1. The leftward skew of academic staff at universities in the English-speaking world (🧵) 2. Political identification of US academics over time, 1989-2014

1. This passage from a recent *Quadrant* piece by South Australian educationalist Alan Lee puts its finger on something about the choice of subjects at school (or university) that I've long struggled to define. 2. Basically, by offering a wider choice of subjects you get fewer students taking the more rigorous subjects. These subjects are then offered at fewer schools (and see the next post for Latin), which then effectively limits choice.

1. I very much agree with @xchrisgonz that reading the great books of the past is a worthwhile endeavour (I happen to find it one of *the most* worthwhile endeavours), though I'd add a couple more arguments to his. heterodoxacademy.org/blog/why-we-sh… 2. I think it's true, as Gonzalez says, that old books can still teach us things about human behaviour and morality, though this isn't limited to imparting additional propositional knowledge. It's also a matter of giving us a more rounded, empathic understanding of these things.

I'm pleased and slightly bewildered to see my piece on Popper's *Open Society and its Enemies* and its enemies in the Journal of NZ Studies pass 10K views on academia dot edu (an order of magnitude more than some other articles I worked much harder on!) Here it is in 12 tweets. 1. In the last year of the Second World War, Karl Popper published a work entitled *The Open Society and its Enemies* in two volumes, the first subtitled *The Spell of Plato*, and the second focusing on Hegel and Marx.

0. My 2015 paper, 'Democratization: A Modern Economic Theory and the Evidence from Ancient Athens' in 12 tweets. The paper takes up the influential account of democratization in the 2003 book below - can it help us understand Athens' transition to democracy with Kleisthenes1? 1. For Boix, elites fear that any democracy will redistribute their assets. Hence they allow democracy to emerge only if either a) society is so equal that elites don't even have that much to lose; or b) elite assets are of a sort that makes them hard to identify and tax.

(taha) Greek and Latin in Niue(an), Part Ua: stele (maka) commemorating a local man called Nukai, who was trained as a missionary in Samoa and returned to the island to preach Christianity. (ua) The reception was so hostile that he was accompanied by some 60 (!) Samoan warriors, who protected him at a fort near the village of Mutalau (where this memorial stands). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukai_Pen…

(taha) Greco-Roman Derivations in the Pacific, New Series!: Greek and Latin in Niue and Niuean. No. 1: the Latin phrase 'pro patria' ('for the fatherland') on a memorial inscription otherwise entirely in Niuean (ua) I suppose this is a reference to the famous (or perhaps now, thanks to Wilfred Owen, notorious) line in Horace's Odes (3.2.13), 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' 'it is sweet and glorious to die for one's fatherland' - though the phrase was obviously used elsewhere

v.1 My article 'Grote's Athens: The Character of Democracy' in 12 tweets.
George Grote (1794-1871) was an English historian, banker and politician. As an MP 1832-1842, he made several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the secret ballot in general elections. v.2 But he is most well-known for his 12-volume history of Greece (1846-1856), which transformed literate perceptions of Athenian democracy from an example of how not to do politics to a resource for thinking about how we might.

1/This is a really interesting piece on the global history of democracy by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. They think participatory government was discovered separately in India, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica, sometimes earlier than in Athens. laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hidi… 2/This is a topic I find really fascinating, though I need to do a lot more reading to be up to speed on the evidence in the various relevant cultures. That's partly why I often end up just focussing on the Greeks (as below)

https://twitter.com/Kleisthenes2/status/1319152915563466752

1. Maybe the most curious institution of the classical Athenian democracy is ostracism, by which the citizenry would kick a politician out of the city for ten years. Here's a very very short introduction. #ostracismculture 2. Ostracism was probably introduced as part of Kleisthenes1's reforms of around 508/7 BC, which also introduced the Council of 500, 10 new tribes, and other democratic innovations. #kleisthenes

1. The Athenian Assembly: A Very Very Short Introduction (thread). The citizens' assembly was probably the most important decision-making body of the Athenian democratic state (though it's worth remembering that women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded) #demokratia 2. Meetings of the Assembly took place on the Pnyx, a flat-topped hill in the centre of Athens. You can go there today (though surprisingly few tourists do), and get in touch with the democratic past, as well as a very nice view of the Acropolis. #athens