I will aggregate all serious contributions to this endeavour and celebrate all of them if I can. I’ll create a subreddit to collect them & discuss each of them. The point is to incentivise informal, independent scholarship. Twitter threads, YouTube videos, etc all count
Conversation
Possible topics are near-infinite. Why was there a Disney animation explosion in the 90s (Aladdin, Lion King, etc)? How did that happen? How did that play out? How did jazz music become a thing? What about hip hop?
What are you curious about? Let’s get someone on it
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Specifically I want to encourage people to try and make the content accessible and useful – think “extremely excellent/insightful Reddit or quora answer” sort of vibe
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ELI5: If there is no cellphone signal, how does the "emergency calls only" mode work?
> The tower goes "OH FUCK! SHIT! I'll connect you".
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Excellent, yes I’ve seen some of his work. 💪🏾🔥 You could say my goal here is to encourage 100 Antons and introduce them all to each other
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Replying to @visakanv
@antonhowes has written well on similar themes!
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I don’t necessarily expect people to do primary scholarship. Just earnest knowledge work by curious nerds. A good book review can count. Think Ribbonfarm’s book review re: The Box, or Seeing Like A State, or SSC’s review of Albion’s Seed. 100 more reviews like that please!!
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What’s the best blogpost someone has written about how Pericles shaped Athens? About Renaissance Florence? About Shakespeare? I know this knowledge exists already, often in thick scholarly books- I mean no disrespect to existing scholarship. I want to incentivise *discussion*
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Let’s dig into this!!
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Replying to @visakanv
For the latter, I'd love to read some more really detailed work on the innovation of the earlier periods. e.g. Song China, the Islamic Golden Age, the Dutch Golden Age, etc. I've been too stuck into Britain 1550s-1850s to do much of that work myself.
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Prize pool is now (I hope) US$2,000 🙏🏾
Not yet sure if it’s best to all go to one person, or maybe to be used for runner ups etc, or something else — I will figure this out with discussions and be as open/transparent about the thinking as possible
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Replying to @visakanv
I love this - can I match this grant with $1,000?
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i might be interested in randomly diving into questions like this on and off on twitter - would be cool to have a hashtag to aggregate these sorts of threads with
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the #goldenage and #goldenages hashtags are both too crowded i think - there's stuff about the golden age of hollywood and the golden age of comics in there. which is maybe kinda relevant but it's not like analysis or anything. some stuff about the islamic golden age
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the #scenebuilding hashtag is mostly used by exactly two dudes who are talking about building scenes in 3d modeling software lol
i'll just send you the threads if i write any then 😅
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