Thank you!

Well, in fairness to them, it was supposed to be a bonus show to introduce the UFC rather than a full show, and they threw the whole thing together in a couple of months. To make matters worse, both JDS and Velasquez were injured going into the fight - JDS had his knee scoped like 10 days before the fight - which…

That’s exactly my read - I think it looks like either Maia-Fitch or a more violent version of Maia-MacDonald, with two entirely different fights playing out over the course of three rounds.

All great points here.

As I said in the article, I love the card, and I think it’s a lock that it’s going to be fun as hell. I just wish the UFC heavyweight champion were going to get the wider recognition he deserves.

Impossible for us to say with any certainty, because we don’t have any sources that would tell us how average people thought about these things; “decline” wouldn’t necessarily have been the lens through which they thought about it, either.

It’s not terrible at all, but I think it’s too optimistic about the structural stability of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. He probably places a bit too much emphasis on the Huns as a causal factor, too. With that said, it’s a fantastic narrative and Heather is a really, really sharp historian even…

Thank you! Yeah, Heather has been working toward that line of thinking for about 20 years - you can track the progression in his scholarly work as he slowly but surely emphasizes the Roman side of things more and more.

So, the Tetrarchy as a formal concept didn’t even really last past Diocletian, though the idea of junior emperors had precedents before that and some limited echoes afterward. It was always dangerous to share power, and the idea mostly came into play after Diocletian as a way of ensuring dynastic succession (father or…

*extremely economistic-thinker voice* Perhaps if the players were receiving fair market value for their services in these enormously profitable bowl games, they’d be more inclined to play in them.

His entire presidency summed up in a single image.

As weird as MMA routinely gets, there’s still nothing that seems more out of place than this family of perfectly manicured Stepford impersonators. The Northcutts are amazing.

Merrills and Miles, The Vandals. It supersedes Courtois, Les Vandales et l’Afrique.

Yep! I’m going to do a full episode on the Vandals in a month or so (I already covered them a bit in episode 8 of this show). There really isn’t much about the Vandals, you’re right about that - the first book-length treatment of the Vandals in English came out a few years back, and it replaced a 50-year-old French…

Yes. I did my PhD on the topic and spent a decade working on it in one form or another. I’m a big Hardcore History fan, though - just a different kind of emphasis.

I’m working on the book piece - the proposal is out now, so if you know someone who makes decisions at a major publisher, maybe put in a good word for me.

Really appreciate that, thank you. I think the “mobile army” thing is just the best fit for the evidence out there, though there are still a bunch of historians who would disagree for better and worse reasons.

In an industry that’s lost somewhere between half and three quarters of its personnel in the last 15 years, the NYT’s commitment to keeping dead weight like Spayd, David Brooks, and Ross Douthat on presumably lucrative contracts is pretty amazing.

I despise both-sides-ism with every fiber of my being, but (chosen medium aside) this is literally exactly what the right did after Obama was elected. In a weird way, it’s kind of heartwarming to see that Americans of all political stripes do actually have something in common: paranoid fear-mongering and an idiotic…

That’s such a great book - I love Dan Jones’ work. As far as child rule is concerned, it has very rarely worked out well, and the Henry VI comparison is a really excellent one: a child who grew into a feckless, useless adult, but without the structures and institutions in place around him to rule without a viable king.