address and phone numbers for Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial designer responsible for the The Western Electric model 500 telephone series and the later princess phone.

South Pasadena City Directory, 1961-1962<br /> by California Directory Publishing Co. https://archive.org/details/csp_000062/page/n21/mode/2up?view=theater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_signal

It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.

Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.

https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Democratic-Culture-Mortimer-Intellectual/dp/0230337465

The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) by Tim Lacy

Syntopical Construction by [[Dan Allosso]]

https://www.amazon.com/GREAT-BOOKS-David-Denby/dp/0684835339

Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

How could one distribute the effects evenly?

What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.

These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/second-unboxing

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/unboxing-the-great-books

https://werd.io/2023/doing-it-all

Interesting to see what, in generations past, might have been a gendered (female) striving for "having it all" (entailing time with children, family and a career) has crossed over into the masculine space.

Sounds like Ben's got some basic priorities set, which is really the only thing necessary. Beyond this, every parent, especially of new babies, in the W.E.I.R.D. culture is tired. By this measurement he's doing it "right". What is missing is an interpersonal culture around him of extended family and immediate community of daily interaction to help normalize his conditions. Missing this he's attempting to replace the lack of experience with this area by reaching out to his online community, which may provide a dramatically different and biased sample.

Some of the "it takes a village" (to raise a child) still operates on many facets, but dramatically missing is the day-to-day direct care and help that many parents need.

Our capitalistic culture has again, in this case of parenting in the W.E.I.R.D. world, managed to privatize the profits and socialize the losses. Here the losses in Ben's case are on his physical well-being (tiredness) and his mental state wondering if his case is "normal". A further loss is the erosion of his desire for a family unit and cohesion of community which the system is attempting to sever by playing on his desire to "have it all". Giving in to the pull of work at the expense of family only drives the system closer to collapse.

The Syntopicon Vault by Dan Allosso

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17oxi03/the_most_common_dream_in_every_country_mapped/

According to this map "The Most Common Dream in Every Country" the West spends a lot of time dreaming about their teeth falling out.

reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).

Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.

I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.

As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.

Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

Our Journey, Day 83 by Dan Allosso

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.

See full quote: https://hypothes.is/a/TTPGtl_GEe6psRsVpOxigg

Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...

This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.

Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:

Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

I read the first edition.

Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac

Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html

It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.

Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.

There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.

Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

Meador, Jake. “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church.” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/.

Meador looks at how churches might offer better community as a balm to W.E.I.R.D. lifeways and toxic capitalism.

Why must religion be the source for these communal and social supports? Why can't alternate social structures or institutions handle these functions?

Is this why the religious right is also so heavily opposed to governmental social support programs? Are they replacing some of the needs and communal desires people in need have? Why couldn't increased governmental support programs be broader and more holistic in their leanings to cover not only social supports, but human contact and community building as well.

Do some of these tensions between a mixed W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D Americans cause a lot of the split political identities we see in the last few decades? What is the balm for this during the transition?

Extreme focus on financial and professional success has driven people to give less time to communal spaces and experiences including religious life.

Is this specific to America's brand of toxic capitalism or do other WEIRD economies experience this?

Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

• Has anyone seen them for sale?
• Made their own?
• Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
• Used a third-party company to design and print something?

In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

• The School of Athens by Raphael
• The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Other thoughts? suggestions?

Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

Apparently every age feels like they're moving into the abyss, even when they're making great strides.

I love this acronym!

explore relationships here with body doubling, observer effect (physics), and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.

Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".

It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.

Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?

A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)

How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

The AdlerNet Guide, Part III<br /> by Amy Hunt

https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabritannicagreatbooksofthewesternworld/Encyclop%C3%A6dia%20Britannica%20-%20Great%20Books%20of%20the%20Western%20World%2C%20Volume%201%20-%20The%20Great%20Conversation/

Lubbock's List: http://www.greaterbooks.com/lubbock.html

http://www.greaterbooks.com/

Center for the Study of the Great Ideas

https://web.archive.org/web/20190806154724/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gbww/index.html

University of Adelaide digital collection of the Great Books of the Western World using public domain sources within their collection.

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world

A digital (app?) version of The Great Books of the Western World with cross references.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ebooks/comments/eao9c8/great_books_of_the_western_world_ebook_collection/

Someone's collected digital copies of most of the Great Books of the Western World collection here.

https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britannicas-great-books-of-the-western-world

the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

Conversely, in Western jurisprudence the emergence of the concept of environmental personhood can be traced to Christopher Stone’s seminal 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” in which the American professor argued that the natural environment as a whole should be granted rights15 and be empowered to institute legal proceedings in its own right through a guardian entity.16 This would enable courts to take injury to the environment into account and to award relief that would directly benefit the environment.17 Stone emphasized that environmental personhood was not as radical as it initially appeared, noting that the legal world is populated by inanimate rights-holders: “trusts, corporations, joint ventures . . . to mention just a few.”18 Stone further drew a parallel between granting rights to nature and the history of the conferral of rights on oppressed or minority groups in ways “theretofore, a bit unthinkable.”19

Vandiver, Elizabeth. Classical Mythology. Audible (streaming audio). Vol. 243. The Great Courses: Western Literature. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2013.

Vandiver, Elizabeth. “Classical Mythology: Course Guidebook.” The Teaching Company, 2013. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/classical-mythology.

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.

http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

Photos from

"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.

https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

Henley, J. (2021, October 11). UK’s high Covid case rates buck trend as western Europe outperforms east. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/11/covid-rates-lower-western-europe-than-central-and-eastern

Ben Bradshaw. (2021, November 2). More than 50 #COVID19 cases in Parliament. U.K. still highest infection, hospitalisation & death rates in Western Europe. Still virtually no mask discipline among Tory MPs. Dwindling on public transport too. #Covid19UK [Tweet]. @BenPBradshaw. https://twitter.com/BenPBradshaw/status/1455451405205098498

Blake. (2021, November 11). Wie ungeheuer peinlich das ist. #impfpflichtjetzt #Neuinfektionen #Corona #Impfung https://t.co/DvIdDhOocM [Tweet]. @BlakesWort. https://twitter.com/BlakesWort/status/1458794747082989574

http://www.nationalgreatbooks.com/cirriculum/background.html

Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

found by way of

Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022

https://occidental.substack.com/p/my-adler-antinet

Cross posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wromeb/the_antinet_as_an_aid_to_analytical_reading_a_la/<br /> with additional commentary.

Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)

My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.

Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus

Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

Are we training thinkers or doers?

Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

Based on some beyond the average knowledge of Indigenous cultures, I'm reading some additional context into this statement that is unlikely to be seen or understood by those with Western-only cultural backgrounds who view things from an ownership and capitalistic perspective.

There's a stronger sense of identity and ownership of language and knowledge within oral traditions than can be understood by Westerners who didn't grow up with it.

He obviously feels like we're stealing from him all over again. We need better rules and shared definitions between Indigenous peoples and non before embarking on these sorts of projects.

Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

Given the predominantly non-literate civilizations that comprised the ancient Near East, I've been wondering about how they may have actually been closer to Indigenous cultures than they are to more modern, literate Western culture.

Perhaps he shouldn't dismiss them so readily here, but rather tie them more directly into his broader thesis.

Indigenous sciences are highly interconnected while Western sciences tend to be highly sub-divided into ever smaller specializations.

Are Indigenous sciences naturally interconnected or do they form that way because of the associative memory underlying the cultural orality by which they are formed and transmitted? (I would suspect so, but don't yet have the experience to say definitively. Evidence for this should be collected.)

A primary difference between Indigenous science and Western science is the first is intimately connected to the practitioners while the second is wholly separate.

Would Western science be in a healthier space currently if its practice were more tightly bound to the people who need to use it (everyone)? By not being bound to the everyday practice and knowledge of our science, increasingly larger portions of Western society don't believe in science or its value.

This is a great pull quote for the book, particularly for Westerners.

However, these ideas are not being introduced to the "world" for the first time, they've long lived in indigenous cultures. We should be more pointed in underlining that they're being introduced to the "Western World" for the first time. These ideas should take up their own space in the pantheon of intellectual history.

Ben Bradshaw. (2021, October 19). Very disappointing non-answer from the Health Secretary to my question why the U.K. has the highest #Covid19 infection, hospitalisation & death rates in Western Europe. Https://t.co/jrxb872YpB [Tweet]. @BenPBradshaw. https://twitter.com/BenPBradshaw/status/1450426408614993923

ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 9). There are many things I would not have believed about the pandemic pre 2020, but top of them is the fact that Western nations would completely ignore 24 months worth of actually implemented policies that were vastly more successful [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1480162136240398339

Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

jorgenponder — om coronavirusepidemin. (2022, January 6). The West: “We think you’re doing covid pandemic strategy all wrong.” Asia: “We don’t think of you at all.” https://t.co/fClY310vim [Tweet]. @jorgenponder. https://twitter.com/jorgenponder/status/1479072019174019073

Nationalistic, racial, and cultural blinders have led us to posit broadly accepted (positive) ideas like democracy as having developed and grown out of Western ideas rather than attributing them to historical cultures and societies all over the world.

Is it possible that the delivery of the ten commandments was a moral and ethical ill brought upon Western culture? Was the fact of one person (or God, in this case) creating a hierarchical structure of one commanding another that began the idea of inequality in Western culture?

Courtney, D. S., & Bliuc, A.-M. (2021). Antecedents of Vaccine Hesitancy in WEIRD and East Asian Contexts. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 5873. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.747721

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

Brief history of the "great books".

The Left’s Covid failure. (2021, November 23). UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-lefts-covid-failure/

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

Kwiek, M. (2021). The Globalization of Science: The Increasing Power of Individual Scientists. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/gj4aq

This is a paper I wrote for ART 126 at Trinity Western University while I was studying Communications and Fine Arts in the early 90s.

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

what a lovely sentence

How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?

What do they still have to teach us?

Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

Masks and Their Moralities | The Familiar Strange. (n.d.). Retrieved September 1, 2021, from https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2021/08/30/masks-moralities/

Trisha Greenhalgh on Twitter: “LONG THREAD on masks. Mute if not interested. Do masks work? Why do some people claim they don’t work? Do they cause harm? What kinds of masks should we wear? How does masking need to change now we know that Covid is airborne? When can we stop wearing them? Get your popcorn. 1/” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://twitter.com/trishgreenhalgh/status/1414294003479089154

POLITICO Digital Bridge: COVID-19 disinformation — Digital divide — Mark Warner. (2021, March 11). POLITICO. https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/politico-digital-bridge-covid-19-disinformation-digital-divide-mark-warner/