the prevalence of the enslaved; Beloch figures 25% (1m total), but estimates certainly run higher. Bresson, L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8) figures perhaps 40-50% and 30% is also a common estimate, though we are here, in practice, largely guessing. Even keeping the 25% figure Beloch uses, which we now have to acknowledge may be on the low side, we have to raise the number of enslaved to reflect the larger free population: 1.33m instead of 1m, for a new total of 5.33m instead of Beloch’s original 4m.
But then if the number of men who fight as hoplites is not, as Beloch supposes, roughly half of polis society, but closer to 40% or even less, then we would need to expand the population even further. If it is, say, 40% instead of 50%, suddenly instead of Beloch’s computation (very roughly) of 500,000 hoplites giving us 1,000,000 free adult men giving us 3,000,000 free persons, resulting in a total population of 4,000,000 including the enslaved, we have 500,000 hoplites implying 1,250,000 free adult men implying 5,000,000 free persons, to which we have to add something like 1,500,000 enslaved persons19 implying a total human population not of 3 or 4m but of c. 6,500,000.
And there’s a reason to think that might be right. The one truly novel effort at estimating the population of Greece in the last few decades (and/or century or so) was by Mogens Herman Hansen. Having spent quite some time on a large, multi-scholar project to document every known polis (resulting in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004)), M.H. Hansen decided to use that count as a basis to estimate population, assigning a rough estimate to the size of small, medium and large poleis – using the built-up urban area of poleis we knew relatively well – and then simply multiplying by all of the known poleis to exist at one point in time. The result, documented in M.H. Hansen, The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture (2006), produced an estimate of 4-6m for mainland Greece and I think, to be frank, Hansen pulled his punch here. His method really produced the top figure in that range, a significantly higher figure that generally postulated for Greece.20
My strong suspicion – which the evidence is insufficient to confirm definitively – is that van Wees is right about the relative size of the slice of men who fight as hoplites (distinct from the ‘hoplite class’) and that M.H. Hansen is correct about the population and that these two conclusions interlock with each other to imply a rather different Greece in terms of equality and social structure than we had thought.
Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture, the Greek peasantry, the Greek countryside through the lens of the much better documented Roman Italian agriculture, peasantry and countryside. After all, it is for Italy, not Greece, that we have real census data, it is the Roman period, not the classical period, that gives us sustained production of agricultural treatises. We simply have a much better picture of Roman social structures and so it was natural for scholars trying to get to grips with a quite frankly alien economic system to work from the nearest system they knew. And that was fine when we were starting from nothing but I think it is a set of assumptions that have outlived their usefulness.
This isn’t the place for this argument in full (that’s in my book), but briefly, the structure of the Roman countryside – as we come to see it in the late third/early second century BC – did not form naturally. It was instead the product of policy, by that point, of a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns to maximize the amount of heavy infantry the land could support. It was also the product of a tax-and-soldier-pay regime (tributum and stipendium) that on the net channeled resources downward to enable poorer men to serve in that heavy infantry.21 Those mechanisms are not grinding away in mainland Greece (we can leave Greek colonial settlement aside for now, as it is happening outside of mainland Greece), so we have no reason to expect the structure of the countryside to look the same either.
In short the Romans are taking steps to ‘flatten out’ their infantry class (but not their aristocracy, of course), to a degree, which we do not see in Greece. Instead, where we get an ideology of economically equal citizenry, it is an ideology of equality within the leisured elite, an ‘equality of landlords’ not an equality of farmers. We should thus not expect wealth and land distribution to be as ‘flat’ in Greece as in Italy – and to be clear, wealth distribution in Italy was not very flat by any reasonable standard, there was enormous disparity between the prima classis (‘first class’) of infantry and the poorest Roman assidui. But it was probably flatter than in Greece within the infantry class (again, the Roman aristocracy is a separate question), something that seems confirmed given that the militarily active class in Roman Italy is so much larger and more heavily concentrated into the heavy infantry.22 Consequently, we ought not assume that we can casually estimate the total population of Greece from hoplite deployments, supposing that the Greeks like the Romans, expected nearly all free men to serve. Instead, the suggestion of our evidence was that in Greece, as in many pre-modern societies, military service (and thus political power) was often the preserve of an exclusive affluent class.
Implications
But returning to Greece, I would argue that accepting the heterodox position on the social status of hoplites has some substantial implications. First, it suggests that there was, in fact, a very real and substantial social division within the body of hoplites, between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’ as politically understood and poor hoplites who fought in the same way but only enjoyed a portion of the social status implied. That division suddenly makes sense of the emergence of demokratia in poleis that were more rural than Athens (which is all of them). The typical polis was thus not a ‘farmer’s republic’ but a landlord’s republic.
At the same time, this also substantially alters the assumptions about ‘yeoman hoplites’ who have to rush home to pull in their harvests and who are, in effect, ‘blue-collar warriors.’ Instead, the core of the hoplite army was a body – not a majority, but a significant minority – of leisured elites who had slaves or tenants doing most of their farming for them. What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either).
Finally, if we extend this thinking into our demographic analysis, we have to accept a much larger population in Greece, with all of the expansion happening below the men who fought as hoplites (both the hoplite class and our poorer working-class hoplites). It suggests a remarkably less equal social structure in Greece – indeed, perhaps less equal than the structure in Roman Italy – which in turn significantly caveats the way we often understand the Greek polis as a citizen community relatively more egalitarian and free than the absolute monarchies which pervaded Egypt and the Near East.
And of course, for one last return to my pet complaint in this post, it should reinforce our sense thatGreek are not Romans and that we cannot casually supply the habits, economics or social structures of one society to the other to fill in gaps in our evidence. In particular, the assumption that the Greeks and Romans essentially share a civic and military tradition is a thing that would need to be proved, not assumed.23
In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your wishlist if you feel comfortable doing so.
Most people haven't actively managed a firewall in at least a decade, assuming they ever have. But keeping track of which applications are using the internet—and how much data they're using—is still useful at times, as is blocking apps from accessing the net entirely.
While you're traveling, for example, internet access might be limited, so it's a good idea to cut off applications that constantly churn through data. But even while at home, it's a good security practice to review which applications are connecting to the internet. And while macOS comes with a firewall, it's not really a useful tool for that.
Which is why I like FireWally. This totally free application, offered by the Ukraine-based indie Mac developers Nektony, isn't a tool for power users—it's streamlined and user friendly. Click the menu bar icon and you'll see a list of applications using the internet. You can see a summary of all traffic today, in the past hour, or monitor incoming traffic in real time.
Beside every application is its data usage. You can see a breakdown of inbound and outbound traffic for any application by hovering the mouse over it. You can block any application from accessing the internet by toggling the switch.
Credit: Justin Pot
What if you don't recognize an application? I, traditionally, ended up copying the name of the application and pasting it into a search engine. FireWally tries to save you some time by providing AI-generated summaries of each application using Apple Intelligence (assuming your Mac supports that feature). It's a useful way to quickly remind yourself what a particular application is, or to identify one you don't recognize.
It's a very streamlined application, but perfect for anyone hoping to understand a bit more about how much data their various Mac applications are using. Give it a spin if you're looking for a simple firewall application.
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV Rating: Mature Archive Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Haurchefant Greystone/Warrior of Light, Alphinaud Leveilleur & Warrior of Light, Unrequited Minfilia Warde/Warrior of Light, Unrequited Aymeric de Borel/Warrior of Light, Pre-Urianger Augurelt/Warrior of Light, Alisaie Leveilleur & Warrior of Light, Warrior of Light & Thancred Waters, Y'shtola Rhul & Warrior of Light, Midgardsormr & Warrior of Light, Hydaelyn & Warrior of Light, Urianger Augurelt & Warrior of Light, Minfilia Warde & Warrior of Light, Ardbert & Warrior of Light Characters: Warrior of Light, Haurchefant Greystone, Alphinaud Leveilleur, Urianger Augurelt, Y'shtola Rhul, Thancred Waters, Emmanellain de Fortemps, Artoirel de Fortemps, Edmont de Fortemps, Alisaie Leveilleur, Minfilia Warde, Midgardsormr (Final Fantasy XIV), Tataru Taru, Ardbert (Final Fantasy XIV), Warriors of Darkness (Final Fantasy XIV), Scions of the Seventh Dawn, Unukalhai (Final Fantasy XIV) Additional Tags: Grief/Mourning, Survivor Guilt, Elezen Warrior of Light, Female Warrior of Light, Healer Warrior of Ligh, Angst, Suicidal Thoughts, Religious Angst, Depression, Patch 3.0: Heavensward Spoilers (Final Fantasy XIV), Patch 3.4: Soul Surrender Spoilers (Final Fantasy XIV), Canon-Typical Violence Series: With Lilies and With Laurel Length: [WORD COUNT] / 82,000 Chapter: 5/15
Summary:
A heartbroken Warrior of Light struggles to come to terms with loss, and the world she has been left to save.
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As Lifehacker's tech deals writer, I'm always looking for the best bargains on TVs, speakers, laptops, and other tech. Now that it's Friday, I've gathered together this week's sales highlights, all of which I've vetted using my favorite price-tracking tools to make sure they are actually good deals. This week, you can find great sales on plenty of flagship smartwatches (perfect to help your healthy new year's resolution), the Kindle Scribe, MacBooks, Ray-Ban Smart glasses, and more.
Remember how I was being salty about our lack of "significant" snow? Well, it all arrived at once last night. We got hammered. The picture is my view as I stepped off what would transpire was the final service to arrive at my home station last night. All the trains were cancelled today.
However, the children were furious this morning because despite the high school and the other middle school in the area being closed, their school was...open. And, cruel parents that we are, we made them attend. A third to half of their classes were missing, some of whom we know live within walking distance of the school. (Our children don't.)
I'm not sure how long we can expect to be in the doghouse, but I suspect it's going to take more than a packet of Haribo to get them to forgive us.
I'm not really taking part in Snowflake challenge this year, I don't have the bandwidth right now, but dolorosa_12 reposted it as her Friday open thread and I thought that tomorrow it's my birthday, maybe the universe is telling me I can ask for things?
Challenge #5
In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.
(dolorosa_12 wisely specified:"I assume the intent is to ask for things on a small-scale personal fannish or material level, not to express wishes relating to the myriad large, overwhelming global crises or things of that nature.")
Lee’s best friend went missing on Bodmin Moor, four years ago. She and Mal were chasing rumours of monsters when they found something all too real. Now Mal is back, but where has she been, and who is she working for?
When government physicist Kay Amal Khan is attacked, the security services investigate. This leads MI5’s Julian Sabreur deep into terrifying new territory, where he clashes with mysterious agents of an unknown power who may or may not be human. And Julian’s only clue is some grainy footage – showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor.
Khan’s extra-dimensional research was purely theoretical, until she found cracks between our world and countless others. Parallel Earths where monsters live. These cracks are getting wider every day, so who knows what might creep through? Or what will happen when those walls finally come crashing down.
There’s a lot to this story: multiverses, aliens, couples who may or may not get together, an evil megalomaniac, the end of everything. And while there are parts of the book that are quite interesting, there was perhaps a little too much going on for me to get overly interested in any of it.
Several of the characters show a lot of potential; I would have loved to see more of Julian and Alison and how their relationship would progress. Same with Lee and Mal. But all the other plot lines kept getting in the way. I never got to know them the way I wanted to. Because there is something there. I guess that’s what kept me going through almost 600 pages, only to come to an ending that was somewhat flat.
I won’t stop reading Tchaikovsky’s books; I still have hope.
Mount TBR 2026 Book Links
Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.
Any new phone almost certainly comes with a handful of preinstalled apps you'll never use, regardless of which manufacturer you buy from or which operating system you're on. Some devices are more bloated than others: Google Pixels have a relatively "clean" build compared to Samsung phones, for example, and don't typically come with third-party apps and games.
But you may still want to eliminate apps and features that clutter your home screen, take up valuable space, and create a drag on performance, especially if you have alternatives you like more. On Android, that likely means uninstalling what you easily can and disabling everything else.
What you can (and can't) uninstall on Android
Unfortunately, many preinstalled first-party apps can't be easily removed. This varies by manufacturer and device—for example, Pixel users can uninstall Google Play Games and Books but are stuck with Chrome, Drive, Maps, and Calculator. As HowToGeek points out, you can delete other pre-selected Google apps added during initial setup, such as the Pixel Watch app and NotebookLM.
On Samsung Galaxy phones, again, some preinstalled bloatware is locked in, but ZDNET calls out five native apps that most users should delete right away: Global Goals, Samsung Free, Samsung TV Plus, Samsung Shop, and Samsung Kids.
To uninstall an app on your Pixel, go to the Google Play Store and tap the Profile icon. Tap Manage apps & devices > Manage, select the app you want to remove, and tap Uninstall. On Samsung, go to Settings > Apps, tap the app name, and tap Uninstall > OK. You can also touch and hold the app icon on your home screen and tap or drag to uninstall.
If you're absolutely set on removing preinstalled apps that can't be deleted using the above steps, you can use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), but thesemethodsare more advanced.
How to disable preinstalled apps
Built-in apps that aren't in use can be disabled, which hides the icon from your app drawer. They'll still take up space, but at least they'll be out of sight. Most preinstalled apps can be disabled if you don't need them, with the exception of critical system apps.
On your Pixel, go to Settings > Apps > See all apps to select individual apps, and tap Disable at the top of the screen. You can hide preinstalled Samsung apps from your home screen settings: tap Hide apps and tap the icon of the apps you want to disable, the press Done.
If you've never heard of Carroll, he wrote odd, quirky, dark, magical realist/surrealist novels and short stories. Probably his most famous book was Land of Laughs. I found his style compulsively readable, though he was absolutely unable to write a satisfying ending to his novels, ever; generally there would be a fantastic buildup followed by either an anticlimax or the book just suddenly stopping or a conclusion where I'd have no idea what actually happened. Still, I did very much like his style and often enjoyed the first half or two-thirds or 99% of his novels quite a bit. (His short stories were sometimes fully successful and did have actual endings.)
I came across After Silence at a used bookshop, and was surprised as I'd never heard of it. I now realize there's a reason I've never heard of it. As far as I know, it's his only non-fantasy work. At least I think it's not fantasy. It has a solid build-up, then completely falls apart in the final third leading to a truly bizarre ending. Definitely my least favorite book of his.
It begins in a somewhat Carroll-typical fashion, with the main character, a cartoonist named Max, having a meet-cute with a woman, Lily, and her young son Lincoln in a museum. It's Carroll-typical because Max's somewhat successful cartoon is deeply weird, Lily takes him to the restaurant where she works which is charmingly weird, and there's hints that something odd is up with her and Lincoln that deepen as the three of them have quirky adventures and form a family.
To be fair to Carroll, this really isn't typical of his writing. Even his best novels feel a bit dated in addition to always imploding at the end, but I do still like Bones of the Moon, Land of Laughs, and the first half of Outside the Dog Museum. His short stories are worth reading and hold up better. I especially like "Friend's Best Man" and "The Sadness of Detail."
Coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" (1947), which is in-turn based on a lecture from 1939, is a word to describe a miraculous turn of events in a narrative. You could even say it's a word that avoids catastrophe ;-D The "eu" prefix is from the Greek word for "good".
Eucatastrophes are often swift and unexpected, such as the Prince waking Snow White or the One Ring falls into Mount Doom.
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Apple's flagship products rarely get substantial discounts—but if you wait for the right moment, you can grab a great deal. If you've been eyeing Apple's top-of-the-line smartwatch, that moment is now: The Apple Watch Ultra 2 has dropped to $549.99 on Amazon, saving you $250 off the retail price. This matches the lowest price it has yet reached, according to price tracking tools.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 was released in September 2023, and after the Ultra 3 dropped last two years later. it was inevitable that the Ultra 2 would see a price reduction. The cool thing is you don't need the latest model to receive the latest WatchOS features, since Apple has a good record of updating their flagship products for many years to come.
The Ultra is the premium Apple Watch model, with the biggest case size, brightest screen (3,000 nits), deepest water resistance (100 meters), and longest battery life (up to 36 hours).
I'll go with the last fannish page I bookmarked: TNG-Picard.com, a beautifully organized collection of TNG and Picard costumes and props, including close-ups of details.
Challenge #5: Create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.
This is surprisingly hard. Everything top of mind for me right now is something that no one reading this has any power over, and mostly involves the world being less of a horrible trash fire.
This last one is a huge stretch, but if any vid makers out there want to make an Star Trek: The Next Generation ensemble fanvid to We Are Going to Be Friends by The White Stripes, that would be amazing.
This book is very silly. It's like creepypasta with floor plans.
But it's briskly written and quickly read. And unique, if that counts for anything. What it isn't is scary, suspenseful, or atmospheric. Read this if you enjoy troubling floor plans and baseless speculation, or if you want to see what all the fuss is about. Probably best on paper so you can reference the floor plans on the facing page.
Internet videos have always been addicting, but short-form content is a whole other beast. Whatever platform you watch them on, these brief clips pull you in and don't let go, and, before you know it, you've mindlessly scrolled through hours of videos, most of which you'll never remember watching.
YouTube Shorts are no exception. But unlike TikTok or Instagram, short-form content is not the main source of videos on the platform. YouTube, of course, hosts long-form videos first and foremost, and is the sole reason why many of us visit the site or app. Shorts are just an afterthought, but an afterthought that YouTube pushes hard. You might hop on to watch a specific video, or check out new content from your subscriptions, but to do so, you'll have to push past rows of "Shorts" all vying for your attention. God help your afternoon if you accidentally click on one.
If you like YouTube Shorts, please disregard. But for the rest of us that just want to find and watch standard videos on YouTube, there's now some respite: As part of a larger update to search filters and content discovery, YouTube is now allowing users to filter out Shorts in searches. The company is pitching this as a way to separate searches between either Shorts or traditional videos, but you'll never catch me searching specifically for Shorts. What YouTube has done here, at least for users like myself, is to create a way to exclude Shorts from any particular search.
How to remove YouTube Shorts from search
To start, open YouTube and search for something. You should now see a series of options along the top of the display, one of which is "Videos." Choose it, and you'll reload the search with only long-form videos. Huzzah. You can also do the same from the greater search filters settings: On desktop, when the results appear, select "Filters" in the top right then look for "Type" on the left of the "Search filters" pop-up window. On mobile, tap the three dots icon, then choose "Search filters." On both platforms, you'll find the "Videos" option here.
Unfortunately, this isn't something you can set and forget: You'll need to choose this option every time you search for something, which is definitely a bummer. That said, at least there's some way to filter Shorts out of a search—especially if those Shorts were impacting your ability to find what you were looking for in the first place.
In addition to this new Shorts filter, YouTube made some adjustments to filters and sorting options. "Sort By" is now known as "Prioritize," and while YouTube doesn't say whether it changed the function, it does say the menu "aims to maximize utility." The company also changed the "View count" sort option to "Popularity." The menu still takes view count into consideration, but also watch time, to sort videos in a search by the algorithms' assumed popularity.
Finally, YouTube is removing the "Upload Date - Last Hour" and "Sort by Rating" options from search. The company says you can still find videos uploaded most recently from the "Upload Date" filters.
The Kindle has become the default e-reader for many bookworms, and I get it. I've used Kindles for well over a decade, and I've enjoyed using my latest Paperwhite quite a bit. It helped me read more than 30 books last year, so I'm not complaining.
The basic Kindle setup is okay, but if you learn your way around the device's gestures, hidden features, and additional services, you can really get a lot out of this unassuming reading device.
Kindle Gestures that you really should know
There’s only one button on the Kindle. Everything else happens using touch. And like every touchscreen device, there are countless gestures you need to know to use the device. The most obvious ones are for the page turns. You can swipe or tap right to go to the next page and swipe or tap left for the previous one. If you have a Paperwhite Signature Edition, you can also double tap on the back or sides of the device to move to the next page.
Tap on the top of the Kindle to bring up the toolbar, where you can go back to the Home screen, change the settings, view the table of contents, and more.
If you tap the bottom left corner, you can cycle between different stats like reading progress, page number, time left in chapter, and more. Oh, and if you want to quickly change the font size, just pinch in or out to zoom in on the text (like you would zoom into images on your phone).
Want to take a screenshot of what’s on your Kindle screen? Tap any two opposite corners of the screen together (top-right and bottom-left or top-left and bottom-right). The screen will flash for a second, and the image will be saved as a PNG in the root directory. Connect your Kindle to your Mac or PC to retrieve the image file.
Easily navigate between chapters
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
The Kindle isn’t the easiest device to navigate, especially when you’re reading a book where you need to jump between different chapters. Here, again, a hidden gesture can help. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up a new Page Flip mode. You’ll see a slider at the bottom, which you can use to move forward and back. There are buttons to jump to the next chapter as well (I use this all the time).
Switch to dark mode and schedule warm light
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If you love reading in bed, you’ll want to enable dark mode. Pull down from the top edge to bring up the quick settings panel. Here, tap the Dark Mode button to quickly invert the colors. You’ll now read white text on a black background. While you’re here, also check out the Warm Light settings (if you have a Kindle Paperwhite, Oasis, or Scribe). Use the slider to increase the warmth of the screen, making it more amber-toned.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
This is especially useful for reading in the evenings or at night, but I like it so much I keep it enabled at all times. You can also set your color temperature to change on a schedule, so that the display slowly warms up in the evening hours. Do this under Settings > Device Options > Display Settings > Schedule.
Lock your Kindle
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Not everyone needs to know what’s on your Kindle, right? If you read a lot in school, or public areas, you can lock down your Kindle using an optional setting. Go to Settings > Device Options > Security and Privacy > Device PIN. You can then set a numeric unlock code up to 12 digits long, but it might be easier to stick to a four or six-digit code.
Send documents and books to Kindle wirelessly
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Reading on your Kindle doesn’t need to be limited to books you buy from the Kindle store. In fact, you can send any PDF or DRM-free ebook to your Kindle, and wirelessly. I have previously outlined multiple methods for doing this, ranging from using an email address, to using the Kindle app. But the one I keep coming back to is Amazon’s own Send to Kindle website. Open it on any browser, sign in with your account, drag and drop a document in a supported format (.DOC, .DOCX, .HTML, .TXT, .PDF and .EPUB), and send it off. Once you sync your Kindle using Wi-Fi, these documents will be available to read on it, just like that.
Show your book covers as screensavers
Credit: Amazon
Every time I set up a new Kindle, I’m surprised that this is a feature that I still need to enable manually. By default, Kindles shows a couple of images as screensavers when turned off. That's because of the e-ink display, which lets them show a static image without using power. These default screensavers, though, are boring. You can make this feature much more interesting (and useful) by showing the cover of the book you were last reading as the screensaver instead. Go to Settings > Device Options and enable the Display Cover feature.
Read long articles on Kindle
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Kindle’s built-in browser is pretty barebones and laggy, but you can still read long articles on it. For a smoother experience, though, you can wirelessly send articles to your Kindle, where they’ll show up in form of books, devoid of ads, formatting, and images.
If you don’t use Chrome, you can also use a dedicated service like Push to Kindle to send articles to your Kindle. You can send up to 10 articles a month for free, and a $2.99/month plan unlocks all limits.
Export your highlights and notes
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If you’re using your Kindle to research or read non-fiction books for school or work, you’ll end up with a lot of highlights. Those highlights, just sitting in your Kindle, aren’t that useful. Amazon has a dedicated website that lists all the highlights from all the books you’ve purchased via the Kindle Store, but it's not your only option.
Personally, I prefer Clippings, which also works for content not bought from the Kindle Store. With it, you can import all the highlights and notes from your Kindle books and personal documents using a browser extension. You can view and organize all your notes from your browser, too, but if you want to export them to a document, you’ll need to pay for a $1.99/month Professional plan.
Borrow books to read from your local library, for free
There are many places where you can rent and borrow books to read legally and for free. The most popular option is using the Libby app from Overdrive, which loans you books via your library card or student ID. In the Libby app, go to Shelf > Loans > Read With... > Kindle. Here, sign in with your Amazon account and verify your Kindle device. Then, tap Get Library Book. Voila, an ebook from your local library will instantly show up on your Kindle device.
De-Amazon your Kindle
Lastly, you can take inspiration from my colleague Pranay, who uses his Kindle without any Amazon services. You can set up a Kindle without an Amazon account and use it as a perfectly good e-reader. You can buy DRM-free books online from various sources and transfer them to your Kindle simply by transferring the ebook files to your Kindle storage or using the Send to Kindle feature I talked about above.
1. If you read and like any of my fics, please leave kudos and/or comments! I love both!
2. I also welcome any art, podfics, etc. on any of my fics. If anything inspires you I love seeing how people interpret my stuff into new works. Please provide me with a link to the work so I can add it to the fic and boost it! My transformative works policy is on my profile page; if you're interested in podficcing, please see my additional notes re podfics.
3. And most importantly, I wish for more justice, kindness, and peace in the world.
We just went to a small, and surprising brief, vigil on the Common in memory of Renee Good 'and other victims of ICE," organized by MIRA, a local immigrants rights and support group. I'm glad I went, and some good things were said. There will I believe be a larger event tomorrow, but when I can show up for short-notice things on weekday afternoons, sometimes that feels like my job.
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Premium noise-canceling wireless earbuds don’t come cheap, and Bowers & Wilkins earbuds (a brand owned by Samsung) are definitely at the top end of that category. But in a market crowded with ANC earbuds that do little more than meet the bare minimum, these justify their price tag by leaning into thoughtful features, sound quality, and build that go beyond the basics. Right now, a brand-new pair of Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 earbuds are going for $279.99 (originally $399) on Woot, their lowest price ever.
Compared to the Pi7, the Pi8 has improved noise cancellation, higher-grade 12mm drivers with Carbon Cone technology, and an upgraded digital-to-analog converter alongside an updated digital signal processor. Its charging case also functions as a Bluetooth transceiver, making it seamlessly functional with in-flight entertainment when you’re on the go. CNET, in a glowing review, dubbed them “easily among the best-sounding earbuds out there,” and they also have a more secure and comfortable fit than their predecessors, making them more ergonomic. The review does note that they don’t have a 3.5mm headphone port but do include a USB-C to 3.5mm cable adaptor.
The Pi8 earbuds have the latest Bluetooth 5.4 with support for aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless for top-quality wireless streaming, as well as an IP54 dust and sweat rating. The case offers around 6.5 hours per charge with ANC on, going up to 13.5 hours with the charging case and a 15-minute quick charge that gives you 2 hours of playback. While 6.5 hours is decent, it’s not best-in-class compared to competitors that reach the eight to 10 hour mark. And although it has three built-in mics for calls, users also note that background noise can occasionally leak through.
Ultimately, if premium sound quality, music fidelity, and rare features like wired retransmission are at the top of your priority list, the Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 earbudsare a comfy and travel-friendly option with competitive ANC. However, if your top priorities are maximum noise cancellation and battery life, you may want to consider the (lower-priced) Bose QuietComfort earbuds instead.
It's such a nice feeling to feel optimistic about the future. I'm in the middle of hitting "submit" on a job application that I am super qualified for and that would be a really great next step in my career (with a great salary). And I have one audition for a paid church singing gig scheduled, with another in the works.
Granted, I have felt super optimistic about positions that I've then not gotten… but, gosh, if this were to work out, my life would be a lot better!
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The ANC headphones from Sony and Bose are great, but they look like gadgets, not music gear. Luckily, Marshall is offering these Monitor III ANC earbuds, which offer a cool retro look. And right now, they're available for the lowest price ever, at $279.99 (down from $379.99), beating the heavyweights from Sony and Bose on price.
These Monitor III headphones feature the iconic Marshall script logo, a retro brass control knob (instead of touch buttons), and a textured black vinyl finish that mimics Marshall guitar amps.
Other than the looks, the most impressive part is the battery life. These will last you for 70 hours of ANC playback (and 100 hours without ANC). That is a staggering number; for comparison, the Sony XM6 gets you 30-40 hours of playback per charge. The headphones are also collapsible, folding into a small ball. They come with a hard-shell travel case and are pretty lightweight, too, at 250 grams. There is no 3.5mm headphone jack here, but the box does include a USB-C to 3.5mm cable for wired listening.
They feature the signature Marshall sound, warm and punchy. They are tuned for listening to rock, heavy metal and guitar-heavy music, and offer a more fun sound profile compared to Sony or Bose, which can sound a bit more flat or balanced.
In its review, PCMag gave the Monitor IIIs a 4.0 star rating, noting that they deliver a "pleasing audio signature, a comfortable fit with intuitive controls, easy portability, and excellent battery life."
I am often impressed by the beauty of the cards I receive for the winter holidays. This year that feeling was even greater. I only got 1 of those family photo cards which I can't do anything with. It doesn't help that the person who sends me those is married to someone I wish she weren't married to so it's always disappointing when I still see him in the photo :) The rest were really beautiful cards, almost all from DW friends, which I can recycle in my collaging.
One of the bases of this is my sister's thank you card. We are original from the US South so the exchange of written Thank You notes are sacrosanct. The words say 'use your wings.'
Also, I am beginning to toy with a formula for my collaging. 5 textures makes a collage. This will probably end up in one of your mailboxes next year. It's a nice non-Christmas winter card.
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2026 has consisted of a few events that have contributed to my ever declining faith in humanity. I’m sure it’s done the same for many of you, so I thought today would be a good time to tell you about some positive interactions I had with strangers this past week, to remind us that not everyone is terrible, and we can still have nice moments in our personal life, even among strangers.
![Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (2025) 47mm LTE Smartwatch, Titanium Casing, Advanced Sleep Coaching, Running Coach, Energy Score, Heart Rate Tracking, GPS, Titanium White [US Version, 2 Yr Warranty]](https://lifehacker.com/imagery/product/01kanvlr9HV9TYTEnQtlGot/hero-image.fill.size_autoxauto.v1767777203.jpg)
![Apple Watch Ultra 2 [GPS + Cellular 49mm] Smartwatch with Rugged Titanium Case & Indigo Alpine Loop Medium. Fitness Tracker, Precision GPS, Action Button, Extra-Long Battery Life, Carbon Neutral](https://lifehacker.com/imagery/product/04fN4FH4utIFsbLRywnFBcc/hero-image.fill.size_autoxauto.v1724056298.jpg)
