New Liberal Arts: Selected Updates
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Journalism
Traditionally, professional journalists have presented themselves as mediators, whether between ideas and readers, events and historians, celebrities and the public, or the state and its subjects. Now that anyone can communicate to millions with just a cell phone, that gatekeeper role has grown less and less relevant. However, emergent forms of journalism continue to give…
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Iteration
How do you make things? You could lay out the process as a line. You start at one end with a bundle of goals and plans. As you work hard—designing, writing, rehearsing, or doing whatever else is required—you progress along the line. At some point, you get to the end, with a product, a novel,…
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Inaccuracy
Inaccuracy is the art of being intentionally inartful in an immaculate way; it differs from most other liberal arts in that it is not constricted by the singular political perspective ever so entrenched in academe. Thus, it behooves the modern renaissance 2.0 person-in-training to see the world as composed of the true dichotomies—conservatives and liberals,…
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Home Economics
It starts with a bunch of bananas at your local grocery store. As you look at them, you are thinking about the price per pound, and the nutritious benefits they give your body. But what are the broader implications of that bunch of bananas? Who picked them? Was he or she paid fairly for the…
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Genderfuck
No one is normal. Seriously, try to think of a few friends you consider to be pretty normal. And then remember the quirky things they do around you sometimes. And then imagine the freaky stuff they probably do that you don’t even know about. Think how cool it would be if every one of your…
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Food
You are what you eat. Food is part of every system. Humanity was created in the moment that nutrition was transformed into culture. There is nothing about this process that cannot be reversed. Food is the ultimate mutually dependent binary. Food is not food if it is not nourishing an organism. Organisms cannot survive without…
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Finding
NEW 10 INPUT “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING TO FIND?”, thing_to_find 20 PRINT “OK, LET’S FIND SOME ”; thing_to_find 30 FETCH ASSUMPTIONS 40 GET type_of_thing FROM all_types_of_things FOR thing_to_find BASED ON assumptions 50 GET all_resources_available 60 FOREACH resource IN all_resources_available 70 IF resource.type == type_of_thing THEN BREAK 80 NEXT 90 knowledge_biscuit = get_info_from_resource(thing_to_find) 100 IF…
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Creativity
Creativity should be studied as a field in its own right, and it should be included in the new liberal arts. To clarify, I’m not calling for psychology classes on creativity, though that would be great. I’m saying creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja…
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Coding and Decoding
This course is about the deep end, and building the courage to plunge into unfamiliar places. Using lessons derived from the practices of cryptography, programming, and foreign language acquisition, we will learn to deduce information from context and recognize new patterns. A language—of jargon, words, symbols, gestures, or images—is a collection of tokens. Shared language…
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Brevity
140 characters are the new 30 seconds. 30 seconds is forever. Anything important is worth saying quickly. By the time it has been said, it is already the past, and so the saying must become a moment of its own. Brevity is urgency and modesty at once. Attention is the scarcest resource. Millions are dying…