PROLE ACADEMY is a platform for talking about important, difficult, and dangerous books. It contains book reviews, short articles you can read on a lunch break, briefings you can digest quickly or pore over, and a blog about reading radically for working people in a hurry – in other words, proles.
The reviews, briefings and articles I write are designed to be short, approachable, and informative about the ideas in these books and what value they hold. I want to put the books in conversation with each other and relate them to everyday life. This isn’t about participating in academic fights, or just taking sides in ideological debates. The ideas you find in universities are crucial to understanding our world and our places in it. However, there’s something poisonous about the elitism of some of these schools, how out of touch they can be, and how they’re compelled to bankrupt you before you’re allowed to participate fully. Plenty of academics are aware of it, too. Even if you get to be a fly on those walls, many experts in a field use jargon to exclude the rest of us from the conversation. PROLE ACADEMY fights against that, too.
While there are great debates worth having online, I generally wasn’t having them on social media. It’s often a waste of time, time we could spend reading up on the ideas, people, and events that affect us most, or could provide us with new futures. I blog about fitting good books into our lives, and how to balance being a lifelong learner of big and dangerous ideas with being a parent, partner, citizen and/or worker.
I also fight against my bibliomania (that compulsive activity of buying up hundreds of books you don’t have any firm plan to read). You can check out some of the ones on my bookshelf here. If this site is successful, I’ll have shelves of books I have read – which, my spouse begrudgingly concedes, is different.
If you want to support this site, that’s awesome – do it here. But we don’t want to sell ads, we’ll never sell visitor data, and won’t put any content behind a permanent paywall. This site is about democratizing the good stuff about academia, and setting the rest aside. It’s about breaking out of unhealthy patterns and finding ways to fit the search for knowledge into our lives. If that interests you, please read, comment, and follow us. We’d love to hear about anything you discover or struggle with in the learning journey you’re undertaking yourself.
Remember: A book isn’t dangerous until you read it.