Ring 0 · The Instrument
Attention
Where you put it, who wants it, what it costs. The instrument you think with — before you think with it.
Cognitive Science: How We Think
Pattern recognition, heuristics, cognitive biases. Why smart people believe things that aren’t true, and what to do about it.
Critical Thinking & Argumentation
Logic, fallacies, Schopenhauer’s 38 ways to win an argument dishonestly. Know your enemy.
Ring 1 · The Field · Prof. S. Blenany + Open
Vulnerability as Power
Bodies, bonds, and institutional violence from romantasy to Kafka. Starts with Fourth Wing. Ends with Audre Lorde. Your last performance review is in there somewhere.
Whose Story? Whose Voice?
Narrative power, erasure, and reclamation from Twain to Percival Everett to Get Out. The canon is a record of who got to decide what greatness meant.
Future Tense
Narratives of collapse and resilience. Butler, Robinson, Steinbeck, Orwell, Hagens, Meadows. The world is not ending all at once. But it is changing faster than our institutions can adapt.
Drawing from Observation
Learning to actually see, not just look. Pattern recognition through visual training. 30 minutes daily. No prior experience required.
Introduction to Political Theory
Plato through Foucault, with stops at Arendt, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville’s more alarming observations about democracy.
Ring 2 · The Architecture
Thy Kingdom Come
Starts with a primary source document proposing to reorganize the executive branch in the name of God. Ends with Octavia Butler, who named this moment in 1993 and was correct.
Introduction to Complex Systems
Network theory, emergence, feedback loops. Why things collapse, why things cascade, and why “nobody could have predicted this” is almost never true.
What Has Us
Starts with a children’s novel naming the shadow. Ends fifteen weeks later with the student writing their own diagnosis. Eighteen centuries of vocabulary in between.
The Human Predicament
Thermodynamically speaking. The economy runs on energy, not money. It has been running, fast, on 500 million years of stored sunlight we will not get back. You will not be able to open a package the same way again.