Teaching Procopius is difficult now. While it has enormous value it is also a high-stakes material today. But his account is also crucial for our application of trauma-informed pedagogy. As a *literary text*, written by someone dealing with pandemic trauma it provides us with a unique way to address the impact of the COVID pandemic.

To make linear time the only option in a story set in a world which constantly plays with notions of non-linear time feels wrong. And it forces compromises that constrain the story, that require us to believe there is just here and now. As time becomes constrained, space becomes smaller. That's something that medieval authors knew very well.

The Green Knight is not a perfect film. Sometimes it loses its pacing, sometimes the camera work seems a bit lazy. But it truly does not matter.

Your phone is just like a medieval manuscript. What we can learn from the medieval culture of sustainability.

Historical data is not your familiar kitten. It is a saber-toothed tiger that will eat you and your village of data scientists for breakfast if you don't treat it with respect.

The process of giving embodies the role of the king as the regulating factor in the realm. Giving as a king is becoming a king. Kingship is a process not a state. And the main sources to this process, the main emanation of this activity that we have, are the charters. If we give them a little nudge and let them move they can reveal very interesting patterns.

Many reviewers have told us that the Witcher is confusing and if it were so it was a grevious fault. While this critique is, to a certain extent, appropriate, it is mostly exaggerated and this exaggeration has interesting roots. To uncover them we need to go way back, back to where it all starts. To the expectation of the medieval.

Writing scholarship on Twitter forces us to be precise, open, and engaging. It gives us an amazing opportunity to amplify voices that otherwise would have a hard time finding their way into “traditional” venues. It is a great training ground for making your research attractive to the wider public. Moreover, our students are on Twitter and we should be where they are, because their feedback is crucial.

Reinventing bureaucracy is a process as old as the state itself. Seeing it not as something exceptional, but as something that has multiple historical parallels might help in this process. The problem of who is a bureaucrat in the complicated state/business/society interface, where their loyalties and obligations lie was for example very much a feature in the letters of late antique literati. We can use this knowledge today.

This crisis has its roots much deeper and its reach is much broader than it might be evident at the first glance. At its root lies the commodification of Higher Education. We started treating universities as providers of services that are supposed to operate inside the capitalist market economy and it will have grave consequences.

Heraclius' reign teaches us that we need a broader, more global perspective to uderstand Late Antiquity. It is time to look beyond the usual suspects for answers.

Translation in academia should be a duty on par with publications in journals and writing books. Those of us who engage in it should be appreciated, praised and encouraged.

We start, as befits the period, *in medias res*. In 435 Theodoric I, rightly judging that the Romans will be busy fighting with the Franks on the Rhine, rushed to lay siege on Narbonne, a crucial city in the south of Gaul. His plans were foiled as the siege was lifted by Litorius, *magister militum per Gallias* with the help of the Huns. We have a brief poetic depiction of that scene by Sidonius Apollinaris, a 5th century poet, diplomat and bishop.

Not that long ago and not far away, around 2014, a weird trend started to appear in the Polish blogosphere. A bunch of people began to write about the semi-mythical Empire of the Sarmatians that stretched from the Rhine to Novgorod. Sort of Erich von Däniken (and yes, aliens do make an appearance) with a Slavic take. The internet is full of such nonsense, right? Nothing to worry about, right? Well...

Before you think that this is going to be an overly optimistic article full of happy slogans, think again. You remember that Guantanamo thing that was supposed to be closed? It still runs. Or how the US were not supposed to bomb people anymore? Still do. No new wars? Well, you know... Nevertheless a lot of good things happened, too. Thus, when I say Obama moment I mean a moment full of potential and full of hope for the future. If it comes into fruition is to be seen.

The academic system is broken. There is a lot of talk about revolutions of various kinds in academia: open access, digital and so on. All of them are important and will, in time, change the way the field looks. Maybe I am a bit naive but I really believe it. The problem is: it will take years if not decades before it happens. Academia is political. Every research is political. Therefore, maybe, we should look for solutions also in the realm of politics.

During the IMC Book Fair I have spent an astonishing sum of three pounds on a battered copy of Philip Whitting's Byzantium. An Introduction. Why, you may ask? It is fairly outdated, very cursory, short and has been out of print for at least thirty years. If you google it you will find just a couple of references to it. For anybody who has Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State on the shelf it can only be seen as a handy introduction to students (if even that).

For some of us this years IMC has been dominated by the #publicmedievalism. We live in dangerous times indeed. Middle Ages were never innocent and have always been highly contested, but in the last years they have become a battleground characterised by particular ferocity of fighting.

One of the really difficult questions that we face in contemporary historical writing is: can we still write grand narratives like in the days of yore? Is there still space for new Pirennes, Mommsens, Blochs, Huizingas? Or are we now firmly in the gilded age, when we need to focus solely on small history, case studies, fragments and very specialised topics?

The University of Mainz and the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz hosted on the weekend of the 19-21 of May the Workshop of the Graduate Exchange in Late Antique, Byzantine and Medieval History. I had the chance to participate for the first time and as it was a splendid occasion that prompted many interesting discussions and insights.

On IMC 2016 one of the most interesting discussions happened after a session devoted to the fate of refugees in the Late Roman and Early Medieval World. You can check the abstracts out here but what drove the whole session home was a talk afterwards.

There is really, really nothing sadder than a welcome post.