Special announcement

It's time to create. (516 words)

Agnes Pelton, Future, 1941

Today is my birthday. It’s been a hell of a week; most people I know are exhausted. I’m not immune to the shock of the here and now, but as I turn 37, my mind is with the future. We still need to create it. That’s the idea behind this post.

The announcement is this: I’m starting an educational organization. It’s in the para-academic niche that I’ve been writing about since last year (see “Para-academia is the future” and “What is para-academia?"). After several months of work with my co-founders, we’re finally at the stage where we can talk about it openly. This is our very first public message. (!)

Our name is The Lenox Institute for Advanced Study, or LIAS for short. Our website is www.lenoxinstitute.org.

LIAS’s courses and events address the social, political, cultural, historical, creative and philosophical contexts of science and technology. This includes “hard” approaches to science and tech. It also includes offerings that reject standard disciplinary boundaries. We operate online and at select locations in New York City.

One of our major motivations is academia’s inability to meet the accelerating pace of innovation head-on. (For more about that, see my last post: about why higher ed falters in the face of AI). Another is a strong conviction that learning is social. Anybody can find online content about AI, biodiversity, nuclear technology, etc. But without a reliable network of mentors and friends engaged in similar pursuits, the contentsphere can do more harm than good. At its core, education is a conversation between human beings. Our goal is to provide the infrastructure and operational support for that conversation. That’s another way of saying: we exist to help people make friends. I know that sounds corny, but I take the friendship/learning connection seriously. My belief in it comes from lots of life experience.

My co-founders are Shannon Nangle and Ryan Artrip. Shannon holds a PhD in biology and has experience as a startup founder; Ryan holds a PhD in interdisciplinary studies, and his research examines the politics of digital media. LIAS currently consists of the three of us, plus a growing network of collaborators assisting us in various capacities.

In future updates, I’ll share how this got started, along with calls for specific forms of support and collaboration. For now, we welcome general expressions of interest, which can include anything from requests to be put on our mailing list to ideas for how we might work together. Please get in touch via info@lenoxinstitute.org or any of my personal accounts, if you have them.

Last but not least: if you believe in this work, please share this post and the website (here it is again). On that note, through the end of April, paid subscriptions to Elf Theory are only $1/month forever if you sign up with this link. “Forever” pricing is not bad in this economy! I created the discount because Substack tends to boost accounts with a higher number of paid subscribers. Visibility is priceless to us.

Thanks in advance. I hope you’re thinking about the future, too.