11 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2025
    1. Opinion: This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education by [[Jennifer Frey]] 2025-07-17 in New York Times

      Frey argues that it's college administrators who are killing off the idea of a liberal arts education. In her experience, students are thrilled to be in these programs and participate in them.


      Me: Some of the pressure, also indicated here, is from toxic capitalism which is pressuring students to be only career-focused in their educational journeys. This pressure leaves much less space for the humanities.

      Read: Fri 2025-07-18 7:13 PM Updated: 2025-07-19

  2. Jun 2025
  3. Nov 2023
  4. Oct 2023
    1. This is great and yes it makes perfect sense, thank you!The comment on reading is super helpful. As I've mentioned on here before I've come ti PhD straight from industry, so learning these skills from scratch. Reading especially is still tricky for me after a year, and I tend to read too deeply, and try to read whole texts, and then over annotate.It's good to be reminded that this isn't how academic reading works.

      reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

      Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

      Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

      Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

      Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

      As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

      These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

  5. Sep 2023
    1. 'The Aeneid' Begins (Schedule and Context)

      reply to u/epiphanysherald at https://www.reddit.com/r/AYearOfMythology/comments/16eti72/the_aeneid_begins_schedule_and_context/

      I've not listened to it before, but some may find Elizabeth Vandiver's Aeneid of Virgil from The Great Courses series to have some useful information and background while reading: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/aeneid-of-virgil.

      It's not terribly expensive on their website, but many public libraries will have copies available for free, often including streaming through Overdrive.com, HooplaDigital.com, or other related free platforms.

      Others in their series including those I've gone through from Vandiver before (The Iliad of Homer comes to mind) have been useful/helpful, especially with regard to context and history.

  6. Feb 2023
  7. Oct 2022
  8. Apr 2022