Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

July 15, 2026

The Unstealable Education: Why the University Will Bury Its Undertakers

The undertakers are circulating again, and this time they have given the university five years to live. The argument runs like this: when a machine can answer any question in any field at any hour, why would anyone pay tuition, or sit four years for a credential a chatbot renders quaint? Close the campuses, the prophets say. Sell the quads for condominiums. The library is now a login. I have been hearing this prophecy, in one costume or another, for my entire working life, and the prophecy is older than the university itself. In the Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates warns that the new technology of writing will plant forgetfulness in the soul, because men who trust marks on papyrus will stop exercising memory and will carry the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was describing the alphabet. He might as well have been describing a data center.

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June 20, 2026

Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

An old professor of mine, holding forth in 1987, handed his students one sentence to carry out the door: don’t make the right decision; make the decision right. He attached a coda that landed harder than the maxim itself. Regret, he told us, is mindless. I have been turning that sentence over for nearly four decades, and the turning has become its own education, because the sentence makes a metaphysical bet most listeners never notice they are taking. It claims that rightness arrives after the choosing, manufactured through labor and revision, and that no quantity of advance analysis can locate it beforehand, since the future refuses to sit still long enough to be computed. With one stroke the professor moved the entire moral weight of decision-making off the moment of selection and onto the years of execution. Pick a door, any door, then build a house behind it.

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February 22, 2026March 3, 2026

The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning?

Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high school before being trusted to cut into a human body. A lawyer spent seven years and a bar exam before being permitted to argue before a judge. A professor spent a decade accumulating the credentials required to stand before a lecture hall and declare, with institutional authority, that they knew something you did not. The entire architecture of Western professional life was built on a single economic premise: knowledge is scarce, therefore knowledge is valuable, therefore the people who possess knowledge deserve premium compensation for granting access to it. That premise is now dead. It did not die slowly. It was killed in roughly three years, and we are only beginning to understand the corpse.

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August 22, 2016August 8, 2017

American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland (The Script)

I started a new podcast on July 18, 2016 called “David Boles: Human Meme” and I have had some great luck with episodes like Of Wealth and the Starless Eye and Omne Trium Perfectum: The Rule of Three and De Anima and the Demon Soul, but today’s podcast — American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland — has taken off on a life of its own, and that’s precisely what you hope to have happen in a podcast about human memetics and the how and why we learn and share knowledge!

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July 20, 2012

Can You Learn in Your Sleep?

I was once in a relationship with a young woman who said that the resolutions to some of her biggest unresolved problems at her school came to her while she was sleeping. She would simply think about the problem that was bothering her while she was getting ready for bed and resolved to find the solution, and it would invariably come to her in some form during her dreams. I attempted to do this as well but found that no resolutions ever came and that I was always dreaming about unrelated subjects — I suppose that finding solutions to problems was just a talent that she had, or somehow she trained herself to be able to do this. I still can’t do it, sadly. However, I am fairly excited to try out something not entirely different and seemingly a bit more grounded in science fact than this dream problem solving ability.

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August 16, 2011May 23, 2013

How the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Makes Us Think there are Coincidences

When I was in high school, I had a crush on a fellow student that happened to live in room 23 of her dormitory. It wasn’t too long before I found out indirectly that she actually had less than no interest in me and so I didn’t attempt to pursue any kind of relationship with her — I just didn’t want to get hurt. Not long after these events, however, I began noticing that the number 23 was popping up everywhere. I would notice it on a box of cereal, or a page in a library book would be dogeared to that exact page. What a coincidence, I thought, that I had recently had a crush on a girl who lived in room 23 and now the number seemed to be following me everywhere I went.