Applications are Open for Foundations of the Liberal Arts, Cohort 1
Break your phone addiction, gain the ability to read books at will, cultivate a beautiful mind and character, and more. Cohort 1 starts September 18, apply today!
Applications for Foundations of the Liberal Arts, running September—December 2025, are now open until September 10! Apply here. Foundations of the Liberal Arts will give you the mental and physical habits needed to master your phone, not be mastered by it. It will give you the skills, methods, and content of reading great books. And it will make your mind, and yourself, more beautiful. Note: the application is shared with another class I’m teaching, Foundations of New York.
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
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.
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
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.
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:
Is over ought. Seek first to understand what is the case, prior to what the case ought to be.
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.
Extend grace to everyone. We’re here to learn together. No one knows everything. We will be better, together.
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.
See here for more information about the nature of that degree. Government degrees are about as high quality as liberal arts degrees broadly, but there is no reason either must be that way. So I teach them the other way.
This is awesome!