Weekly Pose Ponder No. 14
Summarizing the week's posts -- preview of what's coming, "The Core" for Pondercraft, Michael Magoon on Progress, reading history, and an opportunity to study Arendt
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This week I leaned heavily into learning opportunities, with an overview of the Pondercraft “Core,” some thoughts on how to read history, and an opportunity to study Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this July with Samantha Rose Hill.
The week’s featured Substack was Michael Magoon’s From Poverty to Progress.
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Making Progress
Welcome back after the break. Today is “meta Monday” offering a short preview of what’s to come here at Pose Ponder over the next three weeks. Pose Ponder publishes daily on weekdays, 3 weeks on, 1 week off. First up will be a dedicated focus on what could go into a curriculum Core for lifelong learning in the Anthropocene, branching off from this introd…
The Core
So you want to start a program of lifelong learning for the sake of being a good human in the Anthropocene? How to go about that? Here’s a first cut plan. If, in the long run, there will evolve a “curriculum” with a Core and — expanding out from there — spokes or paths, what is that Core?
Mission: Progress
On Wednesdays, I’m featuring Substacks I’ve come across that are instructive and intriguing. Today’s feature is From Poverty to Progress by Michael Magoon. Michael Magoon’s mission is to (re-)enable the pursuit of material progress in contemporary society, based on the historical accomplishments of the last few centuries. I particularly like his definition of progress: “the sustained improvement in the mater…
Reading History
The present is fleeting. News abounds, but without context it’s a lot of noise — and doom. The “news cycle” abandons quickly whatever is happening today and yet resurfaces the same-old, same-old, again and again. (Back in college I used to watch the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, as it was called, which was one of the better sources of news and analysis. After…
Reading Arendt's Human Condition
Early readers of Pose Ponder know I’m a big fan of Hannah Arendt. Several years ago, I took a course offered through the Brooklyn Institute on Arendt’s Life of the Mind, taught by Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill. Samantha has since published a very nice biography of Arendt,