the fifteen subjects
Subjects
Each subject is treated at introductory college level. Lessons are tagged by progression stage — foundation, deepening, comparison, synthesis — so you can choose how deep to go.
Biology
How living systems work at the cellular and organismal level, written for readers who want the real mechanism rather than the cartoon version.
9 lessons
Chemistry
How matter is structured and transformed at the molecular scale, with attention to the reasoning behind chemical concepts rather than memorization.
7 lessons
Engineering
How designers work under constraints — strength, cost, failure, time — and the reasoning that turns a physical principle into something that holds up in the world.
7 lessons
Earth Science
How the planet works as a coupled system: rocks, oceans, atmosphere, and the deep-time processes that shape the surface we live on.
7 lessons
Philosophy
Arguments about identity, mind, knowledge, and value, treated with the same care a careful philosopher would extend to a colleague's strongest objection.
7 lessons
Physics
How physical systems are modeled, where the models break, and how physicists choose between competing accounts of the same phenomenon.
7 lessons
Investing
How markets, portfolios, and risk actually behave. Educational rather than advisory: the lessons describe what is, not what to do.
7 lessons
Business
How firms are organized and how they compete — strategy, operations, and the structural reasons some businesses persist while others don't.
7 lessons
Literature
Close reading of poems, novels, and plays, with attention to how the work makes meaning rather than to summary alone.
7 lessons
Critical Thinking
How to evaluate arguments, weigh evidence, and notice the moves that good and bad reasoning have in common across very different topics.
7 lessons
Mythology
How human cultures have used myth to think about origins, death, fate, and the social order — read seriously, neither as literal history nor as quaint superstition.
7 lessons
War History
How wars actually unfolded — the contingencies, contested causes, and human decisions that shape outcomes — with care to avoid neat narratives that flatten what really happened.
7 lessons
Astronomy
How astronomers learn about the universe — what we measure, how we measure it, and what counts as evidence at scales no instrument can directly probe.
7 lessons
Psychology
How the mind actually works — memory, learning, perception, social behavior — written with attention to what the experiments showed and what later research complicated.
7 lessons
Religion
Introductions to the major living religious traditions and close readings of their foundational texts — engaged seriously as intellectual and historical systems, not as positions to defend or dismiss.
10 lessons