A framework for how adults learn across a lifetime — seven pathways, 88+ biographical profiles of remarkable learners, a 168-book reading list built from decades of reading. The central argument: learning is not schooling. It is a practice you build into a life, and it changes what a life can be.
Structured around mental models rather than disciplines. The pathways cut across science, history, philosophy, art, and practice in ways that course catalogs don't allow. The biographical profiles show what sustained intellectual life actually looks like across a human lifespan.
Circulated as a reviewer's copy. Volume structure under discussion — whether this is one book or the first of two.
A thinking-tools curriculum written for Dave Bernick's undergraduate bioengineering class at UC Santa Cruz — and used there, with strong student response. Six domains of life skills, each mapped to mental models and historical examples. The goal: give students a framework for thinking clearly about problems that don't come labeled by discipline.
The examples range from Feynman to Florence Nightingale to John Snow's cholera map. Being revised for a broader audience — not just engineers, but anyone who wants to think more carefully.
5,500+ books — nonfiction, literary fiction, philosophy, science, mathematics, contemplative practice — curated from a 70-year reading life. Every Tier 1 entry has been personally read. Author pages, subject pages, and a semantic concept index are in development.
The eventual vision: something between a library card catalog and a knowledge graph. Books linked to authors linked to ideas linked to other books. The intellectual infrastructure behind everything else on these sites.