#hellenization

#hellenization

Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the "wandering stars" in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.

Alysa Liu became the youngest national champion in American figure skating at 13. She made the 2022 Olympic team at 16. And she hated it. After Beijing, she retired, threw her skates in a closet, enrolled at UCLA, and spent 18 months figuring out who she was when nobody was giving her a score. Then she walked into a rink, landed a triple like she had never left, and called her coaches.

It started with a book launch in 2021. I'd been living in London as a social media journalist when I asked my then-publication's culture editor to send me to one of these exclusive-sounding events, as 1) I'd never been and 2) I just really wanted to be a person who "has a book launch to go to." Thankfully, there was one that exact day-and he put my name on the list for the release of Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome. Huzzah.

A conversation with Alicia Walker on the pseudo-Arabic inscriptions (or pseudo-kufic) that appear on a number of tenth- and eleventh-century churches in Greece, most notably at the monastery of Hosios Loukas. What did the Arabic script signify in Orthodox culture at the time if not tension with Islam? Alicia Walker is Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.