Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World in a Big Way

Modern life, from the dishwasher to the International Space Station, depends on some combination of the nail, wheel, spring, magnet. lens, string and pump.  With the invention of the nail, houses, boats, weapons, and other vital things could be built.  The ingenious wheel enabled wheeled transportation which conquered much of the world nearly overnight about 6,000 years ago. Springs store and release energy in forms ranging from the bow to dampers.  The magnet, although a natural phenomenon, is the basis for essentials from light bulbs to the internet.  Curved glass (i.e. lenses) was known since the dawn of civilization, but hit the jackpot when the 17th century produced the microscope and the telescope.  The pump... think of the heart.  Roma Agrawal is an expert guide, who emphasizes the big picture.  If you are looking for simple explanations of how things work, this SDG is not for you.

This SDG will be an entertaining riff on the building blocks of engineering.  Remember there is a reason why the phrase 'nuts and bolts' has passed into our everyday language to signify what's really important about any situation.

Museum Madness: Exploring L.A.'s Niche Museums

With over 100 museums to visit and explore in LA County alone, it's all we can do to visit the larger museums once a year much less seek out the smaller, niche museums that have long been on our "someday-I'll-get-there" list.  The "Museum Madness" SDG will be a great way to finally visit some of these niche museums in and around Los Angeles. 

This 12-week SDG will be organized differently from standard SDGs.  One week will be focused on discussing the history, collections, artists and special exhibitions at a particular museum and the following week will be spent visiting that museum and seeing the art up close and personal.  

There will be no textbooks.  Each participant will research the exhibits for their assigned museum and select topics, artists, representative works and study materials for distribution to the group.  Discussion Outlines can be submitted separately or combined with PowerPoint presentations so we can see and discuss specific works prior to seeing them in person. 

Have no fear--the discussions will have the usual rigor expected of PLATO SDGs with the added bonus of field trips!  And for those of you who can spare the time, we can arrange to get together before or after the field trips and enjoy lunch or happy hour at a local eatery.  

ELECTIONS 2024

Every four years our nation goes through a political paroxysm of (pick one or all): furious activity, anxiety, fear, or loathing. The Presidential election -- this year may be the worst ever. The nation has gone through a grueling time since the 2020 election. Now, not only must we choose our president & vice-president, 1/3 of all Senators, all members of the House of Representatives, countless governors and state legislators – we are faced with two very different philosophies of governance. 

 This SDG proposes to study Election 2024 in each of the three terms in 2024. While we will focus on the Presidential race, we’ll also discuss important local and national trends & issues as they emerge.

Vermeer’s Hat

We shall study cultural history of the 17th century illustrated by remarkable paintings of Vermeer. The text provides new ways of thinking about the origins of commonplace objects. Course length - 7 weeks.

In one painting, a military officer in a Dutch sitting room flirts with a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer’s images haunt us with the beauty and mystery - what stories lie behind this stunningly rendered moments? These pictures, which seems so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The dashing officer’s hat is of beaver fur from Canada, while the pieces of silver, mined in Peru, might be used to purchase the Chinese porcelain seen in other Vermeer paintings. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, we trace the web of trade that was spreading across the globe in the 17th century. Vermeer’s Hat shows just how rich is the vision and how the urge to acquire such things was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

Humanly Possible: Tracing a Secular History

Introduce yourself to the men and women who have resisted religious dogma and fixed ideologies to carve out a way of thinking in which individuals occupy center stage. Humanists are freethinkers, following no predetermined path. They are committed to inquiry and formal education and believe that “the meaning of our lives is to be found in our connections and bonds with others.” 

In the 14th century, Petrarch and Boccaccio strove to cultivate “the joy in writing” and worked to enlarge and salvage the “wrecked or sunken knowledge” embodied in classical manuscripts. They were followed by the northern humanists as Erasmus and Montaigne, whose famous essays embraced “both [the] philosophical and personal,” along with the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, “the most intellectually merciless thinker of his time.” During the 16th century, humanists became “less naively adoring of the past, and ever more interested” in human complexity, fallibility, and uncertainty.  Anti-humanism has its day as well—fascists in Italy, blasphemy laws, the contemporary zealots of artificial intelligence—all reflect on the challenges that a turbulent 20th century posed to overcoming injustice through independent thought, moral inquiry, and mutual respect. Humanism is always a “work in progress.” and “history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other, according to the author.  

If the human world is our own work, and  if we want it to proceed well, how do we exert ourselves to make it happen?  If this question interests, this SDG will fill your soul.

Oligarchy

The increasing skewness of the distribution of wealth and income has been debated intensely over the last few decades. Our SDG takes a novel perspective. We focus on the connections between economic and political oligarchy, across multiple countries and over time. The common thread binding oligarchs through history is that wealth defines them, empowers them, and inherently exposes them to threat. The existential nature of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront and how directly they are involved in supporting the coercion underlying property claims. Their response also depends on their capacity, or lack thereof, of collective action. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil.

Oligarchy may, at times, be displaced by democracy or fused with it. The award winning book concentrates on the United States but also  considers ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Sienna, mafia organizations and feuding Appalachian families. The author Jeffrey A. Winters argues that the concentration and protection of wealth are central in understanding politics throughout history.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The core book is entitled King: A Life by Jonathan Eig  and is the first biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. in thirty years and is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in  Biography.  It draws on a landslide of recently released sources including White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material. The book is vividly written and exhaustively researched.  He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC, and of men like Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy. He shows how King was too progressive for some, and vastly too conservative for others.  The author provides a sober and intimate portrait of King's life that captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King: dogs, bombs, Klansmen and segregationists wielding legal and political authority  and the ideas, tactics and strategy used to fight them. Join us in studying the movement whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were during King's lifetime.  

Why the Middle East is a Geopolitical Puzzle & Why We Get it Wrong So Often

“Depending on what we define as the “Middle East” the region consists of at least fourteen different independent states, plus the Palestinian territories, that have variously fought, meddled, traded, allied, blockaded, invaded, condemned and forgiven one another- and that’s just in the last decade. It therefore should not be surprising that the politics of this region are complex and in constant flux, particularly as more powerful nations such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia try to influence their neighbors and external powers including the United States, Russia, China, and France stir the pot for their own advantages. Add to this the rich histories, conflicting religious beliefs, modern traumas, imbalances in wealth , and complicated seems like a gross understatement. Western media outlets, commentators and governments play down the complexity and fall back on simplified explanations. Religion is one simplification. Oil is another and the aftermath of Western Imperialism a third. Obviously, each has a bearing on the Middle East puzzle but they are only some of the factors driving the real dynamics behind middle east geopolitics.

This SDG is aimed at participants who are interested in understanding that complexity and are looking for a place to start. Although our discussion will include Palestine and internal conflicts in Israel, this is not an SDG about the Hamas attacks or the current war in Gaza. Our book, Battleground: 10 Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East, by Christopher Phillips, focuses on conflicts as a starting place to build this understanding. Conflict is defined broadly, not just wars like those in Syria or Yemen but also “fraught conflicts” like those in Lebanon and Iraq or regionwide disputes as in the Gulf or Kurdistan. Why focus on conflicts? Perhaps because they offer a very good window into the region’s geopolitics and show how the state of local politics, informed by history and decisions of the ruling elite interact with outside forces, whether neighbors or more distant powers seeking to use the Middle East as proxies.

Our book explores ten conflicts: Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Kurdistan and the Horn of Africa. I hope you will join me and David Sternlicht, our co-coordinator at 10:00am on Wednesdays at Galey to begin to try to unravel this puzzle and to understand why we get it wrong so often.

Virgil's The Aeneid

After the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, Gaius Octavius, called “Augustus”, came to power. Rome was then first ruled by an emperor, and poets and artists lavished praise on this new regime which brought peace and stability.

The greatest product of the “Augustan Age” is the epic poem by Virgil, the Aeneid, which traced the foundation of Roman people to Augustus’ legendary ancestor, the Trojan prince Aeneas. It is a heroic tale of escape from burning Troy, of thwarted love affair with Dido in Carthage, to migrations across the Mediterranean (and the underworld) to the promised land of Italy where the Trojans became a new people, Romans. For two thousand years this masterpiece has been considered the greatest work of the Roman imagination and an inspiration for European thinkers and artists from Augustine and Dante to Milton, Renaissance artists and Berlioz. Virgil was even regarded by some as a precursor of Christianity and a prophet.

 Virgil plundered the Homeric epics with their stories of war in Troy and the Greeks’ struggles to reach home – the warrior Achilles and the wandering Odysseus both inform the hero Aeneas. This poem is a tale of human endurance, an epic of pietas and duty, as well as a reminder of the fragility of civilization and the paramount need for compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation. T.S. Eliot called it “the Classic of all Europe.”