Every course is a point on the same map. Follow a question far enough and it hands you to its neighbours: history to economics, physics to philosophy, language to the mind.
a coursea connection your guide can walk you acrossclick a point for its waypoints
Select a course: any point on the chart, or any row below.
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Flight log.
Eight evenings. Four disciplines. One question that will not leave you alone.
COURSE 02 · WHY DO CIVILISATIONS RISE AND FALL?
01 ROMEBegin at the height. Grain fleets, straight roads, and no doubt anywhere.
02 COINAGE & TRUSTThe silver thins, and belief thins with it. Money was a promise first.
03 COMPLEXITY'S COSTTainter's ledger: every new fix costs more than the one before.
04 ECOLOGY OF COLLAPSESoil, timber, rainfall. The quiet partners in every fall.
05 THE VIEW FROM CHANG'ANThe Tang watched their own noon pass. The pattern is not only Roman.
06 NOWEight evenings in, the question turns around and looks at you.
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The route every journey takes.
01 — Immersion
Step away from the everyday and into a subject. Lectures, readings and the guide at your side from the first minute.
02 — Connection
Disparate ideas join, like neurons firing together. The map above lights up as your question pulls in its neighbours.
03 — Enlightenment
The click. Understanding you own, because you made the connections yourself with a guide checking every weld.
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Signal, two ways.
Learning GuideThe world is full of questions worth getting lost in. Choose one. I'll help you find your way deeper.
Start me on language. Where did it come from?
Learning GuideNobody knows for certain, and the honest map of the guesses is better than any single answer. First connection: what songbirds and toddlers have in common.
Go on, then. What do they have in common?
Learning GuideBoth babble before they mean. Both learn inside a window that closes. A question back: is that something taught, or something grown? Answer it and you have crossed into 09, How Does the Mind Work?