Several times this year I’ve found myself musing about the future of blogs, partly because of the apparently inexorable decline of the viewing stats for this one, which raises questions about if/when I’ll hit a tipping point as the cost in time, money, anxiety and the fact I should probably be writing other, more academically worthy stuff outweighs the pleasure I get from writing this stuff. I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or not that this seems to be a wider issue. Certainly, in compiling this annual list of the things I’ve most enjoyed or appreciated reading this year, it gets harder to decide whether some things are ‘proper’ blog posts or rather conventional articles that just happen to be online, let alone to decide I should operate a stricter policy on what I include here, beyond ‘I liked this!’. Maybe next year.
For 2019, this is the stuff I loved enough to make a note of it for reference in December – with some patchy bits in the year when I wasn’t feeling up to reading anything taxing, so apologies to the authors of stuff I might have loved if I’d come across it. Feel free to post additional recommendations in the comments, or links to your own ‘Best of 2019’ posts…
January: it’s interesting, looking back at this month, to realise how much it set the tone for the rest of the year, with pieces from two authors whose names will recur below. Sententiae Antiquae has published some great essays this year, besides the usual quotes from classical authors, and in January we got both a retrospective on Hanson & Heath’s Who Killed Homer? and a fascinating discussion of the different functions of pedantry in classical scholarship. Maria Farrell, meanwhile, has been phenomenal this year, starting with this Crooked Timber piece on being an EU citizen in Brexit Britain (and of course it’s now even more painful to think about this): At Least You Can Leave.
February: at this stage I hadn’t started worrying about the status of online articles, so two of the recommendations for this month would in future be ruled out for being properly published – Eidolon is now a fixture of the classical studies scene and needs no recommendation to anyone in the field (but Johanna Hanink’s piece on translation and “translation” is still worth reading if you don’t already know it), and Epoiesen has an ISSN number (but Andrew Reinhard’s Assemblage Theory musical experiment is simply essential). One proper blog post: of the many commentaries this year on the idea of classics and ‘Western Civilisation’, Maximus Planudes’ What is Classics? remains one of the best.
March: I can’t remember why there was so much Tolkien going on this month – an antidote to Brexit anxiety, perhaps – but that accounts for two of my picks, The Scholars’ Stage’s On the Tolkienic Hero, and the reliably brilliant Adam Roberts’ Lord of the Sommes on Tolkien, the Great War and literary modernism. Finally, an incredibly powerful article on the psychological effects of tyranny from a Syrian exile: On the Tyrant’s Ghost in my Head.
April felt slightly more light-hearted and random – though, having said that, the first piece on my list is a fascinating discussion of the politics of historical bike tours in New Orleans. Rosa Lyster was hilarious about yelling about historical figures on Twitter; Mathura Umachandran was excellent on the unspeakable ghastliness of Jeff Koons’ appropriation of antiquity; and Vox Clara offered the first post on what’s proving to be (except for the lack of posts since August) a fascinating blog on her experiences as a school Head of Classics, on Classics, fragments and voices.
May rather passed me by, but Velvet Yates was well worth reading in Eidolon on Aristotle, James Watson and ‘scientific racism‘.
June: by this point I had more or less decided to stop listing Eidolon pieces – but then Mathura wrote More Than a Common Tongue on the often-overlooked or misunderstood differences between the UK and US discourses on race and classics. Lots of other great pieces this month: Rachel Hammersley on David Hume and Thinkers as Readers; Arie Amaya-Akkermans’ guest post at Sententiae Antiquae on classics, westernisation and imperialism in Turkey; Deborah Cameron on the policing of masculine language; and Lakshmi Ramgopal’s moving Three Days on the death of her grandmother.
July: okay, Branko Milanovic scarcely needs the publicity, but I found this a fascinating take on the creation of Yugoslavia. Liv Yarrow wrote the best tribute to the late great Fergus Millar; and Will Pooley offered a very funny analysis of how crap magic can help us understand belief in witchcraft.
August: Adam Roberts again – but on a different blog, his book-by-book reading of Middlemarch – focusing on Odyssean echoes in Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon. Deborah Cameron again on the discourse of sexist beer names, including the useful concept of retrosexualism…
August: Maria Farrell is back, with a brilliant analysis of our toxic relationship with our smartphones; Nicholas Carr makes sense of our current cultural condition in terms of the shift from the public intellectual to the public influencer.
October: Jon Hesk was all too prescient in analysing the dangerous power of Johnson’s use of the sophistry of slogans; Bill Caraher’s response to Andrew Reinhard’s Assemblage Theory (see above) did many things, but above all illustrated why the Epoiesen approach of publishing thoughtful responses to main articles is so productive; and Maria Farrell offered a radical vision of why the Internet must be more than Facebook.
November: okay, November is when I really started disappearing into a hole, but I did take in Sententiae Antiquae‘s important critique of the aesthetic justifcation for the study of classics.
December: yes, a month we probably want to get out of as soon as possible and not look back. There have been some decent attempts at making sense of things, even if it is plausible much too early to say, but I imagine you’ll all already know them and/or happily remain disengaged. Rather, two pieces on totally different topics that shouldn’t be buried in the pile of coroners’ reports: John Holbo’s tongue-in-cheek-but-still-productive idea of Vavilovian philosophical mimicry, and Foluke Ifejola Adebisi’s provocative and important discussion of the problem of ‘decolonisation’ in British universities.
Sphinx 
I notice that Mary Beard has finally gone behind a paywall. So in effect she no longer blogs. Robin Lustig has stopped his weekly blog as he fears that he may only be saying the same things to the same people over and over.
I feel on the whole it is probably a good thing to communicate occasionally rather than drive oneself into the ground through overwork.
How about contributing to Classics International now and again?
Whatever you decide. Many thanks for your blog. I hope you manage some happiness this Christmas – even if the message of Christmas isn’t your sort of thing.
I’ve always thought of Classics International as a Facebook group for posting news, rather than as a place where one can blog – am I missing something, or do you mean that I should advertise my posts there? I didn’t know about Mary disappearing behind a paywall – but hers was always anomalous anyway, as I assume the TLS pays her to blog whereas the rest of us are paying for hosting, domain names, keeping it ad-free etc because we have other motives…