In 2009, after a semester and a half, I dropped out of graduate school.  I’d been attempting to get a M.A. in English literature, but, as happens with everything I do, things did not go as planned. The experience was nothing like I thought it would be.  

Getting a liberal arts degree from a public university (and for all I know, private ones as well) is like drinking from a communal trough. There’s a lot of bustling, muddying, and fighting for resources-for classes you need, for the good professors, for a parking space-there’s not even room to sit and think. At the end you get a piece of paper that says you’ve drank sufficiently from the trough, and then someone might hire you.

But what about those of us who are intensely curious about everything, who can’t pick a path as narrow as the university’s course descriptions, and who will, in all honestly, have several careers in their lifetime?

The system is imperfect to say the least. And yet we are compelled to participate. As I was drinking from the trough, trying not to swallow too much backwash and shit that had fallen in with the rest, I thought about what I was and wasn’t getting from all of it. If I stood up and turned around, I would find an entire world of learning opportunities. I would no longer sicken myself on the same stuff that everyone else- often polluted, one-size-fits-all education. This is a point in history in which people have access. We have access to nearly any book we want. We can travel easier than at any other time. We can talk to people on the other side of the world. Why must we sit in a classroom and learn? Once I began to think about this, I couldn’t stop. Everything I’d been learning was watered down. It was second and third-hand information. Instead of reading about Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx through a professor’s interpretation of the writings of people other than Freud and Darwin, why not go to the source? Why not read Freud’s works on dreams and sex, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto?

I decided to step away from the trough. I’ll read widely and voraciously: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, ancient, and contemporary. Philosophy, economics, physics, psychology. I’ll learn straight from the great thinkers and inventors themselves. I’ll start as close to the beginning as I can, and see where this takes me. The goal is to better understand how the world-and the people in it-work. This website is a record of that journey. It’s pretty much guaranteed not to go as I plan.