New Homes

In Medias Res has just turned five, and it’s time for a new home. We have spent the past years on Medium, a site with the main things a wordsy editor would want: an easy-to-use interface and a nice, readable online format. But we were always aware that we were on someone else’s site. Medium would ask us about putting up paywalls in exchange for recommending pieces, some formatting questions were entirely out of our control, and readers had to register with Medium in order to comment. We think it’s about time we put Paideia’s online magazine on Paideia’s web page.

Doing so allows us to integrate In Medias Res with Paideia’s other activities. Anyone who knows me knows that I have suffered from working remotely: for me intellectual activity is ultimately social, and I have loved making Latin and Greek a way to meet interesting people. Writing about it from home simply isn’t the same. I hope to see more writing which points us to ways we can engage with each other more and build community.

On a personal note, I have gotten a new home as well, moving from New York’s Hudson Valley to Steubenville, Ohio, an interesting but undoubtedly faded rustbelt town. Steubenville’s population (18,000) is less than half what it was in 1940 (37,000); it is poor (median per capita income $24,000); it has lost most of its steel mills and been ravaged by the opioid epidemic. But there is also opportunity here, a sense that the bottom has been hit and the movement upward has begun. New businesses are opening downtown. We’ve moved our own Redux Books here. And there is some interest in Latin here. There is a weekly Catholic Mass in Latin. Thanks to the efforts of the Classics Department at Franciscan University, it looks like we will be able to start a Teaching Literacy Through Latin (Aequora) site here. I already have a little weekly Latin reading group. We’re taking the first steps to build a community of people who can enjoy Latin together.

Online, the most important effect of the change of abode will be the moving of the old articles. In time, we will be migrating content over from Medium to the new site. The process will be pleasantly retrospective for us, and we will be sharing some of our older pieces, with their new web addresses, on social media. We will be replacing the old articles with appropriate links. We hope that some of the old, worthy articles will find some new readers. And for a taste of some newer articles, try Mark Buchan on Orpheus and Eurydice, or my review of the book Horace and Me.  

So here is to change, and remembering that there is a lot of future ahead of us, even if we are not at the beginning of things. Life has dropped us into the middle of things – in medias res.

P.S. If anyone is curious, we’re using as section dividers a design found on the floor of San Clemente in Rome, a spectacular cosmatesque design ascribed to an artist named Magister Paulus. We love seeing its beauty and simplicity on our pages.