(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Which university is the world’s first depends on which definition you use for the concept. The classic view holds that universities are at their heart a European institution, growing out … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) If you’re anything like me, your formal education began very early. I’m told I entered preschool at three, kindergarten at five — though of course how much formal education per … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Much of our education nowadays is explicitly about “book learning”: the intellectual labor of learning history and literature, of mastering mathematics and science, of practicing how to solve problems and … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) From the moment we’re born, we begin learning. When we speak of “education,” we usually mean formalized instruction, but in fact our education begins long before that. Compared to other … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Since we’ve been talking about different types of soldier and warrior, it seems appropriate to take a moment to discuss a particular group: women in war. This is a contentious … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) It isn’t enough to just get warm bodies and throw them onto a battlefield; that’s a great way to waste lives and lose a battle. But how do you turn … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Before you have all those different types of soldiers, you have to get them from somewhere. In these essays I often talk about particular aspects of culture as being on … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) We’ve talked some before, both earlier this year and back in Year Two, about violence on an individual scale. But of course that’s only part of the picture: humans fight … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Of all the types of linguistic variation an author might put on the page — foreign or invented languages, creoles, grammatical features not found in English — there’s one that’s … Continue reading
New Worlds, Year Four New Worlds 4 by Marie Brennan Bathing and banking, animals and adultery: human culture contains a truly daunting array of elements. The fourth volume of the NEW WORLDS series takes readers on a tour of all-new … Continue reading
