I'm reading this right now, and it's new enough - Barbara Levick in 2011 published a biography of the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus, written in the voice of his son, which, for dramatic setting, she dreamed she found in an unpublished manuscript in the Bodeian Library.

And I'm still sorting out what I think about presenting scholarship as might be presented by M. Night Shamalan.

With the 100th anniversary this past week I think we've now reached peak Sykes-Picot think pieces.

These have ranged from the Good (this New York Times piece which actually contextualizes it with other agreements), the Bad (Robin Wright in the New Yorker who does not) and the Ugly ([this Foreign Affairs piece] (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2016-05-17/pipelines-sand) that bizarrely claims that a famous quote from Sykes was about oil pipelines. It was not.)

I've also heard some praise for the new Al-Jazeera documentary about this from a number of commentators I like. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet but it features some very good historians who very much know what they're talking about.

PBS aired their special Teotihuacán’s Lost Kings last night. The full episode is available on their site. In my opinion, it was all right. There was a lot of word choice and some factual errors (i.e. shaft tomb culture had spearthrowers, not just Teotihuacanos) I would have changed that would have made the whole thing a little bit better, but PBS is obviously not an expert on Mesoamerica so I can give them a little slack. One thing I am super confused about is whether or not Gomez has reached the end of the tunnel. I thought they were still working on getting towards those three last chambers, but the episode makes it seem like they already dug them out and found nothing.