Wednesday Jan 6 to Apr 7 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Alice Lewis
Co-coordinator: Edward Robin
We invite you to join us to look at the US between 1933 and
1950. The standard narratives, which we
have all read, view the events of the period through a national lens, as if the
country was isolated from all other countries. What these narratives overlook
is that the US was one of many players in a global economy; what happened in
the US affected in the rest of the world, and what happened outside the US
affected the Roosevelt administration.
For the people who lived at the time, there was no pre-ordained outcome, and the entire period is permeated with uncertainty and fear about the future. Studying this period of American history presents us with themes that will thread throughout the SDG: (1) the immense societal changes wrought by the crises in the period; (2) how the United States’ “original sin” continued to shape governance in both the New Deal and WWII legislation; (3) the exchanges between the US and other countries in crafting the New Deal; (4) the change in the US international standing, as by the late 1930s as it became the shining example of preserving and reconciling democracy and capitalism; (5) how the New Deal built the scaffolding for the new world order that emerged from WWII.
By 1950, the US had authored a new world order that
created a stable and prosperous world (in the west). In the process,
Americans had changed radically since 1933, especially with regard of their
relationship to the state and with regard to the country’s role in the new
world.
Join us as we explore familiar territory with fresh eyes.
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Paul Markowitz and Diane Brookes
Wednesday Jan 6 to Apr 7 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Steve Breuer
Co-coordinator: Linda Kelemer
Hoping to raise our mood during difficult times, we propose to read many of our country’s best humorists.
Andy Borowitz, “America’s satire king”, a nationally known comedian and comic writer has edited selections from The 50 Funniest American Writers in an anthology from the Library of America. Each participant will introduce us to two or three authors and their work, with recommendations for further reading.
Included is a Who’s Who of comic writers, including Mark Twain, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, and Dave Barry. Included are lesser known pieces from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Lampoon, and The Onion.
There will be lots to learn and plenty of laughs.
Monday Jan 4 to Mar 8 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Juanita Davis
Co-coordinator: Mimi Baer
In this stressful era, with uncomfortable government imposed
health regulations and protestors marching on civic centers, I think an SDG on
dissent in America would be very timely. There is a newly published book to
serve as a perfect core book which author Arthur Hoyle has entitled MAVERICKS,MYSTICS, AND MISFITS -- AMERICANS AGAINST THE GRAIN . Hoyle
supplies a gripping story of the lives of twelve people , from the earliest
days of the country to the present, who
each in their own way have challenged and enriched the lives they were born
into, some more publicly, some more privately, some through the arts. They have
helped establish an American tradition for the sometimes conflicting voices of
cooperation and the individual pursuing personal rights. In so doing they have made important
contributions to the culture and history of their times. Come join us in this
celebration of their gifts.
Tuesday Jan 5 to Apr 6 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Jay Christensen
Co-coordinator: Carole Bender
My household has always been filled with education. My Dad served as a superintendent of schools and principal as well as boys' counselor. In addition, he taught world and American history, typewriting, band and orchestra. In my college, I gravitated to business education because of a fine high school business teacher I admired. After bachelor's and master's in business education, I taught my first junior high school class in typewriting to 275 ninth graders every two days. After that experience, I ended up teaching high school business law, business math, shorthand and typewriting. In the meantime, I was attracted to doctoral work in business education and a minor in higher education. That resulted in struggling with a dissertation on "Automated Data Processing Concepts for High School Business Students." Three more college teaching jobs followed with courses taught in office management, introduction to business, records management, shorthand, typewriting, elementary accounting, seminar in data processing education, analysis of communications in business, word processing management (started one of the first courses in the nation), office systems analysis, and University 100 (First-time college students). I can proudly say 45+ years have been spent in the teaching profession.
Everyone has an opinion on how public/higher education can be improved. We hear how our students cannot read or write after graduating from high school. We find students who have few marketable skills for computer-enhanced environments. Our children are exposed to gun violence, drug availability, and gender and racial inequalities. Surveys of global education show American public education lagging in 27th place.
Higher education has also received considerable criticism for wealthy parents and celebrities who will do anything to get their children into Ivy League or well-known universities. With the Covid-19 Pandemic still continuing, questions are being asked whether college students are getting a traditional college education by virtual learning. Although our universities are world class, student debt accrued to attend these universities is now over one trillion dollars. In addition to financial and curriculum concerns. Will college brick and mortar buildings begin to disappear or become functional at a slower pace? Will the traditional lecture be replaced with newer technological ways to present information in a faster, cheaper manner? Will the tuition rates and college costs have to be adjusted to accommodate virtual learning and soaring costs of maintaining building, paying faculty, administrators, and staff, and keeping research programs solvent?
This S/DG will explore the "crises" in both forms of education today, learn about ideas that are being proposed by educators and others, and enjoy meaningful dialogue to define the problems and suggest solutions. We will discuss both the rational and the moral sides of these issues.
There is probably no other single issue that is as important to America's future as the education of our young.
Each class meeting will begin with a 10-minute discussion of a current news event in public and higher education.
Thursday Jan 7 to Apr 8 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Frances Ehrmann
Co-coordinator: Doug Green
Since the series'
inception in 1915, the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories have
launched literary careers, showcased the most compelling stories of each year,
and confirmed for all time the significance of the short story in our national literature.
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY, published in 2000 brings
together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent
a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially
American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of
time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever,
Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the
landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all
aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century.
In this SDG we will read all of these stories and discuss
what makes them the best, how each explored aspects of the human condition, and
whether each story continues to speak to us in the first 20 years of the 21st
Century.
Thursday Jan 7 to Mar 11 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Sheri Ross
Co-coordinator: Rudy Sabaratnam
Tuesday Jan 5 to Apr 6 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Lee Molho
Co-coordinator: Toni Delliquadri
A scientific flood from
psychology poured into economics and undermined its most basic premise. The result was Behavioral Economics.
Inventing it won psychologist Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize. We'll study it using his accessible,
surprise-packed book.
Kahneman presents new understandings about how the mind works. The brain has two ways of processing information, as if it had two separate systems. One system is slow and goes step by step. It does rational thinking. The other system is fast and associative. It provides an endless stream of responses made from memory and sensory associations. We will study the many unexpected ways in which the two systems collide and interact.
Then we will explore why human statistical intuition is stunningly bad. Why does the mind prefer to use substitutes, or heuristics, when simple statistics would give better answers? Kahneman connects heuristics and fallacies to risk analysis, prediction, intuition, and human overconfidence for some important and remarkable results.
We will even meet a new species--the Econ. Econs are humanoids who don't have our fast, associative mental system with its behavioral quirks. For centuries economists have used totally-rational Econs instead of humans to explain economic behavior. Join us as we learn what happens when real humans at last enter the world of the economists.
This SDG is a repeat of Thinking About Behavioral Economics as offered in Winter 2013, with the same core book, Coordinator, and course plan.
Tuesday Jan 5 to Mar 9 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Bob Glasser
Co-coordinator: Ed Keane
As we look
at the governments of the various countries of Europe today, we see, not
surprisingly, a great variety. Some,
such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have reasonably robust
democracies. Others, such as Hungary,
have a form of populism that borders on authoritarianism. Illiberal democracy is often used to describe
the governments of Poland and Turkey.
Our S/DG
will study how these and the other major countries of Europe arrived at their
current state. (For this S/DG Europe
will stop at the border of the former Soviet Union.) To guide us in our study, we will read Democracy
and Dictatorship in Europe by Sheri Berman, a professor of Political
Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. The subtitle of the book, From the Ancien
Régime to the Present Day, gives the historical time periods covered. The chapter titles, shown in the weekly
topics below, give an excellent idea of the topics covered. In week 10 we will read and discuss an
article (to be provided) by Sheri Berman and a colleague.
For each of
the countries and time periods covered, our book gives us the political, economic,
and social conditions that help us understand why that country went the way it
did at that particular time. Berman
believes that the ultimate goal for any country is “consolidated liberal
democracy,” with elections, the rule of law, individual liberties, and minority
rights. That is a rare, and hard-won
achievement. A step forward is often
followed by a step back. We will see why
democracy is so difficult to achieve.
In our study of liberal
democracies, we will explore the tension between democracy—rule by the
people that can slide into repression of minority views, and liberal—respect
for each individual.
In a
sentence with a lot of long words, Francis Fukuyama well says: “Sheri Berman is
one of the best comparativists going, providing an encompassing framework for
understanding the historical development of modern institutions.”
I don’t
think we have to worry about not having enough to talk about every week.
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Fariba Ghaffari
Co-coordinator: Judith Munoz
This critical survey of issues in European philosophy offers detailed accounts of crucial texts by important thinkers. Sedgwick draws key ideas from these sources, analyzing the various relationships between them and linking them to central themes in philosophical enquiry, such as the nature of subjectivity, reason and experience, anti-humanism, and the nature of language.
Areas explored include epistemology, metaphysics and ontology, ethics and politics. Aspects of the work of a broad range of thinkers is considered in detail, including Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guatarri, Levinas, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault and Lyotard.
This intriguing new work presents the complex ideas of European philosophy in a straightforward manner, and will be of interest to both introductory and advanced-level readers
Tuesday Jan 5 to Apr 6 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Jim Kohn
Co-coordinator: Tony Stern
All of us remember Dwight Eisenhower. We know he led the D-Day invasion and served
as president for eight years. Most of us
remember attitudes that developed around Ike’s presidency. Now that 76 years have passed since D-Day and 60 years have passed since he
left office, there has been time to appraise Ike and his leadership of the
D-Day invasion and his presidency. Not
surprisingly, books have been written in the last 20 years which do just that. Ike served during a crucial period which
included World War II, the recovery of Europe, the dominance and robust economy
of the U.S. and early days of the Cold War.
The principal purposes of this SDG will be to (1) study Ike’s background, family, education and time at West Point, (2) look at the difficulties inherent in the D-Day invasion and how crucial it was and how it was conducted, (3) study Ike’s leadership of the invasion and how he made the tough decisions, (4) see how Ike decided to run for president and (5) view the actions of Ike and his administration on important domestic and international issues of the day. We will try to look at the issues Ike faced with the information he had, as well as appraising his decisions and actions with the benefit of hindsight. It is impossible to understand the years since Ike’s presidency without understanding how Ike’s presence and actions prepared the way for them. It will be interesting to see how the impressions of Ike which all of us carry jibe with recent scholarship.
We will use two core books: (A) "Eisenhower in War and Peace" by Jean Smith, an excellent biography, particularly on the years through the end of World War II and (B) "Eisenhower: The White House Years" by Jim Newton, an excellent account of Ike's presidency. Both books offer sufficient detail to get a good "feel" for the subject, as well as conclusions (both positive and negative) on Ike's actions. Other works, including Ike's own books, are cited below. In addition, there are literally hundreds of other sources, including books, on line articles and documentaries, and consulting them will be encouraged
Thursday Jan 7 to Apr 8 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: William Meisel
Co-coordinator: Ken Korman
Robert Reich’s new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is a highly readable discussion of how the elite in our country, the “oligarchy,” control the political system by lobbying and hiring government officials, congressmen, and senators with large salaries after they leave the government. While some corporations state they have liberal goals, those statements hid significant abuses, such as violating laws and paying fines that are less than the profits those abuses generate. This SDG will discuss the validity of those claims and the practicality of the solutions he suggests, and try to balance the discussion with outside articles that have a different point of view. (Note: This is a revision of the original SDG proposal.)
Tuesday Jan 5 to Apr 6 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Carrie Bloom
Co-coordinator: Carolyn Baumwohl
Set mostly in postwar Southern Italy, Elena Ferrante's four-part novel about the discordant yet loving trajectories of two female friends from childhood to adulthood has gained widespread acclaim. The HBO series My Brilliant Friend is based on her work. Ferrante is that rarest of authors—one who is equally adept at depicting both sides of the romance and not-so-romantic transactions between men and women.
This SDG covers the first half of the Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name. The New Yorker review loudly proclaims: “…the sensation...a hungry, relentless urge to keep going, the same feeling that drives you to borrow all someone’s clothes, or pinch them as hard as you can when they don’t understand you. Ferrante shows us the friction that generates human heat—she reminds us what the experience of liking is like.” |
|
Ferrante's gift, one critic argues, is her "unflinching willingness to lead us toward 'the mutable fury of things'" —in particular, toward the passion and bitterness between women and men, and women and women. Ferrante's novels explore the recesses and limits of intimacy: "How many words," one of her heroine's asks, "remain unsayable even between a couple in love?" |
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Stanton Zarrow
Co-coordinator: Judith Glass
Rights are not self-executing; they need cases and controversies brought by individuals and organizations like the ACLU, which was founded by Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin in the aftermath of World War I, the Palmer Raids and the Red hysteria. From its inception until today the ACLU has been at the forefront protecting and extending those rights and liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the 14th amendment.
The ACLU has been identified with issues that continue to divide the Supreme Court and the nation, including a woman's personal autonomy and limitations on her ability to compete equally with men, whether classifications in the law based on race, sex or sexual orientation are illegitimate, and the appropriate role of religion in the public square. But the two areas in which the ACLU has been most zealous, some would say over-zealous, are freedom of speech and the protection of the rights of criminal defendants.
This SDG will examine those issues associated with the ACLU and the milestone cases it fostered in the development of civil rights and civil liberties. In this endeavor we will be guided by the recently published Fight of the Century, a collection of essays written by some of our pre-eminent writers exploring the meaning and impact of those cases---a confluence of judicial opinion and social significance, allowing each of us to reflect on how these issues impact us.
Monday Jan 4 to Mar 29 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Wlodek Proskurowski
Co-coordinator: Tom Loo
Europe is a place of mongrels—and Europeans are “very special bastards indeed”. There can be no more dangerous concept than the idea of racial or genetic purity. The emergence of modern Homo sapiens owed much to Europe, the global centrifuge where our forebears had one final opportunity to trade DNA with other members of the hominid line—before we moderns were the last ones standing.
Gene-sequencing studies have shown that people of European and Asian descent today carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, less than 2 percent of their total genome on average. It is not the same 2 percent from one person to the next: taken together, up to 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome lives on. Recent research links lingering Neanderthal DNA sequences to variations in hair and skin color, sleep patterns, moodiness, and susceptibility to illnesses like diabetes.
Wednesday Jan 6 to Apr 7 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Doree Gerold
Co-coordinator: Hank Toles
Tuesday Jan 5 to Mar 23 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Anne Mellor
Co-coordinator: Jane Nadler
This SDG will explore Jane Austen's early fiction and her debt to the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. After reading the sections of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that most heavily influenced Austen, we will look first at Austen's biography and her hilarious juvenilia, History of England and Love and Freindship (sic). We will then read her first three novels in the order in which they were written, in the context of the social and political debates of her time concerning the education, roles and legal standing of women, the competing values of reason and sympathy, and the political demands of the French Revolution. We will also discuss the best film adaptations of these novels.
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Steve Gordon
Co-coordinator: Anne Peplau
The Los Angeles we know today took shape during World War II, which one historian described as the most significant event ever to occur to Los Angeles. The massive influx of war industries brought a population boom and a diversification of our community. African-Americans and Latinos came here for work, joining whites from the South and Midwest. The aircraft plants provided jobs, higher wages, and more open hiring, including women workers. Civil defense included blackout precautions and defensive armaments against enemy air raids or invasion. At Hollywood Canteen, servicemen mingled with movie stars: dancing with Betty Grable, having a sandwich served by Shirley Temple.
Under the surface, however, dangerous social conflicts were developing. Anti-Semitism was still a powerful force in Los Angeles, as restrictive covenants and redlining limited areas where Jews could live. Far worse, though, was an awareness of the Nazi persecution of European Jews and the very real local activities of Nazi sympathizers and German agents here. Since the mid-1930s, pro-Hitler groups had held rallies in locations such as Hindenburg Park in La Crescenta, Patriotic Hall downtown, and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. Sympathizers bought a 50-acre compound in Rustic Canyon, above Pacific Palisades, for use by eventual Nazi leaders. In opposition, Jews and Gentile allies organized to block Nazi influence in Los Angeles and became aware of Nazi death plots against prominent actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Paul Muni and Eddie Cantor and studio executives such as Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Along with these assassinations, Nazi hate group members planned massacres such as driving through Boyle Heights to shoot Jews on the street.
This SDG will analyze the wartime social changes in Los Angeles and aim a special focus on the mostly amateur undercover espionage conducted by citizens on pro-Nazi and American fascist groups. This struggle is detailed in Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by USC Professor Steven J. Ross. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The other core book is Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles During the Second World War by another history professor, Arthur C. Verge.
Examples of broader SDG Questions. Among the broader insights that can be drawn from this historical period are these questions:
1. Did wartime create a feeling of unity and solidarity across citizens, brought together by a common purpose?
2. When and why do ordinary people take risks and get involved in public events, as did the citizens who conducted the undercover espionage against pro-Nazi groups in Los Angeles?
3. Which institutions and buildings are still part of our lives today after being important in the war? What is the continuity to our time? Which are commemorated and which locations and events have been forgotten?
4. Did the war arouse emotional excitement manifested as anxiety, suspiciousness of others, and "war jitters", but also intense pursuit of distracting entertainment and "live for today" romantic opportunities?
Wednesday Jan 6 to Apr 7 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Kate Carpenter
Co-coordinator: Renee Hurewitz
What makes memoirs tick? How is it that one memoir moves us more than another? How revealing is a memoir of the author as well as of the "characters"? How do memoirists draw us into the eventfullness of their inner lives? How do their personal trajectories say something about their social milieu?
We omit political memoirs. We treat writers who, famous or not, focus on their personal lives—their intimate and their professional relationships and, especially, the linkages between the two. For all their diversity, the memoirs selected here have a common thread: how adventitious happenings shape lives into something like a coherent venture.
In a nutshell, the rationale of this SDG is comparison-and-contrast. We are less concerned with singular, recurrent themes. We are on the lookout for divergent stories and sensibilities, and for the mix of rawness and artfulness, that the best of the genre draws forth. We do not reach for an over-arching perspective.
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Randy Kennon
Co-coordinator: Susan Guggenheim
Thursday Jan 7 to Mar 4 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: David Roloff
Co-coordinator: Sheila Mc Coy
Tuesday Jan 5 to Mar 23 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Dori Davis
Co-coordinator: Barry Mc Grath
The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that no country acting alone can respond effectively to health threats in a globalized world. Global governance is necessary to coordinate the global health response.
The core book “Reimagining Global Health” provides a comprehensive, original and compelling introduction to the field of global health. It evaluates the history and underlying philosophy of global health, from its colonial times through the present. In addition to evaluating successful and failed programs, it offers an overview of how our thoughts of reasonable expectations and limitations have changed.
The book examines creative ways of conducting programs pioneered by Partners in Health and other organizations and replicated to help populations treat HIV, TB, etc. Their interdisciplinary approach is multifaceted and requires an all hands-on deck approach that is geographically broad and historically deep.
Given the historic opportunity to reimagine global health governance in the age of COVID-19, it’s critical that our global society explore where we go from here, both philosophically and practically.
Wednesday Jan 6 to Feb 17 ( 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM )
Coordinator: Stan Morris
Co-coordinator: Lynne Bronner
Monday Jan 4 to Apr 5 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Sam Pryor and Fred Mc Lane
As we know, much of human history
and many great cultures have emerged from the area around the Mediterranean Sea, cultures such as the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginans, Phoenecians, Ottomans, and the Arabs. But the history of the Mediterranean has also
been written by nations or states such as Venice, France, Spain and others who sought to dominate its trade or to spread
their culture and religions in the region.
The
author of our highly readable and entertaining core book, The Middle Sea: A
History of the Mediterranean, John
Julius Norwich, is the author of well-received and fascinating histories of Sicily, Venice and
Byzantium. In this ambitious work, he
undertakes to cover the history of the entire Mediterranean from ancient Greece to the First World War.
Unlike many other authors, Norwich doesn't focus on the history of a single nation or all of Europe. Instead he covers a geographical region (the Mediterranean) to explore the forces and characters that have shaped its history. Norwich focuses on the
rise and fall of civilizations, and the conflicts among them, He follows the
conflicts between Greece and Persia, the rise and fall of Alexander the Great ,
the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and its offspring, Byzantium and the Holy
Roman Empire, the spread of Christianity, the conflict between the Eastern and
Western Catholic churches, the rise of Islam, and the centuries long
struggle between the Christians and Muslims.
This SDG is for those who wish to better understand the complex fabric of history, trade, empires and religions in the Mediterranean, from Greece to World War One. We will also supplement the core book with additional material, and include as an optional supplemental work, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia.
Wednesday Jan 6 to Apr 7 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Ronald Mellor
Co-coordinator: Lise Matthews
It was on the Silk Road that the East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the 20th century, we will examine how the West has always been linked to the East.
Beckwith describes the great Eurasian empires: Scythians, Huns, Turks, Tibetians, Chinggis Khan and the Mongols and the cultural and economic life of Central Eurasia. The Indo-European migration from the region also affected Greco-Roman, Slavic, Germanic, Persian, and Indian languages and civilizations.
This book and our SDG will place Central Eurasia into a world historical framework.
Thursday Jan 7 to Apr 8 ( 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM )
Coordinator: Leo Roos
Co-coordinator: George Lauer
Our understanding of the Physical World and Universe has many gaps, some small and some very large. The latter put into questions many of the current hypothesis that try to explain the Universe, how it formed and to some degree our relationship within it. Some of the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th century have tried to fill these gaps of knowledge, but many still remain and actually grow larger!
The authors of the core book have put together a humorous explanation of what we know and understand of the universe and what the gaps in our knowledge are. Since the book was published in 2017, some recent experiments have brought answers, partial answers or more questions relating to the various topics.
The book is written for those who have little or no knowledge about the Universe, but would like to know how it affects our existence directly and indirectly on this watery sphere. Can you live a comfortable life not knowing about these problems? Does resolving them help civilization? Maybe we will find some answers to these momentous questions.