Polymathic Pizza

Will there always be, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “a time for peace and a time for
war?”
Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare, as an ongoing and
necessary expression of the state, originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley, thousands of years before the Common Era.  The twentieth century witnessed global,
regional, and local war on a near-continuous basis.  In nearly the entirety of the first two
decades of the twenty-first century the United States has been at war in the Middle East and...

Physicists say that it is theoretically possible to time travel into the future, but not into the past.  Imagine, though, interactive live art that could function like a time-machine and challenge this assumption.  Encountering Professor Edgar Arceneaux’s work is to experience this kind of time travel, moving fluidly through the past, the present and the future.  For instance, when witnessing/participating in his interactive, multi-media, temporally fluid live performance art, Until, Until, Until, one moves through time and in time, where “linear logic is abandoned...

In our opening session, TIME served as the framework to understand the universe.  TIME though, as Professor of Anthropology Janet Hoskins has shown in her research, can also serve as a paradigm to illuminate human cultures here on earth.  In her work with the Kodi, an indigenous people who live on Sumba Island in the Indonesian archipelago, Hoskins used TIME to understand their cultural and social practices: “Time,” Hoskins argues, “must be seen as a crucial (perhaps the crucial) dimension of analysis.”  All aspects of Kodi life-- marriage, clan,...

Alice asked, “What is the matter? Have you pricked your finger?”
“I haven’t pricked it yet,” the Queen said, “but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
 
The late Stephen Hawking said, “nothing cannot exist forever.”  One might have to read this a few times to grasp his meaning, but the line leads one to reflect on the expanding universe. For our fall 2018 opening event, physics and astronomy professor Clifford Johnson, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, and literary scholar...

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” –Jack, from The Shining

“Almost all creativity,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow, “involves purposeful play.”  The idea that play is critical to our human landscape in germinating inspiration and creativity has actually been around for a long time.  The line from the 1980 horror film, The Shining, above was first published in a 1659 book of English proverbs, but its origins can be traced back millennia.  Play -- meaningful, purposeful play -- cultivates in us greater creativity,...

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." –Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

With the critical acclaim and popularity of the musical Hamilton, historic renderings on the stage have gained new attention from the historical profession. Heather Nathans in the Journal of the Early Republic recently observed, “artists used Hamilton to consider critical moments in the nation’s passionate and often painful debates about race, citizenship, and belonging.” ...

“For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung.”--Homer

The gods, or alternatively, the sources of life, do indeed spring from the ocean, and Biological Science Professor Jed Fuhrman, like Homer, has been visiting the “all nurturing” sea, producing an epic story of his own.  We polymaths have ventured across the bay to Catalina for our student retreat for three years now and a dolphin visit alongside of our ferry, or even the rare sighting of a whale ignites such excitement in us all—to see the...

“The number of hate groups operating in the [U.S.] in 2016 remained at near-historic highs.”  --The Southern Poverty Law Center

“[T]he Internet has for some time provided extremists with a sense of community, that they are not alone in their beliefs.”  --Rick Eaton                       

When the development of web technologies vastly popularized the Internet in the 1990s, many were hopeful that these platforms would democratize access to...

“A polymath is one who not only masters several disciplines, but who synthesizes them, integrates them.”—Sidney Harman

Professor Tracy Fullerton is a master weaver of multiple threads of knowledge. She is an internationally recognized experimental game designer and her research and teaching treats game design as a collaborative, integrative exercise.  Her latest foray into weaving brings her game design expertise into partnership with Henry David Thoreau, yes, that Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century transcendentalist and founder of environmentalism.  Through...

“Love and desire are the spirits’ wings to great deeds.” –Goethe (18th c.)

“They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries…”  --Blanche, from A Street-car Named Desire (mid-20th c.)

“Love abounds in all things, excels from the depths to beyond the stars, is lovingly disposed to all things.” --Hildegarde of Bingen (12th c.)

Ideas about love and desire are disparate and ever changing across space and time. It is reasonable to say that love and desire are the most powerful forces in...