Time to go back to class
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Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Lifelong learning is booming, with informal lectures, classes and discussion series quickly gaining popularity.
- Whether it's literature, film or the history of plastic surgery, the topics are abundant and the in-person attendance is strong, The Cut reports this week.
- Online learners are turning to Substack communities, Zoom classes or even AI chatbots that can generate personalized syllabi.
The big picture: We're seeing the rise of AI doing the critical thinking for us, despite its often generic output. Plus, we know learning new things is one of the most effective tools we have to stave off dementia in an aging population.
- Spending an evening marking up a syllabus, going deep on a topic or discussing Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" might be the ultimate antidote for the perpetually online condition of brain rot, Hope Corrigan notes in The Cut.
Zoom in: Lectures on Tap, based in New York, presents 45-minute talks from academics on topics like "Why People Cheat?" and "Summer Solstice and the Science of the Sun."
- Profs and Pints, which started in D.C., hosts lectures in bars on "The Great American Road Trip" and "The Physics of Baseball."
Both are expanding. Lectures on Tap is coming soon to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while Profs and Pints has expanded to multiple cities, including Dallas, Detroit, Nashville, Philadelphia and Richmond, according to its website.
- Bookstores can also double as sites for classes: I took a Details & Dialogue class earlier this year at D.C.'s Politics & Prose, which offers courses on history, writing, classics, poetry and more.
- You might even try a brewery: Common Roots Brewing Company in upstate New York has hosted lectures on topics like "Ticks and the Diseases They Carry" and "Wood Identification & Old House Myths."
Washington Post journalist Karen Attiah's class at Columbia University on race and media was canceled last year.
- She has since created an independent version of the class and sought potential students via her newsletter and a Google Form with a sliding-scale payment system.
- "I hope that this can be a model for people to say, 'We can think outside of these structures, these institutions, that trade on prestige and are asking us to believe in their prestige, even as they're caving in on their own values that they use to market themselves," Attiah told Corrigan.
- Within 48 hours of posting, 500 people had reportedly signed up — with more than 2,000 on the waitlist.
