David Allen Sibley: What It’s Like to Be A Bird

In this Olio, we will explore the manifestations and possible reasons for the repulsion people feel for their suffering peers, and how that repulsion might be connected to the pressure for performance in a narcissistic “burnout society” To the conventional “How are you?”, most people would automatically answer the emphatic “GREAT” we...

Existing alongside the so-called formal economy—of employment, production, ownership, and sale within a recognized legal regime—is a shadowy realm of economic activity that takes place “out of sight,” “off the books,” and without ordinary social and political sanction. The informal economy employs legions of street vendors, domestic workers,...

How does music reflect the experience of physical decline and the confrontation with death? This question lies behind the notion of late style: the belief in a distinctive musical idiom, of visionary purity or unresolved complexity, achieved by great artists toward the end of their lives. Today the idea has assumed the status of common sense, applied...

Full Course Name: Communities Under Capitalism: Meeting our Needs During Crisis When government fails to help us through times of crisis, how can we meet each other's daily needs and make sure our communities are taken care of? In the face of capitalism that often feels ruthless we must look to other forms of community care. These are the activities...

The Prisoner, the fifth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the opening passage of le roman Albertine, “the Albertine cycle,” is a portrait of obsessive love. Albertine, the prisoner of the title, prowls the golden cage of the narrator’s house, swathed in luxury, the object of his jealous, possessive fixation. How does romantic love...

Femonationalism: Race, Reproduction, and Right-Wing Feminism How and when have colonial and racist oppression been perpetrated in the name of women’s rights? How did eugenics, xenophobia, and nationalism become the project of some feminists, even to this day? While feminist liberation struggles continue to dream abolitionist futures and shape history,...

This workshop unpacks the role of the death midwife from the final breath, through the 3-day home vigil and funeral, until final disposition. It is open to professional and non-professional end-of-life caregivers and anyone wishing to care for their loved-one naturally, at home, according to personal, religious and cultural traditions. Topics explored...

This course is an introduction to astrology charts.  Learn the characteristics that distinguish each planet, astrological house and zodiac sign.  A Natal Chart is a diagram that describes the position of the planets and their relations with the twelve constellations at the time of birth.  Upon successful completion of this course,...

In many ways, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a haunted book—and in turn, one that has haunted readers and writers since its publication in 1847. Join us for a series of lectures that begin with Brontë’s classic Gothic novel, then continue into its literary afterlife, up to the present moment. We will read Jane Eyre alongside texts that take...

In this workshop you will learn the major, profound and lesser aspects of chart interpretation, encompassing squares, trines, conjuncts, oppositions, grand squares, grand trines, inconjuncts, sextiles, orbs, midheavens, ascendants, descendants.  The significance of chart components including glyphs, degrees, house rulers, and angles.  ...

Full Course Name: Horses, Oysters and Pigeons: How Creatures Helped Create New York City Yet the city is also shaped by forces that are not as obvious or visible but nonetheless have had significant impact on the city: its animal inhabitants. Join us as we look at the city’s culture and history through horses, oysters, and pigeons—those...

From the aerial views provided by army hot air balloons to the synchronized camera/machine-guns of World War I to the contemporary sensing operations of military drones, perception has always been linked to destruction. As Paul Virilio wrote, “the function of the weapon is the function of the eye.”  Militarized nation states understand this...

Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin' and the Politics of Song “By 1962, Greenwich Village had become world headquarters for a folk music scene that, to its own occasional shock and horror, was beginning to matter in the music and popular culture business,” wrote the critic David Hinckley. “What made the Village folk community matter beyond...

Food affects each of our lives. It is a global issue in which all people are stakeholders. We all need to eat, and food production is the largest provider of jobs worldwide with over 1.3 billion people employed (GIS Geography). Recent research reports that there are maybe 10 more seasons of “regular” agricultural practices before our food systems...

Complete Course Title: A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing: an Introduction to Marx In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly...