The figure on Revolutionary Mothers's cover is Abigail Hinman, who (so goes the legend) grabbed a musket to take aim at friend-turned-national-traitor Benedict Arnold as he and his forces invaded her home in 1781 (“Arnold’s Raid on New London [Connecticut]"). This particular stylization of events seems doubtful, but the overall circumstances were not.

The original painting that adorns the cover of Revolutionary Mothers is “Abigail Dolbeare Hinman,” by Daniel Huntington, ~1853-1856.

The painting of Hinman reminds me of the scene one hour into the Little House on the Prairie movie (1974) where Caroline Ingalls, left alone with her children while Charles traveled to earn them some money, hears movement outside their house.

She grabs a rifle, sits calmly in a chair facing the door, and softly sings a hymn to herself. She patiently waited to get at least one shot off on behalf of her family and home before being overwhelmed by murderous thieves in the night.

Thankfully, it was just Charles coming home late.

Related thoughts on the movie Little House on the Prairie

These notes were originally a thread on X from January 30, 2025.

I was recently reminded of “Little House on the Prairie.” Having rewatched the pilot after a long time:

It is superb television—and beautiful art that affirms good work, the pursuit of goals, and high character.

(Spoken by the character Laura Ingalls at the opening of the 1974 movie):

I still thought
it a fine thing to go

where there had never
been a road before.

We'd go where the land was
more bountiful, he said,

and we sold our house,
our land, and cow.

We packed whatever
would fit in a wagon.

I was glad pa
took his fiddle

for it makes
a joysome sound.

I simply desire television with a strong moral point of view—but that is not a scolding morality play.

A related note from an X post on May 26, 2025:

The “liberal arts” are those arts which set you free, and supply the self-mastery to use that freedom well, and do so in the context of one’s society. They are to the mind and character what physical training is to the body, and they should be as evidently demonstrable when taught properly. And in this class, they will be. Read more about The Algernon Project here, and learn the meaning behind its crest.

Content

• Application overview

• What you will know how to do, and have done, by the end of the class

• Class material list

• General class structure and information

• Class expectations and etiquette

• About your instructor

APPLY NOW

Application overview

Applications are open from December 29 through January 15 (5pm EST). Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, and sooner is definitely better.

I’ll inform all applicants of their status, successful or not, by January 16 or sooner, depending on when they apply. I aim to answer each application within a week of its submission, although historically it can take a few days longer. If you have not heard back from me by then, feel free to shoot me an email: daniel@maximumnewyork.com.

Summary of requirements and sessions

• Time: 6:30-8:30pm, Thursdays, January 22 through March 12. Final exam on March 14. We will use between 100 and 120 minutes of the 2-hour class time block, depending on the class, but allocate the two-hour block in your schedule.

• Location(s): Off Herald Square

• Prerequisites: None

• Completion reqs: you must complete all homework; you must pass the in-class midterm with a 90% or above, and the final exam with 90% or above.

Tuition

The class costs $0–1,250 per seat. After acceptance, you will receive a Stripe checkout form via Jotform to pay tuition. You may adjust the cost downward to the extent required for you to afford the class.

You will also need to purchase books and equipment for class, and this will range somewhere between $100-200. Many employers provide reimbursement for continuing education that could potentially be applied to tuition, equipment, or both.

APPLY NOW

What you will know how to do, and have done, by the end of the class

• You’ll have read 7-8 books over 9 weeks, in addition to many letters, essays, and other book excerpts. More than that, you will know “how to read a book” as a technical, composite skill. You will be a far better reader across retention, understanding, and integration.

• You will have committed several minutes (speaking time) of poetry and prose to memory, and performed it. This includes The New Colossus.

• You will understand what “liberal arts” means in full detail. No field can be sharpened to potency without conceptual clarity. Most defenders and detractors of the field struggle to formulate what they even mean by it.

• You will know more about the American Founding Era, and the U.S. Constitution, than almost any other American.

• You will have gained the physical and mental habits required for all of the above and more. These include: memorization, focus, systematized reading, repetition, and progressive overload.

• You will be more beautiful. Embracing the liberal arts is akin to embracing physical training. Physical training makes your body more beautiful and capable, and pervades every aspect of your life in invigorating ways. The liberal arts do the same for the mind and character.

Class material list

You can find all books listed below on Amazon. They have been selected by specific edition, and students must purchase that edition. Each title below links to an Amazon page with the specific edition you need. If you need another edition for any reason, we can work around that, but stick to the list by default.

For class, each enrolled student must purchase the following books:

• Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes

• Education of a Wandering Man, by Louis L’Amour

• There is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel, by qntm (2025 version)

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke (Hackett Classics version)

• Propaganda, by Edward Bernays

• The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis (HarperOne version)

• The Story of My Life (and related letters), by Helen Keller

• A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy

• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition

Each enrolled student must also purchase the items below, or equivalent:

• A watch that is not “smart.” The line gets fuzzy with things like Garmin running watches, but the principle behind watch selection is: it should tell the time and date, and have timer functionality. It should not receive notifications or otherwise “command” attention.

• A notebook that you like.

• Pens or pencils, as the student prefers.

• A phone sleeve/pouch.

General Class Structure and Information

Meeting Time & Place

Class will meet for up to two hours (6:30-8:30pm) on Thursdays, beginning January 22 and ending March 12.

Non-class important dates:

You will attend and do each of these things together with students in The Foundations of New York.

• March 14: Your final exam will be on March 14, conducted in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. It will be a multi-hour, written blue book-style exam.

• March 18: Your end-of-semester party and graduation celebration will be the evening of March 18, location to be determined.

Class Structure:

Classes will be structured as a series of workshops and short seminars, not one long lecture. There will be breaks about every 30-40 minutes. Eat snacks and do what you need to do then, but not during class—I will strictly enforce this (but can, have, and will, make arrangements for people who need them). Further: if you are sniffly, you must blow your nose.

All class time will be analog (no phone or phone equivalent technology—technology that compels your attention). At the beginning of class, students will place their phones in sleeves and turn them off. With a few exceptions, there will be no use of any technology by students other than paper and a writing utensil.

If you think “I have bad handwriting,” that’s OK. We can apply some 80/20 rules of penmanship to alter that during the class. While penmanship is not a competency of the class, I would be happy to work with students on that skill. You’re already in a class with a lot of writing, so you have built in practice! I write in a neo-Palmer script personally.

Attendance:

You ought not miss more than two of the class sessions. But if something comes up, just let me know as far in advance as possible. Life will always intervene, and we will work around it.

If you are going to be late to class, you will need to text or email me with your approximate ETA. Don’t feel embarrassed or squirrely about being late, just let me know so I can conduct class accordingly.

Class Preparation, Homework, and Exams:

• You must spend 7 hours each week without your phone or other technology that compels your attention. Class time counts toward that total. You may not take phone-free time in a block of less than one hour. The time must be taken when you are generally awake, alert, and thinking. For this and many other reasons, I encourage you to dedicate yourself to one session of office hours per week (as described in the next section). You have to set aside time to do your homework anyway, and if you suspect you’d like some help staying focused, I will keep you on track.

• There will be readings for each class (often a whole book), small class projects, and homework that isn’t attached to any specific class, but must be completed before the exam. Plan to allocate at least 5 hours a week for this work on top of your 2 hours of class time. Perhaps you will need less, but plan on at least 5.

• You will have an in-class midterm during class 4, and it should take no more than ~25 minutes. You must get a 90% or above to pass, and you are required to pass. If you get an 89% or below, you will need to show up early to class 5 for a retake. If you fail that, we will discuss class exit options.

• Your final exam will be given in a 3-hour window on March 14. It will be an extensive, hand-written review of the knowledge you will have acquired in the class. You must get a 90% or above to pass this exam. There will be no retakes. If you fail, you will still be welcome at our end-of-semester party.

• You must complete three “seeing” assignments. You must go to a place in the city you have never been—without your phone or similar technology—and take perspective in a variety of ways. These assignments must be completed by the last class.

• You must write, and publicly publish on the internet, one piece of short writing in this class (subject to professional considerations as necessary). A key liberal art is rhetoric, and cultivating the courage to speak to the world in your own way. As we will see in class, the world turns on individuals who decided to write, even just once.

• Join the class Discord. Class participants will be added to a Discord server, which will be our primary mode of communication for coursework, office hours, and general discussion. There will be a code of conduct you need to accept to join the Discord, similar to the class expectations and etiquette outlined in the next section.

Relentless standards, relentless support, and office hours

• You will be held to a high standard in this class, and when you meet those standards you’ll stand radically apart from most people in the city. But you must do the work.

• I will help you. I will be available to you. Many people get excited about a class, but after the first few weeks work and old habits threaten the enterprise. We will not permit that, you and I, especially because we can see it coming. There is no shame in preparing for a known future difficulty, and then struggling mightily upon encounter. The class is designed to assist you in your learning, and I do not want anyone to fail (most won’t). As we will discuss in detail during our orientation party and class 1, you will have ample opportunities to work with me as you go through this class. There will be regular weekend afternoon and weekday morning office hours. During class 1, we will discuss timing. But my very strong suggestion will be to treat at least one session of office hours as “mandatory,” and for you to come and do your reading homework there.

• I challenge you to embrace this opportunity with relish. Work hard for a few weeks, and you will simply not recognize yourself at the end of this class in the most delightful way.

• The plain fact of the matter is I want you to be the best. I want you to be free and beautiful, and a boon to yourself and the civic life of New York City. I want you to regard yourself more highly, as a changed person, upon completion of your exam.

Class Expectations & Etiquette

Classes are open to anyone who worries about the decline of their own mind, whether induced by culture or technology. But not merely that. It is for people who, acknowledging a negative to ameliorate, desire a positive to cultivate. What is that magic we can all feel when we think about “the classics,” or encounter someone who speaks well? What is it about people who are famous for being good readers? What is it about well delivered poetry that still, to this day, can make a prospect swoon? What is it about those rare professors who inspire the soul, and stir it with numbers as well as words? If you want to gain explicit answers to these questions, and become the answer yourself, this class is for you.

The classroom environment I encourage is one of exploration, curiosity, playfulness, and charity/tolerance. You may not repeat what someone says in class outside of class absent their documented permission.

We will be reading some books from the past, which is a foreign country with different ways of speaking and doing than we have. I, and you, will inhabit their mindsets. This does not mean agreeing or disagreeing, although we will do that. But, as liberal artists, we aim first to understand. Frankly: one must crave intellectual risk and adventure to be successful. You need not be afraid of deleterious moralizing from your classmates.

The class has three attitudinal postures that will be encouraged, the opposites of which will be discouraged:

• Stick-to-it-iveness

• Mental toughness

• Positive attitude

This class has four formal rules of etiquette that you must follow:

1. Is over ought. Seek first to understand what is the case, prior to what the case ought to be.

2. No bullshitting, aka be concrete. We’re here to learn together, but we’re doing it in a rigorous fashion. You must always strive to deeply understand your own thought, and the thought of others.

3. Extend grace to everyone. We’re here to learn together. No one knows everything. We will be better, together.

4. Find the good time. Taking things seriously does not mean being mad about them. The wider world can pressure people to get mad to prove that they take ideas seriously. I do not equate anger with either sophistication or dedication, so I relieve you of that burden. Make jokes, be serious, push back, learn a lot. But give yourself (and others) a break while you’re in class.

About Your Instructor

Hello, my name is Daniel Golliher (goll- as in the gall, the nerve, and the audacity; iher- as in how they say “your” where I come from: Gol-yer). I’ve lived in New York City for seven years. Besides my writing on this site, you can learn more about me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Maximum New York. I’ve written a few books, play the piano and sax, enjoy all manner of physical fitness, and can’t wait to meet you.

When it comes to cultivating the liberal arts, my default response is to simply exert maximum effort. I do no less in my own studies of government.

I graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with a degree in Government1, and since then I’ve worked in the legal industry, a coffee shop, higher ed, the legal industry again, and more. I’ve dedicated myself to Maximum New York since March 2022, when I taught its first class.

And when someone shows you an optical illusion, you’re primed to “find the trick.” Maybe you’ll succeed, maybe you won’t, but you’ll know there’s “something to see and perceive here.”

What many might not consider is that all of life, while not an illusion, is also always presenting us with a visual field that we can perceive better with more attention and skill. There’s no trick, but there is more to see.

Another way of thinking about this is when you haven’t seen something that was literally right in front of you. Everyone has done this at some point, and I did it literally yesterday. I was at a coffee shop in Brooklyn where I had never ordered a tea before, only coffee. Their overhead menu only had a broad “loose-leaf tea” item, but not all the specific teas they had available. I looked around the counter for some indication of what they had, but couldn’t find any, so I asked the barista, “What kinds of teas do you have?” With a pleasant smile, they pointed right in front of me, where I had been looking, to a lineup of glass jars with eight different options. My brain was primed to search for boxes, for signs, for letters, but not the particular kind of glass jar that was sitting right in front of me, each with neat labels indicating the kind of tea that was inside.

We will probably always ignore things that are right in front of us for lack of proper priming. Ideally you don’t do it too much, but it’s a human quality.

However, one can have one’s attention and focus trained to more deeply perceive and describe the visual field. Instead of explaining more about how to do this, I’m going to end this piece with two extended quotes that explain this phenomenon in the fields of fiction writing and drawing, although I’ve seen the same kind of explanation given in many fields. The more one sees practitioners in wildly different fields explain the same sort of “seeing” skill, the more fully one appreciates how fundamental a skill it is.

I’ll also note that training the skill to “see” properly belongs in a liberal arts academy. In a literal sense, one is more reality oriented when trained in this skill, and this improves communication, ability to conduct science, whatever you can think. The beautiful thing is that it’s often best trained through the arts.

From “Writing Short Stories” in Mystery and Manners (1969), a compilation of essays by Flannery O’Connor (pp. 92–93):

Fiction writers who are not concerned with these concrete details are guilty of what Henry James called “weak specification.” The eye will glide over their words while the attention goes to sleep. Ford Madox Ford taught that you couldn’t have a man appear long enough to sell a newspaper in a story unless you put him there with enough detail to make the reader see him.

I have a friend who is taking acting classes in New York from a Russian lady who is supposed to be very good at teaching actors. My friend wrote me that the first month they didn’t speak a line, they only learned to see. Now learning to see is the basis for learning all the arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things.

However, to say that fiction proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple, mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you. Art is selective. What is there is essential and creates movement.

From Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards (1999 edition) (pp. 3–5):

(Note: if you think you “can’t draw,” I can’t recommend this book enough. You can.)

Drawing as a learnable, teachable skill

You will soon discover that drawing is a skill that can be learned by every normal person with average eyesight and average eye–hand coordination—with sufficient ability, for example, to thread a needle or catch a baseball. Contrary to popular opinion, manual skill is not a primary factor in drawing. If your handwriting is readable, or if you can print legibly, you have ample dexterity to draw well.

We need say no more here about hands, but about eyes we cannot say enough. Learning to draw is more than learning the skill itself; by studying this book you will learn how to see. That is, you will learn how to process visual information in the special way used by artists. That way is different from the way you usually process visual information and seems to require that you use your brain in a different way than you ordinarily use it.

You will be learning, therefore, something about how your brain handles visual information. Recent research has begun to throw new scientific light on that marvel of capability and complexity, the human brain. And one of the things we are learning is how the special properties of our brains enable us to draw pictures of our perceptions.

Drawing and seeing

The magical mystery of drawing ability seems to be, in part at least, an ability to make a shift in brain state to a different mode of seeing/perceiving. When you see in the special way in which experienced artists see, then you can draw. This is not to say that the drawings of great artists such as Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt are not still wondrous because we may know something about the cerebral process that went into their creation. Indeed, scientific research makes master drawings seem even more remarkable because they seem to cause a viewer to shift to the artist’s mode of perceiving. But the basic skill of drawing is also accessible to everyone who can learn to make the shift to the artist’s mode and see in the artist’s way.

The artist’s way of seeing: A twofold process

Drawing is not really very difficult. Seeing is the problem, or to be more specific, shifting to a particular way of seeing. You may not believe me at this moment. You may feel that you are seeing things just fine and that it’s the drawing that is hard. But the opposite is true, and the exercises in this book are designed to help you make the mental shift and gain a twofold advantage. First, to open access by conscious volition to the visual, perceptual mode of thinking in order to experience a focus in your awareness, and second, to see things in a different way. Both will enable you to draw well.

Many artists have spoken of seeing things differently while drawing and have often mentioned that drawing puts them into a somewhat altered state of awareness. In that different subjective state, artists speak of feeling transported, “at one with the work,” able to grasp relationships that they ordinarily cannot grasp. Awareness of the passage of time fades away and words recede from consciousness. Artists say that they feel alert and aware yet relaxed and free of anxiety, experiencing a pleasurable, almost mystical activation of the mind.

[…]

The key to learning to draw, therefore, is to set up conditions that cause you to make a mental shift to a different mode of information processing—the slightly altered state of consciousness—that enables you to see well. In this drawing mode, you will be able to draw your perceptions even though you may never have studied drawing. Once the drawing mode is familiar to you, you will be able to consciously control the mental shift.

“The algorithm [1]” is very useful to observe, but dangerous and net-negative to merely consume.

There is a consume/observe dichotomy in algorithmic content just like the use/mention dichotomy in language.

Observing the content keeps it in the anteroom of your mind and soul, consuming it brings it right on in (which is dangerous and not advised).

This content is best thought of like a terrible anthropophagus carnivore behind a glass enclosure. Look upon it, but do not let it out without sedation and restraint.

Here’s how my observational relationship with algorithmic content works when I take the time to think it through:

“I am being served this for some slate of programmatic reasons, which are at best partially opaque to me. Bad and negligent actors likely have their preferences reflected in the content that I receive. Understanding that, I wonder: (1) what I am *not* seeing as a result, (2) how does this content move me? How am I feeling as a result of seeing it? (3) while the algorithmic feed is indeed part of reality, and shapes it, it is not the whole of it. What is the daylight between algorithm and the much invoked grass?”

Further, as a stalwart soldier of “concreteness,” I have a blanket rule: any media snippet that I see, especially video, I assume to be spliced to reflect the opposite of what a post containing it purports. The content is misleading until proven reliable.

[1] “Algorithm” is one of those words that many people use, but has taken on an unearthly connotation, as something done beyond human comprehension. My simple definition is just “a step-by-step procedure for carrying out an action or solving a problem.” (While I code, I am not a sophisticated coder. The advanced characteristics of programmatic algorithms, or AI methods of content production, are beyond me in a technical sense.)

[1 continued] The engines that serve content on our media feeds are just code written somewhere, and that code can (theoretically) be looked up and understood. In this way, “the algorithm” is not completely distinct from mere analog propaganda (neutral) engines of the market and politics. The idea that one needs cognitive security measures in place when interacting with media is not new. What is certainly novel is the form-factor of a phone and its potential omnipresence in the hand of every human. That makes the task far more urgent.

I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action — in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.

Theodore Roosevelt

Integrity is the virtue1 of translating one’s professed values2 into action in the world.

Put more idiomatically, this is walking the walk or walking the talk.

The idea behind this word is consistent wholeness. Being one thing. Not cutting yourself into multiple people who operate in a contradictory, undermining fashion.

You can see this in integrity’s etymology. It comes from the Latin “integer,” which means “intact, whole, uninjured.” Compare this to modern English words that share it as a root:

• Integrate: to incorporate multiple things into a whole.

• Integral: essential to make something complete or whole.

• Integer: a non-fraction number, a whole number.

The common antonym of integrity is hypocrisy—Although it might more properly “disintegrity” or “disintegral.” We already use the word “disintegrate” when something comes apart.—There are two distinct versions of hypocrisy:

• Unintentional inconsistency: an unrealized lack of integrity that would be resolved if it were brought to an individual’s attention, or if they realized it. The practice of bringing some behavior or way of thinking into consistency with one’s values is called “integration.” For example, overcoming the coping mechanism of splitting allows an individual to integrate a whole view of life and act according to it. Or if someone doesn’t want to start a fitness routine because it will take a while to get the results they want, you can say to them “Remember when you learned how to play the guitar? Remember how the first few weeks felt rocky, but then it got easier the more you learned, and how it kept getting better the further you went? Realize that the same learning/results curve is present in most things, including fitness. You can have confidence that your emotions will follow the same curve too. Do not let upfront discouragement overcome your desire to achieve a value—you already know this in other areas of your life.” Resolving unrealized inconsistencies is a regular part of human life.

• Intentional inconsistency: a known lack of integrity that an individual does not resolve. Lack of resolution can result from many things. For example: fear or shame (facing up to an action or pattern of behavior and changing it), or a vice (attempted profit from willing deception)—this is willful disintegration.

Vertical and horizontal integrity

In my post “What are the Liberal Arts?”, I said that integrity was one of the two principal operational virtues of the liberal arts:

The second operational virtue of the liberal arts is integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality. How is that different from courage? Well: you can be courageous in some areas of your life, but not others. Integrity is the uniform practice of it in all areas of your life. It demands that all virtues be practiced in all instances. It understands why a deficit of courage in one area of your life can interrupt and weaken its practice in another.

Integrity as a method of living and achieving values requires an individual to stay loyal—in thought and action—to their best understanding of reality, no matter what they’re doing. How you are in one area of your mind and habits inevitably bleeds into other areas. Teaching and practicing the liberal arts requires this knowledge, and the deliberate cultivation of integrity. Why? Because one cannot read well, or think well, without integrity. One cannot be “free” as a result, since one’s thought will be measured against something other than “one’s best understanding of reality.” For example, consider Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is one of the most common ways that a lack of integrity manifests. Here’s how the author Michael Crichton described it in a 2002 speech:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

What’s actually happening here is the person reading the newspaper does not have patterns of thought, or habits of thinking, that prompt them to evaluate information generally3—they only evaluate it when it’s in their area of expertise, or related to “their team.”4 Because they have not learned or practiced these patterns of thought and habits of thinking—the methods of integrity—they do not possess intellectual integrity, which, of course, bleeds into larger disintegration in thought, emotion, and action.

This little illustration from Crichton also shows that integrity can be considered in two ways:

• Vertical integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality within a particular domain, like physics.

• Horizontal integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality across all domains, as a character trait.

“Lack of integrity,” in the technical sense of a lack of good habits and methods of thinking, is how you get the “dumb smart people” phenomenon where experts in one domain boldly venture completely backwards ideas in other domains. They have vertical integrity, but it is undermined by a lack of horizontal integrity.

Of course, without horizontal integrity, vertical integrity can break down more easily. Even physicists (!) will begin to ruin their own science if they do not possess integrity, enabled by courage, in other areas of their lives.5 The replication crisis is a prime example. My favorite discussion of scientific integrity comes from Richard Feynman’s 1974 Caltech commencement address:

I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics.

Three concluding notes on integrity

We have some cultural touchstones of disintegration, and we know how painful it can be. A common one is being completely different, incompatible versions of yourself among different groups of people. This happens to gay individuals before they’ve come out—where “coming out” is part of the process of integration, coupled with honesty, courage, etc—but it also happens to us all. Maybe you have a group of friends you’ve grown apart from, but you can’t bring yourself to be honest with them, so you put up a front for fear of rejection. This is a horrible way to live that only invites further emotional and characteristic degradation, especially into resentment. This is disintegration.

Integrity is a habit. It is not something you simply “have” or “don’t.” It is the sum total of your actions and ways of thinking. In matters large and small,6 vertically and horizontally. Like physical strength, it is built over time, not all at once.

While “lack of integrity” is often used as a phrase of scolding or condemnation, I often mean it in a purely descriptive sense: a wholeness is not present, which results in a lack of structural integrity of a person, their emotions, or their habits. Of course there is moral evaluation to do there, but integrity can be thought of diagnostically just like physical strength and weakness. If you have it, “x” happens. If you don’t, “y” happens. If you want “x,” perform integration.

Note: opening pull quote is from page 187 of TR’s autobiography, from the chapter on his time with the New York police: Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Chapter VI: “The New York Police,” (1913).

Books are not fungible. Different kinds of books are necessary to maintain a regular, skilled reading habit.

Using scarce time to only read "important books" often backfires into no reading at all, because the habit and skill of reading is built by reading "less important," "fun," and even "trashy" books.

The "important books" are often not that easy to read. They are not short, have strange syntax to the contemporary ear (especially if they're old), and likely introduce many new words and ideas.

Imagine if you said "I'm very busy, so I will only lift the heaviest possible weights in the gym when I get a chance to go, and I will not use my available time for any other exercise."

In the first place, you are throwing out the straightforward basis of any important fitness routine: walking a decent amount. In the second place, you're setting yourself up for an injury that will keep you out of the gym totally. Successful strength training involves form, progressive overload (not instant, overwhelming overload), readjustments, and rest.

But many aspiring readers do the book equivalent of "walk into the gym for the first time as an adult, try to deadlift 500 pounds, pull and hurt everything, be unable to work out well" by going from no reading habit to The Power Broker or something.

A reading habit, or a life filled with regular reading, has more than "important books." There are "fun" books, "interesting" books, even "trashy" books. Some of these are very easy to read, and there is little friction to picking them up and finishing them. You might think they don't do anything for you, but, at minimum, they keep up the actual physical habit of handling books and running your eyes over them successfully. They train your body to focus on the book as an object by holding your focus with their fun. People underweight that reading is a significantly physical practice, not just mental.

Also: the "important books" are not actually all books that are important. Books of all kinds are important, and can transform the lives of those who read them. Most would-be readers that try to optimize scarce time for "important books" don't realize they've unconsciously written off almost everything that's been written, which also means they've written off the book equivalents of walking, learning correct form, recovery/rest, and progressive overload. They have set themselves up to, yet again, pick up a brick of a book, get two chapters in, and then that's it.

If you like solving problems and thinking in systems, you *could* read something like The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming. Or you could shift down and read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Or you could shift further down and read a techno-thriller by Michael Crichton, like Jurassic Park, Airframe, or The Andromeda Strain. These techno-thrillers present compelling narrative, great ideas to ponder, and are easy to read. Airframe, for example, centers on a few intense days of aircraft manufacturer employees (primarily one quality assurance vice president) trying to figure out why an airplane had such a strange physical failure. Most of the book is about the problem solving, the technical detail and history of aircraft, and other things to delight a scientific, systems-oriented mind. But it's in a compelling narrative package!

Some postscriptum

[By "downshift" above I mean moving toward books that are less dense, more narrative, and more plot-driven.]

[Indeed, it was The Andromeda Strain that gave me the technical idea to compare government policymaking to disease treatment. Many books offer many things! Reading widely beats reading sparingly almost every time.]

[And if techno-thrillers and hard science fiction aren’t your fancy, then get a “hard fantasy” book with a stringent, rules-based magic system. Or you could just read Twilight and have fun with that—but get with the reading program!]

[Also, a relevant tweet below]

Thank you to Austin, conversation with whom prompted me to write this.

• Set you free (liberate you).

• Shape your character to use that freedom well.

• Do both of the things above in your particular society.

The rest of this post is just unraveling what these things mean in more detail.

The definition of the liberal arts

1) The liberal arts are those arts which set you free

“Being free” means “having the independent ability to understand and respond to reality.” You do not depend on someone else to tell you what is true about reality and what is not. You can figure it out for yourself, you can validate what you hear from others, you can bring others along to your views, and you can self-improve all of the foregoing abilities. Beyond even these bounds, you can learn to see the shape of your own ignorance.

This requires having a fundamental grip on language and numbers, from which all other human understanding blooms, and through which it is expressed.

2) The liberal arts shape your character to use your freedom

What good is knowing the truth if you do not have the courage to express it? What good is knowing how to read if you cannot get yourself to do it? What good is having access to all of human knowledge and craft if you do not explore it? What good is understanding how to build things without the spirit that distinguishes between negative-sum extraction and positive-sum production? What good is understanding what a healthy, strong body is, without the will to achieve it? What good is a quick mind and dazzling wit if you use it to belittle beauty and spit prejudice?

Humanity has more technical access to abundance and good living than individual capacity to reach out and use it. But this is not an immutable state of affairs.

What the liberal arts recognize is that it doesn’t matter if you have freedom if you cannot use it—that on the other side of freedom from is freedom to. That means actively using freedom for good things, and actively not using it for bad things.

Some of the hallmark skills of the liberal arts are cultivating good judgment and embracing discomfort.

The primary operational virtue of the liberal arts is courage: the practice of being true to reality. If you cannot be courageous, you will be run over by your tribe, by opposing tribes, by self-doubt, by anything and everything. Any of your potential good works or expressions will be contingent on the heckler’s veto or tribal imprimatur—by “enemies” and by friends who don’t want you to leave the bucket.

The second operational virtue of the liberal arts is integrity: loyalty to one’s understanding of reality. How is that different from courage? Well: you can be courageous in some areas of your life, but not others. Integrity is the uniform practice of it in all areas of your life. It demands that all virtues be practiced in all instances. It understands why a deficit of courage in one area of your life can interrupt and weaken its practice in another.

And so here we see the essence of the second characteristic of the liberal arts: to be truly free requires both an ordered mind and the physical and emotional habits of expressing that mind’s understanding of reality.

3) The liberal arts set you free, shape your character to use that freedom, and do both in your particular society

We all live in particular societies, which are made up of overlapping and interlocking sub-societies. All of these have histories, path dependencies, neuroses, and virtues.

And so living well requires being able to operate well in these societies. One must understand why society is the way it is, how it has been in the past, and how to build a model of where it might go in the future.

The first prong of the liberal arts, “setting you free,” focuses on methods of the mind.

The second prong of the liberal arts, “using that freedom well,” focuses on cultivating individual character.

And this third prong focuses on doing both of those things in one’s social context, with all its opportunities and constraints. Among other things, this third prong will dictate which language(s) you are trained in.

The implementation of the liberal arts

The liberal arts are implemented across:

• Skills

• Methods

• Content

Broadly speaking, the master goal is “prudent thinking, wise action, and a beautiful soul.” But how do you get that? You train skills, the ability to do something, and methods (sub-skills), the ways in which to do those things. And you train these things on some kind of content. For example—

Skills (non-comprehensive): reading and writing.

Methods of reading: for children, learning to sound words out with phonics, learning to spell, repeating important vocabulary. For adults who are nominally literate: arranging your environment and controlling your focus. Reading is a composite skill, it is not automatically easy, and there are always more frontiers to conquer. A great book on reading methods is, appropriately, How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (take a look at the table of contents).

Methods of writing include both technical capabilities in knowing what to write and how to arrange the words, and the virtues (namely courage) to actually do it.

Content: well, what does one read and write? While there is wide room for discretion, there are better and worse choices, and these follow from the definition of the liberal arts. For example: if you are at an American liberal arts school, and you graduate without knowing the structure and content of the American constitution, or basic American history, there is a very good chance your education has fatal deficits. The liberal arts are supposed to prepare you for life in your society. And so much of American life revolves around our constitution and history in one way or another. People certainly talk about it and make claims about it.

The form of the liberal arts

This is the form of liberal arts through courses. Further: how these courses are given form through integration into a whole curriculum.

Both individual courses and whole curricula are guided by scope (what you teach) and sequence (when you teach it). These are designed to aid in knowledge integration—the weaving of new information into a larger, whole understanding over time. The spiral theory of knowledge is another way of thinking about integration.

The most well-known form of the liberal arts, and one surefire way to answer the question “What are the liberal arts?” are the trivium and quadrivium:

• Trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric

• Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy

Here is Sister Miriam Joseph in her seminal The Trivium explaining these seven liberal arts in summary detail:

The liberal arts denote the seven branches of knowledge that initiate the young into a life of learning. The concept is classical, but the term liberal arts and the division of the arts into the trivium and the quadrivium date from the Middle Ages.

The trivium includes those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to mind, and the quadrivium, those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to matter. Logic, grammar, and rhetoric constitute the trivium; and arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy constitute the quadrivium. Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance. Arithmetic, the theory of number, and music, an application of the theory of number (the measurement of discrete quantities in motion), are the arts of discrete quantity or number. Geometry, the theory of space, and astronomy, an application of the theory of space, are the arts of continuous quantity or extension.

The Trivium: The three arts of language pertaining to the mind

• Logic — art of thinking

• Grammar — art of inventing and combining symbols

• Rhetoric — art of communication

The Quadrivium: The four arts of quantity pertaining to matter

Discrete quantity or number

• Arithmetic — theory of number

• Music — application of the theory of number

Continuous quantity

• Geometry — theory of space

• Astronomy — application of the theory of space1

In other places, you will often varying formulations. For example:

The Trivium: The Language Arts

• Logic — the art of non-contradictory identification

• Grammar — the art of correct language

• Rhetoric — the art of persuasion

The Quadrivium: The Mathematical Arts

• Arithmetic — the methods of grouping discrete quantities

• Music — numbers in time

• Geometry — numbers in space

• Astronomy — numbers in time and space

One might take this particular form of the liberal arts or leave it, but it’s a good conceptual anchor point. These original seven liberal arts, which emerged in the Medieval period, can still be seen in the outline of academies long after. For example, “physics” clearly emerged from astronomy, the so-called application of numbers to time and space.

This formulation of seven liberal arts also shows you what a good answer to the question “what are the liberal arts?” looks like. They are an integrated whole, and emerge from language and number. There is a principled theory behind them, and many curricular implementations one can examine.

It might shock people to know that, while there are definitive answers to the question “What are the liberal arts?” when referring to their form, there isn’t an undisputed answer to that question today. For someone working to apprehend these subjects for the first time, I have this advice: first understand the principles and implementation needs (the earlier parts of this essay) that foreground any actual forms one observes. The forms flow according to context, both societal and temporal.

The liberal arts as opposed to what other kinds of arts?

The liberal arts versus the utilitarian arts.

The liberal arts act upon an individual to set them free, cultivate their character, and pursue that which they like according to their mind and character. Utilitarian arts, by contrast, train a person to do a specific kind of task for someone else, whether that is a corporation, a state, or some other kind of master. Drawing blood, performing computations, or reviewing contracts would be utilitarian arts.

The modern world might also call this distinction “liberal versus vocational arts.”

This counterposition isn’t to say that one is good and the other is bad. But they require different things of a person, do different things to a person, and are aimed at different things.

The preparatory arts versus the architectonic arts

The liberal arts, especially in their formulation of trivium and quadrivium, are sometimes positioned as the basic, foundational, or preparatory arts. One must acquire mastery in them before going on to effectively study more advanced fields like history, law, medicine, or philosophy, which require an integrated deployment of the basic liberal arts.

You can see the outline of this in the modern American education system. Students generally must get a four-year degree (often from a “liberal arts college”) before getting a law or medical degree.

So, while history might be called a liberal art in the modern context, it relies on the other liberal arts to do well.

The unity of knowledge in the world

However: it is clearly true that many non-liberal arts require liberal arts skills to perform. For example, if you want to review contracts, you must know how to read and interpret what you’re reading (and the law is quite sensitive to grammar). If you want to draw blood, you must read the vials to verify your patient.

And perhaps, in the performance of a utilitarian art, you think of a better way to do it—which leads you to energetically pursue a reorganization of your field/business. That is a manifestation of the faculties and characteristics the liberal arts clearly aim at.

Another way to think of it: arithmetic is a liberal art. Computation is not. Scientific or philosophic thinking is a liberal art. Lab work is not. Exhorting people to join your startup is a liberal art. Processing the employee onboarding and cap table is not.

And while the liberal arts can be taught in school, some people naturally sharpen them as they live their lives, and even become great at them. The liberal arts are not just integrated into other arts or into life alongside other arts, but are naturally occurring arts in the world of human society. But most people, most of the time, could benefit from deliberate study. Here’s Sister Miriam Joseph again in The Trivium:

Each of the liberal arts is both a science and an art in the sense that in the province of each there is something to know (science) and something to do (art). An art may be used successfully before one has a formal knowledge of its precepts. For example, a child of three may use correct grammar even though the child knows nothing of formal grammar. Similarly, logic and rhetoric may be effectively used by those who do not know the precepts of these arts. It is, however, desirable and satisfying to acquire a clear knowledge of the precepts and to know why certain forms of expression or thought are right and wrong.”2

It’s worth emphasizing: one ought not get too hung up on sharp separations between liberal and other arts. They are all related in life, and motivation matters. Here’s Aristotle in his Politics:

(3) Now that those of the useful things that are necessary should be taught is not unclear, and also that not all should be taught: liberal tasks being distinguished from illiberal ones, it is evident that they should share in those of the useful things that will not make the one sharing in them vulgar. (4) One should consider a vulgar task, art, or sort of learning to be any that renders the body, the soul, or the mind of free persons useless with a view to the practices and actions of virtue. (5) Hence we call vulgar both the sorts of arts that bring the body into a worse state and wage-earning sorts of work, for they make the mind a thing abject and lacking in leisure. But it is also the case that, while it is not unfree to share in some of the liberal sciences up to a certain point, to persevere overly much in them with a view to proficiency is liable to involve the sorts of injury just mentioned. (6) It makes a difference, too, for the sake of what one does or learns something. What is for one’s own sake or for the sake of friends or on account of virtue is not unfree, while the person who does the same thing on account of others would often be held to do something characteristic of the laborer or the slave.3

The Confusing Cloud of Concepts (3C)

Perhaps you have a decent idea about what the liberal arts are at this point, or at least a directional inclination. But what, then, are these things: the Western canon, the classics, the humanities, and the Great Books?

Here’s what they are:

• The Western canon is the collection of great, enduring, and influential works from Western civilization, often defined as something like the Greco-Roman Mediterranean civilization as it evolved through Europe and its offshoots in North America and elsewhere. There is no 100% definitive list, but there are definitely some “usual suspects” in every version of the canon, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine.

• The classics have two definitions. (1) Those works, languages, and histories which come from the “classical world” of Ancient Greece and Rome, and (2) those which which are “of the first class,” or of enduring value. A classic book could be ancient, or it could be Shakespeare, or it could be Gone with the Wind.

• Great Books are classic (second sense) books that are of enduring value. There are many different implementations of Great Books curricula, but you might have heard of St. John’s Great Books program, which is the most famous one.

• The humanities are things you study that make you more fully human, or are the things that only humans do (as opposed to animals or nature): like history, philosophy, and literature. The humanities are distinguished from the natural sciences (biology, chemistry) and technology, and do not include mathematics in the modern day. You can see how “humanities” and “liberal arts” get confused. I’d put it like this: the seven liberal arts have basic and more advanced forms. The language arts (the trivium) in their advanced forms often bloom into the things we call the humanities today. The mathematical arts (the quadrivium) in their more advanced forms often bloom into the things we call mathematics and science today. But realistically, most people who use the word “humanities” do not have a coherent concept in their head. You, reader, do not have to be like them.

The important things to remember here is that all of these words have fuzzy uses, and there are often multiple common meanings in circulation. What’s worse, many people only use these words in an associative fashion (on vibes) rather than a definitive fashion (with a concrete definition). But one can navigate this, do not despair.

What do modern “liberal arts” colleges teach?

Although there are exceptions, most places that call themselves “liberal arts colleges” do not teach the liberal arts well, and don’t even have a coherent concept of what they mean by “the liberal arts.” They offer hodgepodge course catalogs to students with insufficient guidance about what to take and why, and most students who exit those colleges could not: (1) tell you with confidence what “the liberal arts” are, or (2) pass an exam about the basics of their field with a 90% or above.

In the case of Harvard, especially its government degree, students certainly do not get a rigorous liberal arts education. It is not achievable by default; only exceptional students who buck the default curriculum according to some higher vision that presupposes the knowledge inherent in the degree they’re seeking can deviate from that. Generally, you can see my linked essay on Harvard’s government degree for a fuller, technical overview of why modern liberal arts degrees are incoherent at best, among other things.

Run for your life from the college president, administrator, or alumni who tells you their liberal arts degree “taught them how to think.” Strictly speaking, there is no problem with that—but those people often don’t even know what they mean by that phrase.4 They are parroting it from brochures, websites, and from each other. They do not know what was supposed to have happened to them in their liberal arts program.

You can run the test yourself if you get the chance. Ask “What are the liberal arts?” and don’t stop until you get a good, specific answer. Follow up with “How are those different from the humanities?” You get the picture.

Further: a vital component of the liberal arts is shaping character. This means a school needs to have explicit virtues (habits of character) that it prizes, and bring students into conformity with them. This could also be called “moral instruction,” and most colleges simply do not do this today, or do not do it well.

Finally: a liberal arts college should prepare students for the society they will enter. That means American liberal arts colleges should prepare students to enter American society (this does not mean avoiding works or topics that come from outside America). But essentially no liberal arts graduates know the passable basics of American government, law, politics, or history. They are often completely ignorant of the basics of their society. The Ivy League colleges are the worst offenders, in part because of their reputation for rigor, and otherwise because their graduates tend to occupy higher perches in society. But the distance between what those students know about American society upon graduation and basic proficiency is enormous.

The “second dose” theory of the liberal arts, and The Foundations of the Liberal Arts

I’m teaching Foundations of the Liberal Arts, which begins today. It is aimed at adults in New York City in 2025, coming from a relatively cohesive set of social backgrounds with common exposures to technology, especially phones. The implementation and form of the class is driven by a further constraint: it meets for 10 in-person sessions spread over 12 weeks.

This class (and The Foundations of New York) operate on a “second dose” theory of learning: people were exposed to the liberal arts when they were younger, but it takes a second exposure in adulthood to really take hold in a more enduring way. Why?

Because reading great literature (or learning about government) hits differently when you have lived the experiences in the book! And because adults who have lived some portion of life beyond early adulthood come to appreciate their own needs, desires, and identity, and have a vision for how they can productively use the insights and habits of the liberal arts.5 Further: adults in the modern era have forgotten how to actually read books and derive benefits from them, often because they don’t have mastery over their phone (they are not free). They need a “second dose” of the liberal arts to remind them of what they knew when they were younger, and to help them cultivate the virtue necessary to operate freely.

And the graduates of the class will, of course, be able to answer the question: “What are the liberal arts?”

The “liberal arts” are those arts which set you free, and supply the self-mastery to sustain that freedom. They are to the mind and character what physical training is to the body, and they should be as evidently demonstrable when taught properly. And in this class, they will be. Read more about The Algernon Project here, and learn the meaning behind its crest.

Content

• Application overview

• What you will know how to do, and have done, by the end of the class

• Class material list

• General class structure and information

• Class expectations and etiquette

• About your instructor

APPLY HERE

Application overview

Applications are open from August 20 through September 10 (5pm EST). Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, and sooner is definitely better.

I’ll inform all applicants of their status, successful or not, by September 12 or sooner, depending on when they apply. I aim to answer each application within a week of its submission, although historically it can take a few days longer. If you have not heard back from me by then, feel free to shoot me an email: daniel@maximumnewyork.com.

Summary of requirements and sessions

• Time: 6:30-8:30pm, Thursdays, September 18 through December 4. No class October 16 or November 27. Final exam on December 13.

• Location(s): A lovely university campus in Lincoln Square, Manhattan

• Prerequisites: None

• Completion reqs: you must complete all homework; you must pass the in-class midterm with a 90% or above, and the final exam with 90% or above.

Tuition

The class costs $0–1,250 per seat. After acceptance, you will receive a Stripe checkout form via Jotform to pay tuition. You may adjust the cost downward to the extent required for you to afford the class.

You will also need to purchase books and equipment for class, and this will range somewhere between $100-200. Many employers provide reimbursement for continuing education that could potentially be applied to tuition, equipment, or both.

APPLY HERE

What you will know how to do, and have done, by the end of the class

• You will have broken your phone addiction.

• You’ll have read 7-8 books over 12 weeks, in addition to many letters, essays, and other book excerpts. More than that, you will know “how to read a book” as a technical, composite skill. You will be a far better reader across retention, understanding, and integration.

• You will have committed several minutes (speaking time) of poetry and prose to memory, and performed it. This includes The New Colossus.

• You will understand what “liberal arts” means in full detail. No field can be sharpened to potency without conceptual clarity. Most defenders and detractors of the field struggle to formulate what they even mean by it.

• You will understand the basic conceptual underpinnings of mathematics, and will have basic ability with mathematic proofs (not the impoverished way you likely learned in school). If you can read, you can prove.

• You will be able to answer the question: “What is history? What is the shape of proper historical inquiry?”

• You will know more about the American Founding Era, and the U.S. Constitution, than almost any other American.

• You will learn to speak about the technical mechanics of language as some speak about engineering. You will gain more precise control of your own idiolect. And I look forward to seeing how this changes your interactions with LLMs.

• You will regard writer’s block as a “skill issue.”

• You will have gained the physical and mental habits required for all of the above and more. These include: memorization, focus, systematized reading, repetition, and progressive overload.

• You will be more beautiful. Embracing the liberal arts is akin to embracing physical training. Physical training makes your body more beautiful and capable, and pervades every aspect of your life in invigorating ways. The liberal arts do the same for the mind and character.

Class material list

You can find all materials listed below on Amazon. Books have been selected by specific edition, and students must purchase that edition. Non-book materials may be substituted with equivalents at the student’s discretion.

For class, each enrolled student must purchase the following books:

• Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes

• Education of a Wandering Man, by Louis L’Amour

• There is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel, by qntm (NOTE: this is a pre-order of a newly revised edition that will be released on November 11. Pre-order that one, do not get an old edition)

• The Prince (translated by Harvey Mansfield), by Niccolo Machiavelli

• Propaganda, by Edward Bernays

• The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis

• The Story of My Life (and related letters), by Helen Keller

• A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy

• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition

Each enrolled student must also purchase the items below, or equivalent:

• A watch that is not “smart.” The line gets fuzzy with things like Garmin running watches, but the principle behind watch selection is: it should tell the time and date, and have timer functionality. It should not receive notifications or otherwise “command” attention.

• A simple radio with no digital interface, plus batteries, plus 3.5mm headphones if needed. I recommend this one or this one. I own and use both.

• Two notebooks that you can tear pages from (we will not do this too much, but need the option).

• Pens or pencils, as the student prefers.

• At least two separate disposable cameras.

• A phone sleeve/pouch.

General Class Structure and Information

Meeting Time & Place

Class will meet for two hours (6:30-8:30pm) on Thursdays, beginning September 18 and ending December 4. There will be no class on October 16 or November 27. There will be a total of 10 class sessions.

Non-class important dates:

You will attend and do each of these things together with students in The Foundations of New York.

• September 11: Your orientation party (not mandatory, but it will be fun!) will be the evening of September 11 in Lincoln Square. Highly encouraged.

• December 13: Your final exam will be on December 13, conducted in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. It will be a multi-hour, written blue book-style exam.

• December 17: Your end-of-semester party and graduation celebration will be the evening of December 17 in Lincoln Square.

Class Structure:

Classes will be structured as a series of workshops and short seminars, not one long lecture. There will be breaks about every 30-40 minutes. Eat snacks and do what you need to do then, but not during class—I will strictly enforce this (but can, have, and will, make arrangements for people who need them). Further: if you are sniffly, you must blow your nose.

All class time will be analog (no phone or phone equivalent technology—technology that compels your attention). At the beginning of class, students will place their phones in sleeves and put them in a separate part of the classroom. With a few exceptions, there will be no use of any technology by students other than paper and a writing utensil. All homework will be completed via handwriting on paper or similar, with little to no phone usage.

If you think “I have bad handwriting,” that’s OK. But we will be applying some 80/20 rules of penmanship to alter that during the class. While penmanship is not a competency of the class, I would be happy to work with students on that skill. You’re already in a class with a lot of writing, so you have built in practice! I write in a neo-Palmer script personally.

Attendance:

You ought not miss more than two of the ten class sessions. But if something comes up, just let me know as far in advance as possible. Life will always intervene, and we will work around it.

If you are going to be late to class, you will need to text or email me with your approximate ETA. Don’t feel embarrassed or squirrely about being late, just let me know so I can conduct class accordingly.

Class Preparation, Homework, and Exams:

• You must spend 7 hours each week without your phone or other technology that compels your attention. Class time counts toward that total. You may not take phone-free time in a block of less than one hour. The time must be taken when you are generally awake, alert, and thinking. For this and many other reasons, I encourage you to dedicate yourself to one session of office hours per week (as described in the next section). You have to set aside time to do your homework anyway, and if you suspect you’d like some help staying focused, I will keep you on track.

• There will be readings for each class (often a whole book), small class projects, and homework that isn’t attached to any specific class, but must be completed before the exam. Plan to allocate at least 5 hours a week for this work on top of your 2 hours of class time. Perhaps you will need less, but plan on at least 5.

• You will have an in-class midterm during class 5, and it should take no more than ~20 minutes. You must get a 90% or above to pass, and you are required to pass. If you get an 89% or below, you will need to show up early to class 6 for a retake. If you fail that, we will discuss class exit options.

• Your final exam will be given in a 3-hour window on December 13. It will be an extensive, hand-written review of the knowledge you will have acquired in the class. You must get a 90% or above to pass this exam. There will be no retakes. If you fail, you will still be welcome at our end-of-semester party.

• You must complete three “seeing” assignments. You must go to a place in the city you have never been—without your phone or similar technology—and take perspective in a variety of ways. This will include writing and taking at least one photograph, and reporting back to the class. These assignments must be completed by the last class.

• You must write, and publicly publish on the internet, one piece of short writing in this class (subject to professional considerations as necessary). A key liberal art is rhetoric, and cultivating the courage to speak to the world in your own way. As we will see in class, the world turns on individuals who decided to write, even just once.

• Join the class Discord. Class participants will be added to a Discord server, which will be our primary mode of communication for coursework, office hours, and general discussion. There will be a code of conduct you need to accept to join the Discord, similar to the class expectations and etiquette outlined in the next section.

Relentless standards, relentless support, and office hours

• You will be held to a high standard in this class, and when you meet those standards you’ll stand radically apart from most people in the city. But you must do the work.

• I will help you. I will be available to you. Many people get excited about a class, but after the first few weeks work and old habits threaten the enterprise. We will not permit that, you and I, especially because we can see it coming. There is no shame in preparing for a known future difficulty, and then struggling mightily upon encounter. The class is designed to assist you in your learning, and I do not want anyone to fail (most won’t). As we will discuss in detail during our orientation party and class 1, you will have ample opportunities to work with me as you go through this class. There will be regular weekend afternoon and weekday morning office hours. During class 1, we will discuss timing. But my very strong suggestion will be to treat at least one session of office hours as “mandatory,” and for you to come and do your reading homework there.

• I challenge you to embrace this opportunity with relish. Work hard for a few weeks, and you will simply not recognize yourself at the end of this class in the most delightful way.

• The plain fact of the matter is I want you to be the best. I want you to be free and beautiful, and a boon to yourself and the civic life of New York City. I want you to regard yourself more highly, as a changed person, upon completion of your exam.

Class Expectations & Etiquette

Classes are open to anyone who worries about the decline of their own mind, whether induced by culture or technology. But not merely that. It is for people who, acknowledging a negative to ameliorate, desire a positive to cultivate. What is that magic we can all feel when we think about “the classics,” or encounter someone who speaks well? What is it about people who are famous for being good readers? What is it about well delivered poetry that still, to this day, can make a prospect swoon? What is it about those rare professors who inspire the soul, and stir it with numbers as well as words? If you want to gain explicit answers to these questions, and become the answer yourself, this class is for you.

The classroom environment I encourage is one of exploration, curiosity, playfulness, and charity/tolerance. You may not repeat what someone says in class outside of class absent their documented permission.

We will be reading some books from the past, which is a foreign country with different ways of speaking and doing than we have. I, and you, will inhabit their mindsets. This does not mean agreeing or disagreeing, although we will do that. But, as liberal artists, we aim first to understand. Frankly: one must crave intellectual risk and adventure to be successful. You need not be afraid of deleterious moralizing from your classmates.

The class has three attitudinal postures that will be encouraged, the opposites of which will be discouraged:

• Stick-to-it-iveness

• Mental toughness

• Positive attitude

This class has four formal rules of etiquette that you must follow:

1. Is over ought. Seek first to understand what is the case, prior to what the case ought to be.

2. No bullshitting, aka be concrete. We’re here to learn together, but we’re doing it in a rigorous fashion. You must always strive to deeply understand your own thought, and the thought of others.

3. Extend grace to everyone. We’re here to learn together. No one knows everything. We will be better, together.

4. Find the good time. Taking things seriously does not mean being mad about them. The wider world can pressure people to get mad to prove that they take ideas seriously. I do not equate anger with either sophistication or dedication, so I relieve you of that burden. Make jokes, be serious, push back, learn a lot. But give yourself (and others) a break while you’re in class.

About Your Instructor

Hello, my name is Daniel Golliher (goll- as in the gall, the nerve, and the audacity; iher- as in how they say “your” where I come from: Gol-yer). I’ve lived in New York City for six years. Besides my writing on this site, you can learn more about me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Maximum New York. I’ve written a few books, play the piano and sax, enjoy all manner of physical fitness, and can’t wait to meet you.

When it comes to cultivating the liberal arts, my default response is to simply exert maximum effort. I do no less in my own studies of government.

I graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with a degree in Government1, and since then I’ve worked in the legal industry, a coffee shop, higher ed, the legal industry again, and now I dedicate my time to Maximum New York.

We’ve long had conversations about the value and nature of humanities, and the impact of technology on people’s ability to learn (particularly at college). The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (published 1987) tackled both of these things directly, as have many people before him. He said this about music:

The music of the [modern day], on the other hand, knows neither class nor nation. It is available twenty-four hours a day, everywhere. There is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels exclusively devoted to them, on the air nonstop; there are the Walkmans so that no place—not public transportation, not the library—prevents students from communing with the Muse, even while studying. (pp.68-69, 25th Anniversary paperback edition)

And in 1994, the television show Touched by an Angel opened an episode with two angels looking over a high school in the morning, reflecting on how technology had become all encompassing and inescapable (watch the first 90 seconds of the video—I also recommend the show in general). Their estimate of the situation was that it was crowding out some of the good of humanity, and that was even before widespread use of the internet.

But history does not repeat, it rhymes. Our current conversation is happening as AI rises, as colleges face dropping enrollment (and many are closing), as phone use comes under more scrutiny, and more. We can learn from the past, but our solutions will need to be tailored to both human nature and our contemporary context. I, of course, an an optimist. I don’t necessarily endorse anything in the sources below, I’m just holding them up as parts of a conversation. There are many more beyond these.

Leave comments with any articles or social media posts you think would be good to add to the list below.

What are phones doing to people’s minds? What is AI doing to minds and schools?

• “what i learned not looking at screens for 3 weeks,” Twitter/X thread, Fred @FriedKielbasa (August 17, 2025).

• “Quitting Your Phone is Actually Simple: but not necessarily easy,” This is Human, Ray Katharine Cohen (August 10, 2025).

• “In my zombie era: The third stage of culture in the age of infinite information,” Numb at the Lodge, Sam Kriss (July 2, 2025).

• “Can You Read? For many people, the answer is ‘no’ more often than they think. A note on Flowers for Algernon,” The Algernon Project, Daniel Golliher (July 11, 2025).

• “Tyler Cowen on how AI will reorder economies, schools, and spirituality,” the “The education system’s failure to adapt” section at 27:11. Azeem Azhar’s YouTube channel (June 4, 2025).

• “I’m a teacher — AI is beating us in the fight for kids’ minds,” The New York Post, Jeremy Adams (June 20, 2025).

What about the humanities?

Some articles

• “The humanities should be harder: Low standards have devalued non-STEM study,” , Matt Yglesias (August 7, 2025).

• “Unyoke the Sciences From the Humanities: Arts and sciences typically cohabitate. Should they?” The Dispatch, Evan D. Morris (August 7, 2025).

Some social media posts

Tanner Greer of had a long thread about how to make an English major rigorous. I have quoted the first tweet in the thread at full length below (from July 5, 2025):

I was pondering the other day what would be required to make an English major as rigorous as possible (i.e. comparable to a hard science degree).

A few tentative thoughts.

1. The major in English should be first and foremost a major in English philology. Every student takes the basic linguistics core courses (phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax). A semester survey on English grammar caps that section off.

Every student takes 2 courses on old english, 1 on middle English, 1 one Early modern English, and then something on modern English varieties or modern English socio-linguistics.

You probably also want to include 3 years of Latin or French, or a passing test grade in either.

This is probably sufficient to give the student foundational knowledge in English *as a language.*

2. You would want a core set of courses that require technical mastery in interpreting texts. This means a poetry class that requires you to memorize poetic forms and scan hundreds of poems. It means memorizing and reciting poetry and other passages for credit. It means a prose class where people are taking big blocks of Faulkner or Conrad and diagramming the sentences and passages. It means diagramming famous essays and the structures of novels.

I am not sure how many courses this would require, but maybe two, one focused on prosody in poetry, the other on structure in prose.

3. Something like the following progression of foundational surveys:

a) Classical antecedents: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphosis. Even better if the class also assigns poems or short stories that allude to this material so that students can see the connections over time.

b) King James Bible. (Same thing as before--but perhaps even more critical to include the poems/short stories). Make students memorize key Bible passages.

c) Shakespeare survey. At least 8 plays across genres. Make students memorize key passages.

d) English poetry to Milton + Paradise Lost. Make students memorize.

e) English poetry after Milton survey. Make students memorize.

f) 18th and 19th century novels (assign 12, unless you have a really big novel like Moby Dick, in which case you can shorten a bit; at least half of the novels should have been written in English).

g) Development of the essay to 1900 (Start with Montaigne and Bacon and move forward in time. Include several book length works)

g) The modern essay and narrative nonfiction (include several book length works--Didion, Wolf, McPherson, that sort of thing).

There also should be at least one research based class, but I suppose they can choose can between different topics/authors there.

4. I would have previously said a series of courses on composition but given ChatGPT and the inevitability of cheating I do not really know if there is a point to this anymore. The curriculum would need to be focused on things that can be tested, things that can be recited, and class discussions and debates. Students will have to learn how to write well through reading good models.

Unfortunately, the inability to assign essays makes it difficult to reach out rigor goal but I do not have any good solutions his.

Imagine being a journalist or demographer in 1925. For the previous 100 years, going back to the early 1800s, the fertility rate in the U.S. and practically every other rich country had steadily declined toward the replacement rate of 2.1.

OK! Let’s take a look at what a famous contemporary writer1, Stuart Chase, said at the time. In the February 1939 edition of The Atlantic, Chase opens his piece “Population Goes Down” with a dramatic picture:

There are more than a million empty desks in the elementary schools of America this year. In 1930 the total enrollment was 21,300,000; in 1938 it had fallen to about 20,000,000…This is only the beginning.

Chase was writing at the contemporary low point of fertility in the United States. Below I’ve reproduced a graph that Derek used in his post, with a red arrow to emphasize what the world around Chase must have looked like.

From his perspective, things were trending sharply and unambiguously. He had full confidence in the population projections released by the National Resources Committee in The Problems of a Changing Population (1938),2 which showed the U.S. population growing slowly before eventually plateauing and falling in the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, this report was made at the cabinet level to President Franklin Roosevelt, and exemplifies social policy thinking at the time:

And when the results of the 1940 census were released not long after the report above, Chase was (epistemically) delighted to find that the U.S. population had landed directly between the two population estimates the authors of the 1938 report thought most likely: 131,308,000 and 131,993,000. In a 1941 pamphlet entitled “What the New Census Means,” Chase said:

He then proceeded to take a victory lap:

Well, we know that pretty much right after all of this the U.S. entered the baby boom. Chase, standing in 1941, had been fully confident in future population projections showing slowing growth and eventual decline. He had the advanced statistics of the day on his side, and his underlying assumptions seemed reasonable enough. And yet he, and many others, got their predictions exactly backwards.

This doesn’t mean they were dumb, or even that their assumptions were unreasonable. I don’t want to paint them as simple. They were perfectly aware that their assumptions could be overturned by events, at the very least. For example, in his (May) 1941 pamphlet Chase says this:

One ought not even assume that Chase was pessimistic about our prospects of dealing with fertility and population decline (to say nothing of the changing ratio of young and old). Toward the beginning of his 1938 Atlantic piece he says, “…when an economic system built on three centuries of steady expansion encounters a population curve that is rapidly ceasing to expand, it is bound to buckle and crack—until adjusted to the new conditions.” And in the final paragraph he says, “One last prophecy…The reproductive index will move up again when children are wanted so badly that parents are at last ready to sink their prejudices and really safeguard the community against insecurity, unemployment, and war. Will the instinct for survival take care of this in due time? I think it will. It is a tough instinct.”

Finally, Chase was not sounding an emergency klaxon: “What is the [population curve] going to do to us here in America?…Fortunately, it moves slowly and nothing need happen very suddenly. If, however, we pretend it is not there and one day wake up, some unpleasant things might happen very dramatically…If we face the situation with our eyes open, we can probably handle it.”

Why look at what was said in the past?

The consonance of past and present is delightful and useful

A detailed look at the past helps you think about the present more clearly, and with less visceral attachment to the tribal thinking of the modern moment. History shares this context-switching advantage with good science fiction.

The more you look back to Stuart Chase’s confidence in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the more you think: “What might I be missing today? How can I see now what Chase and others did not see then? Is it possible? If it’s unclear, I must hold myself and others to a rigorous standard of thinking as we figure it out.”

Further: it is a simple human delight to see that people were not very different in the past than they are now, at least in some ways; that our failures and fortunes repeat; and that we can use this information to our advantage. For example, I’ve written elsewhere about New York’s housing supply crisis of the 1920s—it was almost a blow-by-blow repeat of the policy debate we’re having in our current shortage, and is useful in that very debate.3

Collateral discovery

You never know what you’ll find when exploring sources from the past, and collateral discoveries can prove useful to other interests—or hover in the back of your head, waiting for some future discovered connection.

For example: I frequently write about NYC’s education budget for Maximum New York. It is the largest part of our city budget by far, clocking in around $40 billion this year; NYC spends more per student than anywhere else in the country. These costs continue to increase even when pupil count decreases.

So imagine the researcher’s delight when I stumbled across this graphic and piece of information from Chase’s “What the New Census Means” pamphlet from 1941, which I originally read to flesh out his views on population rates (emphasis added):

New York City high schools in March, 1939, registered an all-time high of 257,498 students. By October, 1940, they had 3,000 fewer pupils. Elementary schools in New York lost 150,000 pupils between 1930 and 1940. Teaching staffs were cut down, saving the city $2,000,000. “The largest school system in the world,” said one of its officers sadly, “has now reached the contractive stage, and will from now on become smaller year by year. Plainly an epoch has been reached; one era has ended and another is to begin.” (this and graphic below can be found on pp.5-6)

As it turns out, I have gained a significant contemporary source to improve my writing about current NYC education budgets, and to help jumpstart some new historical research about city education budgets specifically. Clearly our education system used to function such that decreased enrollment led to decreased overall expense, which is the opposite of how it works now. And I never would have found this without exploring another topic more broadly.

It is good to build the muscle of constructing foreign contexts for analysis

People will say anything about what the past was like. But we can go check many of these claims. Some of them require looking up a document (“did this person really say that?”). Some require many documents (“what was the prevailing sentiment among academics at the time?”). Getting good at this, and cultivating instincts and taste in epistemic proxies based on these practices, will give you a better view of reality.

And then you realize: how you treat the past is how you treat the present. The present also requires this same kind of context-building, this same kind of evidence marshaling, this same kind of epistemic taste. It’s just easier to feel like you understand the present, because you live in it. But it requires work just like the past, especially if you’re deeply embedded in unhelpful information bubbles.

For example: now that you know about Stuart Chase, what do you think about this January 2025 report from McKinsey: “Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality.”

So what else did that 1939 Atlantic article say?

I’ll end with some quotes from the article. It, as well as the other sources I list at the end of this post, could almost have been written today. Do with these what you will.

The state of the world

Only recently have statisticians refined their figures to the point of clear prediction. Their work is dramatic. They now realize that the zero hour is only a few years ahead. Presently not only will the growth rate disappear, but there will actually be fewer Americans on the continent. The repercussions are already considerable, and promise to be tremendous. Every business man, every government official, every banker, every school board, every citizen, will feel them.

The birth rate in America has been falling for a century. In 1875 it was 37 babies per thousand people per year. One thousand people means, roughly, two hundred families, and a new baby in every fifth family each year. In 1912, the rate was 26 babies, one a year in every eight families. In 1935 it was down to 17, and still falling. A similar trend is noticeable all over the world, especially in western countries. The Swedish rate is now down to 14, the English and French to 15. The German rate was 17 in 1930. It has increased slightly, under Hitler’s régime of forced parenthood, but experts think the gain will be temporary. Mussolini’s attempt to stimulate babies has had no appreciable effect.

On why the birth rate continues to fall (where have you heard this before…)

Why do they decline so universally and persistently? Here are some of the reasons.

It is now biologically possible to control conception. Birth-control methods are reaching every economic class in all civilized nations.

There seems to be an obscure biological factor which makes fertility lower in cities than in the country. Most of us are now living in cities or towns.

Young people marry later than they used to.

Many young people wish small families, or no families. Why do they not wish large families? For many reasons which are deep and complex. The World War had something to do with it. Widespread insecurity and unemployment frighten many prospective parents. Children in the handicraft age were an economic asset, helping around the farm; in the machine age, particularly in cities, children are an economic liability. Higher living standards have encouraged smaller families. A standard having been established, people are loath to slide down the scale.

A reproductive index of 1.0, or unity, indicates a stable population, where 1000 mothers produce enough girl babies to become 1000 mothers in their turn. If the index is above unity, there is a surplus of potential mothers and the population will expand. If the index is below unity, there is a shortage of girl babies and the population must fall. The Old Folks Home would have a reproductive index of zero.

Around 1930, the American index dropped below unity for the first time in history. It is now about .98. England is down to .74, Germany to .75, Sweden to .86, France to .93.

The effects of population decline on schools

A curious population wave is passing upward through the schools, with a heavy undertow of empty desks behind it. The wave was caused by the large number of children born immediately after the war. It is now roaring through the high schools. The undertow is caused by the sharply declining birth rates which set in around 1925. The undertow is just reaching the first years of high school. The United States Bureau of Education estimates a high-school peak enrollment of 6,135,000 in 1938-1939; then a recession as the wave rolls on to the colleges, and the undertow moves in. High schools are now stationary in New York, Ohio, Washington. Total publicschool enrollment in New York City dropped from 804,000 in 1930 to 753,000 in 1936 — 50,000 empty desks in one city. But effects of ‘the heavy losses in births between 1930 and 1937 are still to come.’

On children

Children consume 50 per cent more milk than adults. The milk industry is in for some painful readjustments.

As children become scarcer, they may be valued more highly, and spoiled more thoroughly.

As obstetricians decline, morticians will thrive. All industries catering to the aged will be stimulated.

Demands for more social security

When government budgets are relieved by a decline in school outlays, they will be simultaneously burdened by an increase in old-age pensions.

What we can be sure of is a sharp crescendo in demands for social security…

Political opinion may drift more to the conservative side — except in the matter of government pensions.

Realizing that housing demand (and prices) aren’t a function of population, but households!

This happens to be a drum I bang all the time (thank you for posting, ).

But, as an offset, houses may not follow the population curve. The number of families may increase long after the curve passes the crest. There will be fewer children, but more families.

Retooling an economic system, which made it much easier for past generations to succeed (goes Chase’s reasoning)

The outstanding economic problem of the next few decades will be to get an economic system geared for expansion, remodeled to operate in a community which grows slowly or not at all.

Business activity grew almost automatically in the past. More customers were at the counter every year. Thousands of citizens became rich simply by buying in at the 50 million population level and selling out at the 100 million level. You couldn’t lose. Those carefree days are over. There is not much increment in buying in at the 130 million level and selling out at 130 a generation later.

When the problem gets more visible, people will clamber

Many people want a return to the good old days of automatic expansion and little government interference. When they realize—say five years hence — that the Republican Party cannot give it to them, and that the population curve has much to do with it, we must brace ourselves for a terrific outburst of wild schemes to reverse the birth-rate trend. Congress will swarm with lobbies for taxes on bachelors, bonuses for twins, free trousseaus and curly-maple suites for brides, ‘Mrs. America’ cups for prolific ladies of all ages, penalties for the use of contraceptives, guaranteed jobs for bridegrooms. Pulpits will rock; editorial writers will let down their hair; statesmen will thunder about race suicide; generals will ask where our future defenders are to come from. The hullabaloo will be shattering — and the population curve will go serenely on its downward course. If Mussolini could not turn it, what chance has a democratic state?

The possibilities of immigration restriction (according to Chase)

Indeed, there is a definite bright side to this picture. With immigration greatly restricted in the future, the American people for the first time in history will have a breathing spell to become more integrated and homogeneous. There will be an end of ‘little Italys,’ ‘Wops,’ ‘Hunkies,’ ‘Yids,’ ‘Greasers,’ ‘ignorant foreigners.’ The melting pot will really melt. Household servants may become scarcer, which will cause their wages and status to rise. Educational standards can be lifted all around, as pressure on the schools relaxes. What we call ‘democracy’ can be brought nearer.

Two further notes from Chase’s 1941 pamphlet “What the New Census Means”

Eugenics is not feasible (although Chase notionally favors it)

Legislation cannot directly fix the fertility crash

Sources used:

• “Population Going Down” in The Atlantic, by Stuart Chase (February 1939).

• “The Problems of a Changing Population: Report of the Committee On Population Problems to the National Resources Committee” United States National Resources Committee. Science Committee (May, 1939).

• “What the New Census Means” by Stuart Chase. Published in New York, New York, by Public Affairs Committee, Inc. (May, 1941). [Daniel’s note: this pamphlet repeats substantial material from Chase’s 1938 Atlantic article, although you’ll find plenty of new material at much greater length.]

• “What Caused the 'Baby Boom’? What Would It Take to Have Another?” Derek Thompson (July 2025).

Further exploration:

• Understanding the Baby Boom: The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust, (September 2023).

• Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality, McKinsey Global Institute (January 2025).

In the story, scientists develop a treatment that allows a mouse, Algernon, to become vastly more intelligent. They then apply this treatment to a man of sub-normal intelligence, Charlie, and watch as he becomes more intelligent than any human alive, even to the point that he takes over managing the intelligence experiment with himself and Algernon as subjects.

The book is styled as Charlie’s diary. At the beginning the prose is simple and broken, and it blooms wonderfully as the “treatment” works. He easily learns more languages, discovers the world through books, advanced mathematics, and more. But eventually the treatment wears off for both him and Algernon, and the reader is helpless to watch as the book’s prose descends toward its original quality.

The part of the book that stays with me in when Charlie realizes, through the brilliant power of his new mind, that the treatment is degrading, and that he is regressing. He is still intelligent enough to realize what is happening to him, and to grieve what he is losing, but he is powerless to stop it. And, eventually, when he descends back to his previous state, we see that he can’t even conceive of what he had. He is kind of happy, even.

While many readers would recoil in horror at this prospect, they are currently inducing this very process in themselves by the use of their phones. They can feel it. Their attention is degrading. Their ability to focus is waning. They cannot get through a book, they cannot get their thoughts written down. “I used to read all the time as a kid,” these people say. They can viscerally sense that some essential part of themselves is being sapped, and they know their phone is the vampire. And yet they can only watch hopelessly, as a third-party observer, while they continue to lobotomize themselves.

The Algernon Project is dedicated to helping them understand that this is happening, why this is happening, and what to do about it. My solution: the rigorous, properly taught liberal arts—the strengthening and beautification of the mind. This project is to the liberal arts broadly what Maximum New York is to politics and government. MNY regularly delivers political understanding and power, and The Algernon Project will cultivate the potential and beauty of the mind. You’ll also find that my criticisms of the standard methods of government instruction are mirrored in subjects like reading, writing, and more. However, I will note at the outset, to avoid misunderstanding: I enjoy social media and screens, and I use them frequently without issue. The proper liberal arts bloom in the modern context, and embrace its unique advantages.

The symbol of The Algernon Project is a shield featuring a gladiolus flower and a gladius—a Roman short sword. Both are derivative from the same Latin root, and the gladiolus is also called the “sword lily.”

Why? First, take this excerpt from Flowers for Algernon. The main character, after realizing his whole new mind will deteriorate, has a panicked hallucination:

I stare inward in the center of my unseeing eye at the red spot that transforms itself into a multipetaled flower—the shimmering, swirling, luminescent flower that lies deep in the core of my unconscious. I am shrinking. Not in the sense of the atoms of my body becoming closer and more dense, but a fusion—as the atoms of my-self merge into microcosm. There will be great heat and unbearable light—the hell within hell—but I don’t look at the light, only at the flower, unmultiplying, undividing itself back from the many toward one. (283)

Second, take this excerpt from Sister Miriam Joseph’s (SMJ) classic on liberal education, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric:

“In true liberal education…the essential activity of the student is to relate the facts learned into a unified, organic whole, to assimilate them as…the rose assimilates food from the soil and increases in size, vitality, and beauty.” (7)

In both of these cases, a brilliant mind is compared to a blooming flower. And SMJ reveals a common traditional understanding of the liberal arts as a cultivation of the mind or soul, often with specific analogous reference to flowers.

So: to reverse the process of mental deterioration many have induced in themselves, especially (but not exclusively) through their phones, I choose a flower. And I choose its eponymous partner, a soldier’s sharp sword. Together they symbolize the robust cultivation of a beautiful mind, and an aggressive offense against any threats to it.

What will The Algernon Project do?

I will be teaching a Foundations of the Liberal Arts class this coming fall (announced via this newsletter), on a different week night than my Foundations of New York classes. Further, I will host one-off evenings where I explore different parts of the liberal arts; many of these will be cross-over events with Maximum New York, like my recent overview of the American Founding Era.

I will also be writing extensively, and this blog will carry technical commentary on the liberal arts, along with broader, related social and media commentary.

Here are some examples of what I will be publishing soon:

• What are the liberal arts?—What have they been? Are there competing conceptions? As opposed to what other arts? Is it a canon, a series of methods, or a series of principles?

• What do contemporary universities mean when they say they teach “the liberal arts”?

• Is education, particularly university education, broken? Is that new, if true? If true, in which ways?

• What is the rigorous version of the liberal arts that actually improves one’s life in explicit ways one can describe and easily demonstrate? Or that earns a proper place beside mathematics and engineering, or that properly subsumes them into a larger, consilient whole?

• Many opinions about what the liberal arts are, how they work, or what they could be, are colored by the season of life when people experienced them (or experienced what was offered in their name): ages ~17-22, on a college campus. Many people will find they have a different appraisal if they’re introduced to the liberal arts in a different season of life. They ought not anchor on their older conclusions.

• Why and how I love social media and screens, and think they are part of a good life.—How the liberal arts must integrate the modern context, not purely be a reaction against it.

• The concrete value of rote memorization.—Why and how to recite memorized content. The value of physically channeling the superior work of others as a method of self-improvement, especially as a beginner.

• Cultivating the mind is as self-justified as cultivating the body. There are external uses for both, but they stand on their own merits.—Via analogy, the difference between mere exercise and training.

• The technical craft of reading for adults.—Reading comprehension, Adler’s reading techniques, what does reading give you versus other media, the proper results of well-done reading versus otherwise, why you can’t read and what to do about it.

• Beyond reading.—How to use every part of the book. There is far more to most books than their story or chapters, literally and metaphorically. No book is more misunderstood than the dictionary.

• The technical craft of writing for adults.—Whether and how to write as an adult. Do you write? Can you write? As with reading, many adults cannot honestly say they know how to write, if by that they mean “write at will, according to an understood process, with no permanent blocks, to express myself.”

• The epistolary format.—Whether and how to incorporate it into your reading and writing. What value is it to study this format?

• Poetry and music.—Their comparisons to rhetoric. What is there to get from these fields with practice? When is it worth cultivating capacities in these fields, and in which ways?

• Lifestyle design.—Most people have arranged their lives, physically and socially, to prohibit reading, iterative learning, and deep contemplation; they must look that fact square in the eyes, and do the same with its remedies. Good lifestyle design does not lean solely on negative avoidance (don’t do X), but provides a positive vision that can outcompete the deleterious one (do X, and here’s how).

• The nature of the phone in one’s life.—How does it compare to past waves of radio and television? What is it to most people? How does it interact with patterns of the mind?

• When is it useful to teach the classics (pre-Christian material)? When is it cargo-culting? The example of Plato’s Cratylus.

• Historical inquiry, properly taught, is one of the sharpest methods of apprehending contemporary society. It performs a similar mental move of altering context just enough to loosen the mind’s biases to see what is true, in a similar way to some science fiction.

• The necessity of good friends for a proper liberal arts education, and for the full realization of the those arts throughout life.

I look forward to exploring and sharing the robust liberal arts with all of you. If you have any specific questions or other prompts, drop them in the comments.

➡️ Skip to the beginning of the piece

Table of contents

• Introduction: Mercy Otis Warren’s history (both biographic and vocational)

• Opening thoughts on America and the new 19th century

  • The duty to the nation of those with talent, time, and means

  • The assertion of women’s role in politics

  • The present is evolving quickly with vast improvements, and more is expected in the future

  • The duty of Americans to unite under virtuous principle

• The dangers of decadence and ease

  • Kids these days have forgotten the real history of the Founding Era, and don’t appreciate it

  • Decadent civilization, detached from feedback loops with rough reality, ruins societies

  • America was founded by British emigrants who were not corrupted by decadent ease, and who saw the rougher reality across the ocean as a refuge and opportunity

• Religious intolerance and tolerance

  • Religious intolerance was widespread, and not confined to the puritans

  • As time went on, and Americans approached their Revolution, religious toleration increased and became widespread—especially due to the waning influence of the Church of England (Anglicans)

  • Since no human can know everything, and we all think and perceive differently, we should be open to the idea that others have different parts of the truth that we do not

  • However, “tolerance” can go too far, and dissolve all good conviction

  • An (unintentionally) brutal description of Rhode Island and its people in the midst of the discussion on religious toleration

• Closing Notes

  • Thoughts on Native Americans, their similarities to Europeans, and their understandable reactions to Europeans

  • The straw that broke the camel’s back was not taxation without representation, but ingratitude on the part of the Mother Country toward her loyal colonies

• Post scriptum: John Adams’ angry response to Warren’s history

Introduction: Mercy Otis Warren’s history (both biographic and vocational)

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) is one of the most important members of America’s founding generation that many people have not heard of. She published a contemporary history of the American Revolution in 1805, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, and was an active member of the Revolution’s social and political scene, corresponding and organizing widely from her and her husband’s home in Massachusetts.

Historian Lester Cohen praised her in this frank way: “In an era dominated by giants, she honorably may be numbered among the intellectuals of the second rank: those, for example, who served in colonial or state legislatures, the Continental Congress, and the Constitution-ratifying conventions and those who publicized the revolutionary cause through their writings.”1

A great defender of the American Experiment, she also penned a sharp Anti-Federalist pamphlet opposing the constitutional frame from the 1787 convention in Philadelphia (many of her concerns, like a lack of a bill of rights, would be remedied). The pamphlet was entitled, “Observations on the new constitution, and on the Federal and State conventions, by a Columbian patriot,” and was published in 1788. Notably, it carried the Latin subtitle “Sic transit Gloria Americana,” which is a play on the standard Latin “Sic transit gloria mundi,” which means “thus passes the glory of the world.” In Warren’s eyes, the new constitution threatened to undo the new nation.

One could say much about her influence, past and present, but for this post I’m going to present excerpts from the introduction and first chapter of her 1805 history. The point of this exercise is to show modern audiences a few things:

• The people of the Revolutionary Era often thought similar things as us about their own time.

• Many problems are a permanent part of the human condition, and you will find them replayed in every era. The past can be an excellent guide toward successful resolution, and a comfort in failure or difficulty.

• The way you think about the past is likely the way you think about the present. If you are incurious about the past, and don’t seek to understand it and its people, you are probably badly botching your understanding of the present in the same way.

• History is all about context. Past writers assumed common knowledge that…isn’t…today. For example, Warren assumed her audience had familiarity with British history, which is extremely relevant when explaining the American Founding (and beyond). Modern audiences, British and American, generally do not, and this will be readily apparent if they try to read her work. So they should ask themselves: what other references do I think I get, but are actually illuminated differently by contextual features I don’t appreciate? How would I know this? Per my point above, they could, and should, do this in the modern day with as much rigor.

• The past is a foreign country, sure. It was extraordinarily different in ways the modern person would find hard to believe; when Mercy Otis Warren wrote, we still hadn’t invented regular timetables for oceanic freight, which would happen four years after her death in 1818. But the past would be shockingly familiar in other respects. Human nature endures. Ideas endure. Much of what would be labeled “modern thought” was very present hundreds of years ago.

• People in the past write about their own time, just like we do. It wasn’t “history” to them yet. The idea that Americans were already writing histories of the Revolution by 1805 is surprising to some. But David Ramsay’s The History of the American Revolution came out in 1789!

I’m taking excerpts from her history’s introduction, entitled “An Address to the Inhabitants of the United States of America,” and the first chapter, “Introductory Observations,” because they lay out her general mode of thinking, and because they contain broad observations about the colonial period. It’s a good way to begin a historical inquiry—not by trying to ascertain the “correct answer” about an era, or mastering academia’s current consensus about it, but trying to put yourself in a contemporary head and just seeing what’s there. Questions and further thinking are natural from that point. In my view, the best professional historians, and the best non-historian people with the best historical perspectives, build pictures of past worlds this way.

All block quotes are from the 1989 reprinting of her history unless noted otherwise, and are followed by parenthetical page citations.

Opening thoughts on America and the new 19th century

The duty to the nation of those with talent, time, and means

Warren wrote her history to transmit her view of America’s founding principles to the present and future generation, so that they could live up to the promise of the new nation. For her, it was vital that readers understood both the events that occurred, and the character of those involved in those events. My readers should keep in mind that she wrote this over years, and finally published it when she was 77. It was, and is, a substantial achievement—and this was the kind of thing she thought proper to “improve the leisure Providence had lent.”2

At a period when every manly arm was occupied, and every trait of talent or activity engaged, either in the cabinet or the field, apprehensive, that amidst the sudden convulsions, crowded scenes, and rapid changes, that flowed in quick succession, many circumstances might escape the more busy and active members of society, I have been induced to improve the leisure Providence had lent, to record as they passed, in the following pages, the new and unexperienced events exhibited in a land previously blessed with peace, liberty, simplicity, and virtue. (xli)

I’m reminded of Theodore Roosevelt’s injunction to the higher classes of American society in his 1893 speech “The Duties of American Citizenship”:

It is just the same way with politics. It makes one feel half angry and half amused, and wholly contemptuous, to find men of high business or social standing in the community saying that they really have not got time to go to ward meetings, to organize political clubs, and to take a personal share in all the important details of practical politics.

In both cases, Warren and Roosevelt asserted a proper use of time for the wealthy and talented: service to the nation.

The assertion of women’s role in politics

Mercy Otis Warren was aware of her uncommon position as a woman active in Revolutionary politics. She was not alone, to be sure, but she was perhaps the most prominent, visible, and intellectually engaged, and she foregrounds that for her readers several times.

The solemnity that covered every countenance, when contemplating the sword uplifted, and the horrors of civil war rushing to habitations not inured to scenes of rapine and misery; even to the quiet cottage, where only concord and affection had reigned; stimulated to observation a mind that had not yielded to the assertion, that all political attentions lay out of the road of female life. (xli)

The present is evolving quickly with vast improvements, and more is expected in the future

One often sees commentary that laments the pace of modern change. And while our own era is certainly different from past iterations, this concern is not new at all. Mercy Otis Warren was definitely more of an optimist though—or rather, she did not write change off out of hand as an immediate problem.

Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led to contemplate the great events that have run parallel with, and have just closed the last. From the revolutionary spirit of the times, the vast improvements in science, arts, and agriculture, the boldness of genius that marks the age, the investigation of new theories, and the changes in the political, civil, and religious characters of men, succeeding generations have reason to expect still more astonishing exhibitions in the next. (xliii)

The duty of Americans to unite under virtuous principle

Modern Americans might not realize just how foreign the original colonies were to each other. Founding Era calls for unity were existential, whereas today they have a squishier connotation. “On the eve of independence, residents of the thirteen colonies were more likely to be familiar with events and fashions back in England than they were with those of a neighboring colony.”3 When the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774 to discuss how to respond to escalating British restrictions, John Adams remarked on the assemblage: “The Art and Address, of Ambassadors from a dozen belligerant Powers of Europe, nay of a Conclave of Cardinals at the Election of a Pope, or of the Princes in Germany at the Choice of an Emperor, would not exceed the Specimens We have seen.”4

In the mean time, Providence has clearly pointed out the duties of the present generation, particularly the paths which American ought to tread. The United States form a young republic, a confederacy which ought ever to be cemented by a union of interest and affection, under the influence of those principles which obtained their independence. (xliii-xliv)

The dangers of decadence and ease

Kids these days have forgotten the real history of the Founding Era, and don’t appreciate it

People forgot the revolution in many ways as soon as it was over, just like those who are barely 18 now have no real concept of 9/11 or whatever event the 30+ crowd wants to use as a benchmark.

Many who first stepped forth in vindication of the rights of human nature are forgotten, and the causes which involved the thirteen colonies in confusion and blood are scarcely known, amidst the rage of accumulation and the taste for expensive pleasures that have since prevailed. (4)

Decadent civilization, detached from feedback loops with rough reality, ruins societies

Warren was certainly not the first to worry about the corrupting effects of ease and decadence.

The Roman historian Sallust observed in The War With Catiline (emphasis added):

But when our country had grown great through toil and the practice of justice, when great kings had been vanquished in war, savage tribes and mighty peoples subdued by force of arms, when Carthage, the rival of Rome's sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse…Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue; to value friendships and enmities not on their merits but by the standard of self-interest, and to show a good front rather than a good heart. At first these vices grew slowly, from time to time they were punished; finally, when the disease had spread like a deadly plague, the state was changed and a government second to none in equity and excellence became cruel and intolerable.5

And the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is absolutely filled with warnings against the corrupting effects of ease. Here is Hosea 13:5-6: “I cared for you in the wilderness, in the land of burning heat. When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me.”

Luxury, the companion of young acquired wealth, is usually the consequence of opposition to, or close connexion with, opulent commercial states. Thus the hurry of spirits, that ever attends the eager pursuit of fortune and a passion for splendid enjoyment, leads to forgetfulness; and thus the inhabitants of America cease to look back with due gratitude and respect on the fortitude and virtue of their ancestors, who, through difficulties almost insurmountable, planted them in a happy soil. (4-5)

A young Abraham Lincoln would warn of the dangerous temptations of ease to the United States in his 1838 Lyceum Address, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” (skip to the final bolded paragraph for the meat of the sentiment):

Through [the Revolutionary] period, it was felt by all, to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.--Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it:-- their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded. The experiment is successful; and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

America was founded by British emigrants who were not corrupted by decadent ease, and who saw the rougher reality across the ocean as a refuge and opportunity

The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations, and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization. They have been equally conspicuous in the decline of Roman virtue, and in the dark pages of British story. It was these principles that overturned that ancient republic. It was these principles that frequently involved England in civil feuds. It was the resistance to them that brought one of their monarchs to the block, and struck another from his throne.6 It was the prevalence of them that drove the first settlers of America from elegant habitations and affluent circumstances, to seek an asylum in the cold and uncultivated regions of the western world. Oppressed in Britain by despotic kings, and persecuted by prelatic fury, they fled to a distant country, where the desires of men were bounded by the wants to nature; where civilization had not created those artificial cravings which too frequently break over every moral and religious tie for their gratification. (5)

Thus a spirit of emigration adopted in the preceding reign [the Stuart monarchs] began to spread with great rapidity through the nation. Some gentlemen endowed with talents to defend their rights by the most cogent and resistless arguments were among the number who had taken the alarming resolution of seeking an asylum far from their natal soil, where they might enjoy the rights and privileges they claimed, and which they considered on the even of annihilation at home…Thus, through every successive reign of this line of the Stuarts, the colonies gained additional strength, by continual emigrations to the young American settlements. (5-7)

Religious intolerance and tolerance

Religious intolerance was widespread, and not confined to the puritans

Especially in the earliest days of settlement, the American colonies were natural homes to religious intolerance in some ways. After all, people left Europe because they had strong religious views—and many of those people belonged to the Church of England itself, especially in Virginia. They were not friendly to attempts to shape the colonies after different religious traditions.

Yet while we admire their [the first planters of the American colonies] persevering and self-denying virtues, we must acknowledge that the illiberality and weakness of some of their municipal regulations have cast a shade over the memory of men, whose errors arose more from the fashion of the times, and the dangers which threatened them from every side, than from any deficiency either in the head or the heart. But the treatment of the Quakers in the Massachusetts can never be justified either by the principles of policy or humanity…yet an indelible stain will be left on the names of those, who adjudged to imprisonment, confiscation and death, a sect made considerable only by opposition. (9)

The spirit of intolerance in the early stages of their settlements was not confined to the New England puritans, as they have in derision been styled. In Virginia, Maryland, and some other colonies, where the votaries of the church of England were the stronger party, the dissenters of every description were persecuted, with little less rigour than had been experienced by the Quakers from the Presbyterians of the Massachusetts. An act passed in the assembly of Virginia, in the early days of her legislation, making it penal “for any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the province.” (10)

You can see a similar history of religious intolerance in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (written 1781-2, publish 1787), which Warren would have read. From Query 17, on religion:

The first settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of the English church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with complete victory over the religious of all other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the powers of making, administering, and executing the laws, they shewed equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern government. The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England. They cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the reigning sect. Several acts of the Virginia assembly of 1659, 1662, and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their children baptized; had prohibited the unlawful assembling of Quakers; had made it penal for any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the state; had ordered those already here, and such as should come thereafter, to be imprisoned till they should abjure the country; provided a milder punishment for their first and second return, but death for their third; had inhibited all persons from suffering their meetings in or near their houses, entertaining them individually, or disposing of books which supported their tenets.

As time went on, and Americans approached their Revolution, religious toleration increased and became widespread—especially due to the waning influence of the Church of England (Anglicans)

In the following excerpt, she also notes that religious toleration coincides with the happy medium between barbarism and decadence (emphasis added).

The religious bigotry of the first planters, and the temporary ferments it had occasioned, subsided, and a spirit of candor and forbearance every where took place. They seemed, previous to the rupture with Britain, to have acquired that just and happy medium between the ferocity of a state of nature, and those high stages of civilization and refinement, that at once corrupt the heart and sap the foundations of happiness. (13-14)

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia also affirms this trend toward toleration. From Query 17, on religion:

The Anglicans retained full possession of the country about a century. Other opinions began then to creep in, and the great care of the government to support their own church, having begotten an equal degree of indolence in its clergy, two-thirds of the people had become dissenters at the commencement of the present revolution. The laws indeed were still oppressive on them, but the spirit of the one party had subsided into moderation, and of the other had risen to a degree of determination which commanded respect.

Since no human can know everything, and we all think and perceive differently, we should be open to the idea that others have different parts of the truth that we do not

It is rational to believe that the benevolent Author of nature designed universal happiness as the basis of his works. Nor is it unphilosophical to suppose the difference in human sentiment, and the variety of opinions among mankind, may conduce to this end. They may be permitted, in order to improve the faculty of thinking, to draw out the powers of the mind, to exercise the principles of candor, and learn us to wait, in a becoming manner, the full disclosure of the system of divine government. Thus, probably, the variety int he formation of the human soul may appear to be such, as to have rendered it impossible for mankind to think exactly in the same channel. The contemplative and liberal minded man must, therefore, blush for the weakness of his own species, when he sees any of them endeavouring to circumscribe the limits of virtue and happiness within his own contracted sphere, too often darkened by superstition and bigotry. (11)

However, “tolerance” can go too far, and dissolve all good conviction

In this passage, Warren makes to great observations. The first is that she, and others, are ashamed of the conduct of their ancestors. They looked backward like we do today, shaking our heads—what a marvel moral progress is!

The second: she notes that extremist personalities often don’t moderate, they just move to another extreme. Here, she is talking about moving from dogmatic religion to militant atheism that sees no value in religion, and wants to directly tear it down with the same violence religions visited upon each other. The French Revolution did not help these worries.

The modern improvements in society, and the cultivation of reason, which has spread its benign influence over both the European and the American world, have nearly eradicated this persecuting spirit; and we look back, in both countries, mortified and ashamed of the illiberality of our ancestors. Yet such is the elasticity of the human mind, that when it has been long bent beyond a certain line of propriety, it frequently flies off to the opposite extreme. Thus there may be danger, that in the enthusiasm for toleration, indifference to all religion may take place. (12)

An (unintentionally) brutal description of Rhode Island and its people in the midst of the discussion on religious toleration

I don’t know whether Warren meant there to be any humor in this passage, but she was a talented playwright and satirist, so I wouldn’t be shocked. Regardless, it works well as understatement, to the detriment of New England’s smallest state.7

[William Penn] fixed his residence on the borders of the Delaware. He there reared, with astonishing rapidity, a flourishing, industrious colony, on the most benevolent principles. The equality of their condition, the mildness of their deportment, and the simplicity of their manners, encouraged the emigration of husbandmen, artizans and manufacturers from all parts of Europe. Thus was this colony soon raised to distinguished eminence, though under a proprietary government. But the sectaries that infested the more eastern territory were generally loose, idle and refractory, aiming to introduce confusion and licentiousness rather than the establishment of any regular society. Excluded from Boston, and banished the Massachusetts, they repaired to a neighboring colony, less tenacious in religious opinion, by which the growth of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was greatly facilitated. (10)

Closing Notes

Thoughts on Native Americans, their similarities to Europeans, and their understandable reactions to Europeans

While some modern eyes might turn away at a few phrases that Warren uses (like “savage”), they would err to do this. In doing so, they would miss the more profound points that she makes, and impute a worldview and manner that Warren did not possess. She saw the relationship between Native Americans and colonists in terms of their similarities, and in these similarities held up Native violence as understandable (even as she most certainly did not like it).

It is an undoubted truth, that both the rude savage and the polished citizen are equally tenacious of their pecuniary acquisitions…when the first rudiments of society have been established, the right of private property has been held sacred. For an attempt to invade the possessions each one denominates his own, whether it is made by the rude hand of the savage, or by the refinements of ancient or modern policy, little short of the blood of the aggressor has been thought a sufficient atonement. Thus, the purchase of their commodities, the furs of the forest, and the alienation of their lands for trivial considerations; the assumed superiority of the Europeans; their knowledge of arts and war, and perhaps their supercilious deportment towards the aborigines might awaken in them just fears of extermination. Nor is it strange that the natural principle of self-defence operated strongly in their minds, and urged them to hostilities that often reduced the young colonies to the utmost danger and distress. (13)

The straw that broke the camel’s back was not taxation without representation, but ingratitude on the part of the Mother Country toward her loyal colonies

“Taxation without representation” is the popular characterization of the American Revolution today, and it’s not wrong. But here Warren gets at something else: ingratitude. The American colonies had supported Britain in many ways, most recently (relative to the Revolution) by fighting and helping to finance the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which was the colonial theater of the related Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) between European powers.

Nor is it surprising, that loud complaints should be made when heavy exactions were laid on the subject, who had not, and whose local situation rendered it impracticable that he should have, an equal representation in parliament. What still heightened the resentment of the Americans, in the beginning of the great contest, was the reflection, that they had not only always supported their own internal government with limited expense to Great Britain; but while a friendly union existed, they had, on all occasions, exerted their utmost ability to comply with every constitutional requisition from the parent state. (16)

Post scriptum: John Adams’ angry response to Warren’s history

Warren’s history reviewed most of the Founders you’ve heard about, and that included her good friend John Adams—and the coverage was not always laudatory. After Adams sent her his first impressions of her book, the two went on to collectively exchange about 200 pages worth of letters (printed as below). In the end, after much effort and years, their friendship would be restored. But that’s a history for another time.

"Can you read?" For a lot of people the answer to this question—in many ways—is "no."

They can certainly run their eyes over short, simple English text and understand it, but they don't currently have the capacity to, at-will, easily take in things like books, essays, or more complex written media.

"I could read a book though." <> "I could quit smoking any time I want." <> "I could start going to the gym." But do you? Think of it as "revealed capacity."

I talk to a lot of people who express this thought: "I used to read books all the time when I was younger. I was a reader. But I can't remember the last time I really read a book, and I definitely don't do it regularly now."

This does reflect a real degradation in capacity. Whether it's brought on by algorithms is a separate question. The capacity loss is real. But it can be reversed.

Just like there is a whole different kind of life on the other side of physical fitness, there is a whole different kind of life on the other side of high-functioning literacy. But there isn't yet a good industry focused on helping adults regain their literacy in this way.

This is one of my 2025 ideas. If you would like to be able to read "hard books" again, or just read regularly again, I'd love to get a coffee and talk through where you are, why you think you're there, and what could be done. DM me, email me by responding to this post, or drop a comment.

Your "zombie era" is not only avoidable, you can likely get to a place where it's not even a threat or a temptation. But it requires training.

Many people look at social media/phones in their personal lives and think (explicitly or otherwise) "I guess I'll just live with this as best as I can, but it's hard to do it well."

I do not think like that at all, and the digital world doesn't create guilt/bad times for me. I love social media, but it's not a threat to my reading, my productivity, or my inner life. But, like physical fitness, this state of mind is the result of deliberate, conscious action that has crystalized into easy, enjoyable habit over time.

There is a different way to live. Rage against the dying of the mind. Turn back the the fall of Algernon.

Some other thoughts:

• "Reading is a composite skill"

• "Some notes on how to read important books"

• "On the Good Art of Fighting distraction"

An aside on Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes published the novel Flowers for Algernon in 1966, after first publishing it as a short story in 1959. It is one of my favorite books, and I reread it about once a year. It is also one of the most heart-wrenching, quietly horrifying things I have ever encountered.

In the story, scientists develop a treatment that allows a mouse, Algernon, to become vastly more intelligent. They then apply this treatment to a man of sub-normal intelligence, Charlie, and watch as he becomes more intelligent than any human alive, even to the point that he takes over managing the intelligence experiment with himself and Algernon as subjects.

The book is styled as Charlie’s diary. At the beginning the prose is simple and broken, and it blooms wonderfully as the “treatment” works. He easily learns more languages, discovers the world through books, advanced mathematics, and more. But eventually the treatment wears off for both him and Algernon, and the reader is helpless to watch as the book’s prose descends toward its original quality.

The part of the book that stays with me in when Charlie realizes, through the brilliant power of his new mind, that the treatment is degrading, and that he is regressing. He is still intelligent enough to realize what is happening to him, and to grieve what he is losing, but he is powerless to stop it. And, eventually, when he descends back to his previous state, we see that he can’t even conceive of what he had. He is kind of happy, even.

It breaks me every time. Of course, almost every human must deal with this phenomenon in some way. We all get old—we all bear witness to our degrading capacities, helpless to reverse the decline. Some of us get dementia or another neurodegenerative disease that, in its early stages, is exactly like the moment where Charlie realizes the treatment is wearing off. Others of us watch this happen to our loved ones.

However: I’m reminded of a medical appointment I had at the beginning of my course of chemotherapy. The medical technician (I must admit I don’t remember the professional title exactly) was an older Japanese man who spoke in a beautifully accented English. As he injected me with a radioactive tracer for a PET scan, he looked me in the eyes and, with tranquil confidence, said: “Do not worry. Technology will save you.”

May it yet save us all.

In many people’s minds, the corporate world is artificially divided into “for profit” and “non-profit.” As most understand these terms, “for profits” are all about meeting the bottom line no matter what, and “non-profits” are about doing good in the world.

This framing is completely wrong, and relies on widespread misunderstanding of what a “corporation” is in the first place. It also ignores that there are many kinds of non-profits that do very different things.

The better frame: every corporate form has a set of affordances attached to it—things that are possible given their legal structure, their societal context, and the people involved in them.

If you want to “do good” in the world, it would be odd if the best way to do that in all cases was to incorporate as a 501c3 non-profit corporation. Clearly that is wrong, not least because 501c3s were only invented in 1969.1 America went to the moon before the modern non-profit was even understood!

Corporations doing good

If you use the more productive frame—it doesn’t primarily matter what your corporate form is, rather what you are able to do—you’ll quickly realize that 501c3s and other non-profit forms are incorrect for many tasks.

Unfortunately, people reflexively reach for them for their social approval and legibility. It’s easy to convince people you have good intentions if you’re a “non-profit,” even if you don’t.

As I wrote recently, I converted my civics school from a non-profit to an LLC:

I have been a fiscally sponsored non-profit for the past year, and it has served me well in that time. But it will not serve me as well going forward. Every incorporated form has a set of affordances, and a business or association should use the form that gives it the best results. MNY is not just a civic school, but an experiment in finding the best form for effective civic groups. This is not a typical path, but I believe it is worthwhile. If you would like to learn more about all of the many corporate forms (including the municipal corporation, which NYC is), indicate that you’d like to take my corporations class.

It’s been an immense benefit, and has allowed me to further my own educational mission.

You don’t need the administrative overhead and compliance of a non-profit do benefit the community: the lesson of Fractal Tech

I’m writing this at the barn raising for Fractal Tech, a business that trains excellent software engineers. But the don’t only do that. They open up their space to others to host events, convene great minds, and more. They already have the lease and the space—why not let friends and others put it to productive use?2 As a result of their public spirit, many other great things have been accelerated, including my own Maximum New York.

Business does not need to be legally required or incentivized to do good. The business owners can just do it. Many already do, but many more could.

And if you just do it, you’ll likely have more flexibility, autonomy, and ability to respond to circumstances than other corporate forms that trade tax advantage for compliance and administrative burden.

I’m not against non-profits, just reflexively reaching for them

I’m not against non-profit corporate forms. I’ve used them myself. But people should consider whether the set of affordances that come along with that legal instrument really match their needs.

You might think “but the legal form requires the good!” No it doesn’t. You all know plenty of useless non-profits that waste money, and plenty of for-profits that have greatly benefited our society. The opposite is also true. At the end of the day, it just matters who runs them, how they run them, and what culture they inspire.

For-profit corporate forms are often much better placed to drive forward a bright, civic future. They are nimble, flexible, and easier ways to reward performance. I know. I’ve lived it.

Reach out if you have any questions.

I’ve written a few pieces on reading and writing here:

• Some Notes on How to Read Important Books (August 4, 2024)

• Personal libraries (June 19, 2023)

• Some Opinions on How to Write Online (May 23, 2023)

After and since each of them, I’ve received consistent notes that could be summarized like this: “But how do I read/write when my phone is distracting me? How do I fight distraction generally?”

Actually finding the answer to that question is particular to each individual’s context, but I’ll tell you some of what I do. Caveat emptor, your mileage may vary, and all other good advice hedges.

I love social media

I have a wonderful time on social media; I love Instagram (especially Reels), Twitter, Substack, and LinkedIn (very underrated). They’ve brought so many great people into my life, they are engines of serendipity, and the content is brilliantly entertaining.

I also don’t have a problem being away from them for extended periods of time, and regularly read and write for hours without my phone.

This is mystifying to some people; they imagine the brute force they’d have to apply to overcome their own phone addiction, and then they project that onto me, imagining that I’m constantly blowing out a forehead vein keeping myself away from the glowy square in my pocket. And then they email or talk to me, asking how I have the endurance.

I then explain that their perception is wrong, usually through analogy to physical fitness. For example:

If you run regularly, your body is used to it. It is easier than it was when you started, for both your muscles and your lungs. And if you become well practiced at it, your body will come to massively enjoy it. From the perspective of the experienced runner, the activity is a joy.

But from the perspective of someone who is new to physical fitness, it might seem like the opposite. It might seem like the advanced runners are just gritting their teeth through massive pain and immolated lungs, and that the source of their strength is primarily their ability to torturously endure. Now, part of getting faster or stronger is in fact abjuring comfort to pursue strength. But it is not what the novice imagines.

The novice takes their own experience, which is that of untrained muscles and untested lungs, and extrapolates that experience into the future. For them, training might seem like a long future of unpleasantness. But like everyone who tries to predict the future by linearly projecting from the present, they would be wrong. They fail to take into account that their body will adapt, and that their experience will change accordingly.

In the same manner, people who witness my friendly, non-addictive relationship with social media need to realize: it has come from the cultivation of good habit over time. And you too can achieve such a relationship with the application of the proper training regimen!

But before I describe what I did specifically, I’ll explain how I overcome fear.

Dispel fear by making its worries concrete

Put simply: I write down what I’m afraid will happen.

When I worked in the corporate world, I had to get in touch with a ton of partners at a large law firm. They knew it, and I knew it—but the partners are always busy, and if I’m being honest, they thought I was wasting their time at least a little bit (even if they thought of our interactions as a necessary evil).

This means that when I wrote up a call sheet about 10 names long, I would immediately feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. I would want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap. I felt dread. A lot of people have these moments in their jobs: you have to do something you really don’t want to do, and this causes you to put off starting it, which causes you to start worring about your slow pace and mounting work.

So how do you dispel this? Write down what you’re afraid of. In my case:

• They’ll yell at me for…doing my job?? No. And even if they did, that’s now a problem for them, not me.

• I’ll get fired because…I’m wasting their time doing my job?? No, they understand that I’m doing my job, and even if they think I’m wasting their time, they’re not going to do anything about that.

• My reputation will be damaged because the partners…will talk about how I wasted their time?? I mean, realistically everyone at the firm understands that we all have different jobs to do, and we all talk to our peers about how we have to do things we don’t like. This is fine.

Once you write your fears down, they are vulnerable to logical thinking. And usually the fears are either unrealistic, or they are deal-withable. OR! You realize they are absolutely beneath you. Every time I’ve done the exercise of writing my fears down, I wind up scoffing at the list a little bit. That’s what I was afraid of? I can deal with it!

I usually don’t have to write things down; most of the time I do the exercise of concretizing my fears in my head. But the result is the same every time: the fear dissipates, and I’m left with a simple set of realistic actions and consequences.

Dispel distraction by making its trade-offs concrete

Distraction can also be treated by being explicit. Instead of stating what your fears really are, you write down what happens if you indulge your distraction, and see if you’re OK with that.

When I was first coming to terms with my phone’s intrusions into my work time, I had the following conversation in my head over and over:

Daniel A (having just sat down to write): I want to go on Instagram.

Daniel B: That's a bad idea.

Daniel A: No it's not, I'll just do it real quick.

Daniel B: It's never real quick, be realistic. Isn't it correct that it could easily eat at least 5 minutes?

Daniel A: It is.

Daniel B: OK, well, do you want to be delayed by five minutes? 

Daniel A: That seems fine--

Daniel B: --and do you also want to immediately start your work session by interrupting it? Isn't that the worst habit? Doesn't it make it easier to interrupt yourself later on too?

Daniel A: It does. I want to go on Instagram.

Daniel B: You are allowed to go on Instagram if you agree to making the following trade-off: you get to go on Instagram right now, but your work session will be damaged, and all future work sessions will be damaged by your reinforced bad habit. Do you want to make that trade-off?

Daniel A: I want to go on Instagram.

Daniel B: That is actually fine, but I'm asking if you want to make the trade-off. All you have to say is that you acknowledge it, and you're free to go on Instagram. 

Daniel A: Well I don't want to make that trade-off. I only want to go on Instagram with no trade-offs. 

Daniel B: Well Instagram only comes with the trade-offs.

Daniel A: Goddamn it. 

Daniel B: I'm not telling you to stay away from Instagram! Just acknowledge the trade-offs. It's not your fault or anyone else's that they exist, they're kind of just a fact of reality. You can't avoid them. Only face them honestly or not. But you'll face them regardless. 

Daniel A: I do not want to make the trade-off.

Daniel B: OK. You can go on Instagram after you write a few hundred words and work out that idea you had. But if you do it right now, you probably won't get started on that. So let's just do that for now. 

I would sit in silence for several minutes, wanting to grab my phone, but arguing with myself in this way. I always kept coming back to an explicit acknowledgement of the trade-offs.

The trade-offs make the decision to check the phone both straightforward and honest without conjuring a fight. I’m not trying to brute-force hold myself into the chair and ignore something I’m clearly somewhat addicted to; doing that sets up a contest between your novice will and the powerful addictive thing. Who do you think is going to win that?

I also don’t blame myself for the trade-offs. Phone usage in the middle of a writing session will interrupt my flow state, interrupt my thought, and generally slow down my work. It is incredibly bad strategy, and the tactics of someone who wants me to not write. This is true. I don’t get mad at myself for not being able to check my phone when I want, or view myself as weak. I would no more view myself as weak for being unable to run five miles with a stomach full of freshly chugged water.

Instead of engaging in a contest of will that I would lose, or berating myself for a perfectly regular fact of reality, I just repeated the explicit trade-offs of my actions until I could accept them. Trade-offs are easier to make when you concretize them, just like fear is easier to face in the same way.

Over time, this deliberate effort had crystalized into a habit. I don’t have to argue with myself anymore. I can swat away the desire to check my phone with a brief flash of emotion that doesn’t even consciously register as a full thought. Just like the seasoned runner who can easily put miles under his shoes.

The Midwestern track coach attitude

I’ll close with the general affect I go into fear, frustration, and other challenging emotions with: the attitude of the Midwestern track coach.

• Stick-to-it-iveness: you can do it, but you’ll need to try multiple times over a consistent period of time. It will get better over time. Don’t extrapolate your first, worst try into the future.

• Mental toughness: it might not be easy. Most good things aren’t. You aren’t owed them being easy—not because anyone is out to get you, but because that’s just how reality works. Embrace the work ahead, knowing you will have earned the result.

• Positive attitude: what an opportunity to improve and cultivate good habits! Life will get better and easier tomorrow because of the work you put in today.

Final note: I wrote this essay in one shot in 47 minutes. It’s about 1,700 words. No phone usage. It’s not magic—it’s the good art of fighting distraction and not just winning the battle, but the war.

Since announcing my Bowling Alone book club, I have predictably come face to face with a common phenomenon: many people want to read important books and engage deeply with them, but they can barely get through the books’ introductions. Their experience of reading books is more properly described as their experience attempting and failing to read books.

Friends and acquaintances often ask me how to remedy this situation—either because they’ve seen my working library, or they’ve witnessed my desk. I have no trouble reading all kinds of books.

So here is an incomplete list of things I tell people when they ask me something like “How can I get myself to read books?”

The prime directive: retain focus

Many people who have trouble with reading actually just have trouble staying focused on anything for very long. The text of this piece is just me coming up with different ways of staying “Focus on reading, do not focus on other things while you are trying to read!”

Understand and embrace the project of reading

Before I list any general principles, I’ll show you the schedule of my first Bowling Alone reading session, which I finished right before sitting down to write this essay:

Preface (11 pages):   20 minutes
Chapter 1 (14 pages): 36 minutes
Break:                7 minutes
Chapter 2 (17 pages): 45 minutes
Break:                16 minutes
Chapter 3 (17 pages): 40 minutes
              
          TOTAL TIME: 164 Minutes (2 hours, 44 minutes)

After about 2.75 hours, I got to page 64.1 The total book is 444 pages, so I can expect to spend ~19 hours total reading it (assuming linear extrapolation). In my experience, the likely range is probably 18-25 hours, depending on a variety of factors.

Why lay this out?

Because most people do not think about reading a book with any more resolution than “read the book,” and they have no other plan than “go until you’re done.” This is a poor strategic posture for almost any activity.2 A book will always take some amount of time to read, regardless of whether or not you track it. Within your life, you will either set aside that amount of time or not. Your odds of doing that go up dramatically if you know what the number is, especially for important books that will require some multiple of ten hours to finish.

Imagine picking up a 20-hour book and trying to read it in a week—and yet people do this all the time! It can be done if you do it explicitly and set aside dedicated blocks of time, but most people will get overwhelmed and frustrated when they’re only 50 pages in after 2+ hours of reading. Simply plan your reading, and simply do not refuse to plan it!

👉 Tip: You can use audiobook recording length for a rough estimate of reading time if you haven’t yet figured out your own reading speed.

Defend the focus required to read

While experienced readers can dip in and out of books productively instead of experiencing them through extended reading session, those who struggle with reading should probably not emulate this practice.

They likely struggle to sustain even one reading session of 20-40 minutes, let alone one that lasts hours, but should cultivate the focus necessary to do so. Reading sessions allow you to reach a flow state and read faster, more productively.

Finishing books requires hours, and if you can’t read for very long at a time, the process of finishing a book will likely end in frustrated failure. Increased completion time makes infrastructure more expensive, and increased reading duration makes book completion less likely.

So how do you maintain focus while reading, and how do you read for longer periods of time?

I’ll tell you the things I do during hours-long reading sessions, and you can take from them what you will.

(1) Kill your phone (or computer). You cannot be trusted with it. Even if you could (which you can’t), it’s not a good idea.

If you use your phone at any point during your reading, you have failed. Do not do it. It breaks your focus, and pulls your attention to other matters. You cannot win against it, and you shouldn’t try.

People often resist this advice—phones are so useful! You can look up things that are relevant! You can take notes! I don’t dispute this, and as you’ll see later in the piece, I do temper this advice for experienced, successful readers. But if you’re not that, I’ll ask you this: why are you trying to make reading harder? Why do you want to introduce an element into the process that you must overcome, control, and restrain? Why introduce that into a process you’ve been having trouble with? Take it out!

(2) Track time

I track how much time I spend reading “important” or “serious” books—those books that are projects vital to my research and intellectual development.3 As you can see in my Bowling Alone reading session schedule, I time each chapter and break.

Why?

First: it cements my sense of “completing something” after I’m done with each chapter. I get the treat and reward of noting the total time it took.

Second: since it quantifies reading time, I can compare chapters to see where I slowed down or sped up. This allows me to think more critically about my experience of the book, like where I might have slowed to take more notes or reread, etc.

Third: from a project management perspective, I can track total time spent with a book. I can see if I’m running behind or ahead of schedule, and compensate accordingly.

Finally: I do this with a digital wristwatch. It’s a few easy buttons that don’t take my focus away. I would not use my phone to track this.

(3) Take breaks—also timed

I usually take a break after each chapter to skim the notes and markups I made, and to just walk around and simmer. Sometimes I will write thoughts in a notebook. But I don’t check my phone on these breaks—the phone is death.

This might resemble the Pomodoro Technique to some, but it is fundamentally different in a few ways:

1. I do not set deliberate break lengths ahead of time. I take breaks that feel natural to my internal sense of thought. If I need to write a bit longer in a break, I do.

2. My timers count up, not down. This guides attention differently. You don’t wait “for the break/work to be over.” You retain control of the time interval, and end it when you feel done. The reason why I track everything on a digital wristwatch is because it’s easy to check without risk of distraction, and because I can observe my natural work patterns while also not worrying about them in the moment. I like to know that my natural break between chapters is definitely more than five minutes. I’ve learned this by watching myself over time.

(4) Intentionally choose your sonic environment

Music or no music? Café or library?

There are many ways to engineer your sonic landscape when you’re reading, and we all have different responses to sonic stimuli. Your goal should be minimizing things that can steal your focus.

I prefer silent places, and I usually wear my noise-cancelling headphone on top of the natural silence.

Sometimes I play music, but that is the exception. When I was reading Bowling Alone, I listened to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony quietly on loop. Although it was playing from Spotify on my phone, my phone was on airplane mode in my backpack, and I could control the music from my headphones if I needed. Under no circumstances was I going to get my phone out of that bag.

You might think you can have your phone “just for music,” but ask yourself: how well has that gone in the past? Your phone will get you. It is the enemy of reading. Do not trust it. “But it will be fine,” you say.

Uh huh. You’re just like every sailor who got close to the sirens and thought they could resist killing themselves and wrecking their ships. Nope. Tie yourself to the mast.

(5) Write

Reading a serious book is an active, responsive experience. You will think about what you’re reading, and you should allow those thoughts to flow in a productive way—it helps engage further with the text.

I do this by underlining and writing margin notes as I read. Later I will use these to help me produce finished book notes.

As I mentioned above, I also write during my breaks. It’s all part of entering an extended reading session, all part of processing and interacting with the book as I move through it with one uninterrupted stream of focus.

(6) Consider food and drink, and how they pull you away from the book

How many hands do you need for it? Do you have to look at it much?

Food and drink can be more distracting than you realize, if they must be paid attention to be consumed.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I’ve been so enraptured by a book that I somehow hold my book open and eat with both hands. But usually I don’t mix the two.

You are far better off taking time to eat expeditiously and exclusively, and then getting back to your book. Otherwise, switching your hands between book and food spends time and divides focus.

(7) Physical, paper books

People have different experiences here, and I’m not going to try to talk someone out of something that works for them.

But paper books probably work best for most people, if they’re trying to read and digest something important.

Not only do the books have no built-in, other purpose to distract you like a phone, but your spacial memory is more primed to take in information laid out in sequential pages, rather than the endless scroll of a phone or Kindle.

Further: while some pieces of tablet technology are progressing wonderfully, most do not rival physically writing notes in a book. Memory and thought consolidation is still the domain of paper.

Optimism of the will, honesty to the self

I’ve been to a ton of events where people get together to read, and I have watched many individuals read.

They sabotage themselves.

They use their phones, they eat involved food, they take too many breaks to talk to others, and they stop too soon, not realizing they’ve only been at it for like 20 minutes.

They are not reading. They are attempting to do many things at once, one of which is read. This goes predictably well—they fail from the starting line, at which they’ve laced their shoes together.

But when people later report their reading success or failure, their own habits are invisible to them (“I read but didn’t get very far.” No: you did not read, I saw you.) This is terrible, because they blame their correctly perceived failure to read on some innate deficiency, rather than execrable, correctable habit.

These things are straightforwardly fixable, although if you really want to read, you’ll likely have to do some work to break your literal addiction to your phone. I can help with this.

If you want a concrete piece of advice to start with, I’d say to time your reading with a timer that: (1) counts up, not down, and (2) is not your phone. You can get basic information to frame your tolerances, and inform your path forward. If you use a timer that counts down, you will be cutting off your baseline natural impulses, and you will not become familiar with them.

By doing this, you’ll see when your energy flags, when your attention dies, and how long you actually invest in the task. For perhaps most people, simply writing down total time spent reading is enough to reveal why they can’t finish a book. They just don’t read very much, and they get frustrated that they’re not done!

Finally: embrace the high adventure of reading! It is a composite skill, and it takes time to cultivate. But you can do it, and reap the compounding rewards of having done so.

It was published in 1936, and follows Scarlett O’Hara from the eve of the Civil War to her life years after it concluded. She grew up in Clayton County, Georgia and later moved to Atlanta, so hers is not an especially happy story—but it is a great one.

I’m currently re-reading Gone with the Wind, so I thought I’d share a short speech that one of its principal characters makes early on, after the South has fired on Fort Sumter, but before the formal beginning of the war.

The slave-owning plantation gentry are all gathered for a summer barbecue when the men begin excitedly discussing the prospect of war with the North. They’re all fully convinced that the South would prevail instantly, when the socially ill-received Rhett Butler gives them an unwelcome economic analysis.

Who, in the modern era, reminds you of the Southerners? Who reminds you of the North?1

From Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler’s “The Arsenal of the North” speech:

“Why, we could lick them in a month! Gentlemen always fight better than rabble. A month—why, one battle—”

“Gentlemen,” said Rhett Butler, in a flat drawl that bespoke his Charleston birth, not moving from his position against the tree or taking his hands from his pockets, “may I say a word?”

There was contempt in his manner as in his eyes, contempt overlaid with an air of courtesy that somehow burlesqued their own manners. The group turned toward him and accorded him the politeness always due an outsider.

“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But—of course—you gentlemen have thought of these things.”

“Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!” thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.

Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.

“The trouble with most of us Southerners,” continued Rhett Butler, “is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga” (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor).

“You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North.” His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. “I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month.”

For a tense moment, there was silence. Rhett Butler removed a fine linen handkerchief from his coat pocket and idly flicked dust from his sleeve. Then an ominous murmuring arose in the crowd and from under the arbor came a humming as unmistakable as that of a hive of newly disturbed bees.

I’ve had above-average facility with computers for a while—but that’s more an indictment of the average than praise for my own ability.

One thing that’s held me back is my inability to code.

But that all changed in the past year, when I went from creating no finished products, to creating several every month that wildly increase my productivity.

This is a short explanation of what caused that transition.

So you couldn’t code, huh?

“Can’t code” is a little strong. I understood many of the fundamental concepts in computer science. I’d finished the online version of CS50. I’d worked through books like Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. I’d completed (with some elision) Replit’s 100 Days of Code.

But I still didn’t feel like coding had caught on internally. I didn’t have any projects I really wanted to pursue, and I wasn’t spending my free time working on coding projects the way I wanted to work on other passions.

I had a lot of coding knowledge, but it hadn’t been productively integrated by the forge of practical reality: I hadn’t shipped anything besides exercises selected for me by others, and I hadn’t built anything someone wanted (including myself). I was thoroughly untethered from a positive feedback loop.

I know a lot of people who get caught in this stage, and they allow whatever knowledge they’d accumulated to wither. But that didn’t happen to me thanks to advances in AI tools, particularly chatGPT, and Replit’s interactive programming environment.

How did chatGPT and Replit make you a coder?

They reduced so much friction around coding—it became an easy use of my time to create productivity increasing tools for myself.

chatGPT helps me write my programs (which are almost always 100 lines or less) quickly, and Replit gives me a way to use that program instantly to get the results I want.

But how do you know if chatGPT is giving you good code?

I only really know how to code functionally in Python—and that’s all I ask chatGPT to do. I type the sequence of instructions for my programs into chatGPT (which I’d otherwise do manually in an IDE by writing all the different parts of the program as comments, and then filling them in), read through the output to see if it looks good, make adjustments if needed, and then deploy the program in Replit. If I get an error, I get chatGPT to help me find the bug if I don’t see it myself.

What’s an example of something you code like this?

I’m currently working on a research project for Maximum New York that involves analyzing all 174 enacted local laws in New York City from 2023.

I wanted a program that would:

• search through the text of all of these laws for any word or phrase I specified,

• create a table that showed all the laws that had my search term, and how many instances of the search term,

• save that table as a .txt file,

• and name each file after its search term.

So I worked with chatGPT to get a ~70-line Python program, pasted it into Replit, and ran it. (I already had a folder with all 174 laws in appropriately named PDFs, which I downloaded with the help of another quick program I made, so I didn’t need to scrape anything from the internet.)

Here’s what the setup looks like when I run the program. Note the console on the right waiting for my search term:

Once I enter my search term, the console prints the program’s search progress:

And when it’s done, it prints the results as a table in the console. It also saves that table as a .txt file in a separate folder:

This is useful?

Yes! Probably not for you, but it definitely saves me a lot of time. I also think it’s fun to search through the docs just to explore.

Your code is terrible, saving results as txt is terrible, you don’t use a real IDE, and you should feel bad.

Listen, I need this program to do very specific things in a way that integrates with my legal research workflow, and nothing more.

I need ~zero friction at my current level of ability.

I don’t need to do anything else with my results other than take a quick look at them with my eyes.

I don’t need a fully decked out IDE (I am a small coder).

If I needed more than these things, I would build that functionality (using more advanced tools if needed). And I imagine I will do that soon, but that’s another stage of development.

Computing is personal again (for me)

I don’t code programs to ship them to anyone but me, at least for now.

But I’m happy to be at this stage—it is my zero-to-one for coding. I regularly create functional programs that help me, and I’m learning more each time I do it. It’s where I’ve always wanted to be, all because modern tools reduced friction in the right places (quickly coding when I need it, deploying a program).

I’d love to hear how you finally got going with coding, or if you’re still having the same trouble I was up until a year ago. Drop a comment, or send me an email!

Before I get into that though, let’s look at what baby showers accomplish more specifically (my friend just had one, so I saw the efficient deployment of this social tech very recently).

What baby showers accomplish

Generally speaking, they take all the work of preparing for a child, and spread it out among a whole community, using a social protocol that everyone understands. Everyone also understands that someone else should plan the baby shower for the parents-to-be. Many hands, light work. More specifically, that means:

• Logistics: decentralized acquisition of everything expecting parents need for their child. This is especially useful for first-time parents, and is aided by using tools like a registry.

• Information: first-time parents don’t always know what they need, and other people and parents have more collective knowledge. A baby shower, especially combined with a registry, helps parents get things they didn’t even know they needed.

• Forcing function: they also serve as a forcing function; if you know you’re having a shower, you need to ask for things, and you have a reason to make a registry.

• Framing: showers turn an event that’s all about helping someone with material items into a celebration, like a birthday party. It’s the difference between “help these parents get what they need so they don’t have to spend so much money” and “happy birthday, here’s that thing you wanted/needed!”

• Norm reinforcement: showers reinforce norms around celebrating birth, new life, and parenthood. And in places where adults don’t come into contact with children, they keep having children on the table as an option. It’s easier to contemplate having children if you see others preparing for, and doing, the same thing.

A word about registries

We use registries for baby showers and weddings, and in both cases they can wildly improve the efficacy of the events. But you might not know how they work (and why would you if you haven’t had to use one), so here’s an overview informed by Priya.

Babylist.com is for baby showers, and if you follow the link you’ll see a ton of resources. Not only do they give you things like “Your Pregnancy Week-by-Week,” with attendant checklists of things you need to have and do, they give you sample registries! (Some even have browser extensions that allow you to select things from any webpage you visit and add it to your registry.) Every woman’s pregnancy is different, and babylist.com provides a wide array of examples to cover everyone’s needs.

When Priya was building her registry, she also reached out to other friends who had had babies, and they sent her their old registries and ideas for items to put on her registry. So, not only are the registries themselves helpful, but by creating a registry you’re creating an artifact to pass on to someone else in the future.

As you can quickly see, registries draw information out of everyone in a decentralized way—way more than they’d otherwise give—and organize it.

Finally, registries are great for the people who want to get you things. They get guidance on what you specifically ask for, and registries display which things someone has already purchased for you, minimizing duplications. If someone sends you a package directly, you can also track it.

Cancer registries: a helpful new approach

Imagine having this kind of information and material coordination for cancer! It would dramatically improve the cancer patient’s experience—minimize work and maximize help—and allow others to help them more easily. Instead of asking “What do you need?”, they could just ask for a link to your registry.

Further, you could probably deputize a friend to make your registry for you, or at least make most of it with your final sign-off. Registries allow a cancer patient to hand a lot of work off to someone in a way that isn’t really possible right now absent a large effort.

I’m imagining how my experience of Hodgkin’s lymphoma would have been different if I could have gone to a cancer registry site, clicked on the “Hodgkin’s lymphoma” section, and seen: sample registries, other people’s registries, checklists made by doctors from my cancer center depending on the nature of my disease, and the ability to just publish a list of stuff and give it to a friend to distribute.

Some very kind people reached out to me after my diagnosis—they’d previously had cancer, and they let me know they’d be there to talk if I wanted. I didn’t actually have the time or the mental space to take them up on their offers, but it would have been great if they’d sent me their old registries (if only they had the opportunity to make them)!

Cancer patients need help determining what they need

From the outside, it might seem like cancer patients know what they need, even if they have a hard time getting it—this is not true at all. Cancer patients often have very little time between their diagnosis and the beginning of their daunting treatment, and they will be shellshocked for at least some of that time. They have an immense amount of financial, administrative, interpersonal, and life decisions to make (for example, I had to decide whether to freeze sperm before my chemo began, and I had to do it quickly).

And because cancer is not a monolith, there is rarely a standard playbook you can pull off the shelf to make this work easier (although registries could help):

[Cancers] have different stages of progression, different subtypes, different treatment regimens (chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and more), different survival rates, different symptoms, different chores (administrative and medical), different treatment side effects, and different social awareness and acceptance.

Cancer patients are usually just as blindsided and ignorant as anyone else, but there is no standard social protocol that makes getting information and resources easy. If anything, we have the opposite: people are afraid to interact with cancer patients, either due to their own fear of death, or the fear of not knowing what to say.

I sent this essay to my mother to review (after all, she had a front row seat to my own cancer journey), and I’m just going to quote her email comments directly and at length on cancer registries:

The cancer victim could gather input from others who have experienced the same or similar treatment regimens, and come up with a list of what others have experienced to be the most helpful. This, of course, would take into consideration living conditions—Are you by yourself? Do you have children to care for? Do you have family nearby? What are the day-to-day things needed to maintain some normalcy on autopilot? You have laundry to do: ask for laundry supplies so that you don't have to remember to purchase them.  Ask for anything that chemo-brain makes you totally forget—Personal hygiene: a shit-load of your favorite toothpaste, deodorant, shampoos, toilet paper, etc., whether for yourself, or for others in your household as well. Children's school supplies, OTC medications, paper plates and cups...

Then there's the usual comfort care items: foods, warm blanket, extra pillows, heating pad, moisturizers...You know—you've experienced it all.

I've read that to provide help to those grieving a death or serious health circumstance, do not ask them "what can I do to help" or say "if you need anything at all, please let me know."

The grieving have no idea what they need—they simply are temporarily brain dead. Instead, just go grocery shopping, supplies shopping, get gift cards to favorite restaurants, etc., and drop it off at their door. If what you've given them is not to their liking, no harm, no foul. They simply don't use it! 

Not only do I fully endorse all of that, but you could bake much of it into a registry. I’ll also note: there are many services, like laundry, that would be great to have on a cancer registry. My laundry became quite backed up, especially after my second dose of chemo, and I paid for a laundry service with a small monetary gift from a friend. It was an immense boost to my quality of life.

A word of thanks to my friends and mother

Despite not having a registry, I still got similar results in effect. I am surrounded by kind, generous, well-adjusted people (I live near my friends, after all); they gave me money, time, their spare rooms, fraternity, their minds, and physical items/food according to their own capacities. They also treated me the same, not like an alien.

I even had one doctor friend offer to be my liaison between me and the hospital if the medical administrivia became too much (she also volunteered to do any medical research I wanted). Since a lot of my treatment happened in the winter, I called all of this my “chemo Christmas.”

But the experience could have been optimized with a registry, both from the perspective of the helpers and the one needing help. I likely would have gotten more of what I needed—but didn’t know to ask for—and a lot of things that would have just made the whole experience nicer. For example, my AirPods case is mostly broken, and doesn’t charge very well. New AirPods would have been great, but I didn’t think to ask for them, because they weren’t like money or food. It would have felt strange.

And for people who don’t have such a strong social support network, registries make it easier to ask for help; they lower the logistical and emotional friction to assisting cancer patients. They are also another way to get resources besides a GoFundMe, which, while helpful, comes with psychological friction for many cancer patients.

More people are likely to order something off your registry (including Visa and store gift cards), where it can be sent directly to you, than independently figure out what you need and mail it.

But what about the event: the cancer shower

My friend Hailey came up with the shower/registry idea at Priya’s baby shower, and it really does make sense. When I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, I would have liked to have had an event where everyone got together for food and good times, especially before my hair fell out (but after would have been OK too). Following the template of a baby shower, I could have also asked some friends to throw it for me.

Of course (and to put it mildly), cancer showers would be different from baby showers.2 They’re about helping to mitigate a bad thing, rather than facilitate a good thing. The psychological aspects are also different: when do you have the shower?3 Do you have it before or after you start chemo (especially because there’s not that much time between diagnosis and the start of treatment to plan things)? What if you don’t get chemo, but surgery? What if you have a cancer with a challenging survival rate—how do showers fit into that picture, as opposed to a cancer like mine, which has a high rate of cure? What if your cancer treatment lasts a long time, and you need more things (do you have a cancer sprinkle?). These things need to be worked out, but they are workable.

I can imagine some people would want a shower-type event, and some people would just want a registry.

Either way, the norm of a cancer shower/registry would be better than the current state of things, a common example of which is laid out plainly by Caitlin Flanagan:

Are you someone who enjoys the unsolicited opinions of strangers and acquaintances? If so, I can’t recommend cancer highly enough. You won’t even have the first pathology report in your hands before the advice comes pouring in. —“I’ll Tell You the Secret of Cancer”

If you want to help make this happen, or you have a friend who needs one of these, drop a comment or forward this post. I’ll be working on it.

Thank you to Hailey, Priya, and Mother for helping me think through this post, and for providing the inspiration for it.