Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • CMS Bonfire

    Salvete et χαιρετε! My name is Kyle and I am one of three Student Consuls of the Classical and Medieval Society. We recently held our first ever CMS Bonfire event, and I’d love to share with you its success! The University has three fire pits that students may use, though most departments unfortunately do not […]

  • Unlearn

    Unlearn

    Essay Writing 101 First, congratulations to our classics students who convocated on Saturday, especially to the MA students. I know you’re all going on to great things, and I hope to see you at the Wine and Cheese on Thursday at 5:30, where we’ll also see the release of the first issue of Tiresias, the […]

  • Music Day

    So last night we had a bonfire thing. I wasn’t there, but I heard it went great. Instead, yesterday I had a lot of meetings about community development and the future of Labyrinth, and things are looking pretty awesome. But, it meant that I didn’t write a Newsreel post today. Now, normally what I do […]

  • Essay Hell

    Essay Hell

    Essay Writing 101 It’s the middle of term, and you’re probably entering what I like to call “Essay Hell”. Papers are starting to come due, and you should have been writing them before, but you had other work. I know how it is. With that in mind, Labyrinth will feature a number of posts about […]

  • A Little Bird Told Me

    A few readers have asked me where I find the news for our Newsreel posts, which to me is an opportunity to write a post about it. i follow a lot of news sites and blogs, which I link to with every article, but I also follow a lot of classicists and medievalists on Twitter, […]

  • Alien Ruins

    Alien Ruins

    We haven’t found any, but that would be pretty cool. It’s a common trope in media though, that alien cultures leave their ruins abandoned. In Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars, and even the Mass Effect series, characters explore ruins on planets where the native culture still lives, and even thrives. But the ruins are abandoned. […]

  • Everything Old is New Again

    Newsreel Our fascination with the ancient world leads us to try to reconstruct it, whether that’s archaeologists dressing a bison with stone tools, or making tv shows like Rome. We want to see what it was like, and get a glimpse of what it might have been like for the people who lived then. We […]

  • Meet the Profs

    Salvete/χαιρετε fellow students! Welcome to a new year of CMS events! Our first event, Meet-The-Prof night, is a tradition within CMS where the students and professors in the Classical Studies and Medieval Studies Departments come out to socialize and get to know one another better. It’s a great way to get to know your fellow […]

  • Exploring the Poles

    Exploring the Poles

    Newsreel It’s a slow news week, but it’s interesting to see what constitutes a slow news week in archaeology. This week sees artifacts unearthing themselves (less than medieval, but still awesome), and the grave of a mysterious warrior. Both of these finds are in Poland, which is rich with a history stretching back thousands of […]

  • Three Kinds of Medievalism

    Three Kinds of Medievalism

    I got a lot of reactions to the Tolkien article in last week’s Newsreel. Most of them wondered what Tolkien has to do with medieval studies. Middle earth isn’t exactly historical, and even the commentary and metaphor in it isn’t a commentary on medieval events, but on ones contemporary to the author. So why do […]

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