Monstrous Miscellany

  • The Haunted House in Athens

    Today, for Halloween, we are simply presenting the most famous ghost story from classical antiquity: Pliny the Younger’s tale of a haunted house in Athens.

  • The Chimaera on Ancient Coins

    Forget the proud eagle or seated Britannia of modern coins; the Greeks carried monsters in their pockets! Among the most fearsome was the Chimaera, “a lion at the front, a snake at the back, and a she-goat in the middle,” who could “breathe forth the terrible might of blazing fire” (Homer, Iliad 6.181–182). What follows…

  • Classical Monsters in Computer Science

    Has Open AI’s messy GPT-5 rollout gotten you down? Is xAI’s poor handling of Grok’s  ‘MechaHitler’ comment giving you pause about chatbots? We’re pessimistic about the effect such AI models—a new type of monster?—will have on the future of humankind, but in the meantime, here’s some information about how the field of computer science has…

  • Monstrous Relativity

    Although a discussion of Einstein’s theories of relativity might be fun, we’re not exactly qualified to cover them—and might have difficulty tying them in with monsters, apart from “monstrous” (i.e., supermassive) black holes—our “monstrous relativity” instead involves the cultural relativity of what might be considered monstrous.

  • Monstrous Surrealism: “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”

    During a recent trip to NYC’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), I stumbled across a beautiful little piece of surrealist art by Leonora Carrington. The Surrealists often used imagery from Greek and other mythologies to express the fantastical and dreamlike aspects of the unconscious and irrational mind, and Carrington’s work is no exception.