On a rainy Friday night in May, about 70 New Yorkers gathered around a projector screen at NeueHouse, a sleek co-working space in the Flatiron District. The crowd buzzed; couples on dates and groups of friends chatted and sipped cocktails while waiting for the event to start. But they weren’t there to watch a comedian perform a stand-up routine or for a private screening of an upcoming film — they were there to learn.
The guests were attending a presentation titled “The Age of Rage: Understanding Modern Movements” given by CUNY professor Carlo Accetti. It was a production from Lectures on Tap, an event series co-founded by Ty and Felecia Freely, which books 45-minute lectures given by experts and academics at bars around Manhattan and Brooklyn on topics ranging from “Why People Cheat?” (one of the most popular lectures to date) to “Summer Solstice and the Science of the Sun.” The organization will soon expand to Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Tickets to lectures sell out anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours after the schedule is released.
Later, a group of women sitting around an espresso-martini littered table eagerly shot their hands up when the evening’s host opened up the floor for questions; during the mingling portion of the evening, attendees flocked to Accetti, greeting him like a minor celebrity. “After the lectures, people often come up to us and say, ‘I graduated five years ago or ten years ago and I didn’t like school when I was in there, but now that I’m gone I realize that I miss having access to these experts. I miss having this kind of communal learning environment,’” Felecia Freely told me. A couple seated next to me said they had been trying to get tickets for months and didn’t care what the topic was about; they just wanted to participate.
While the Trump administration slashes federal funding for universities around the country, attention spans are broken, literacy rates are down, and AI is zapping critical-thinking skills. “Brain rot” was Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year. But amid this steady drumbeat of bad news about our collective intellect, pockets of resistance are emerging outside traditional academic settings via groups of intellectual hobbyists. People many years out of college or graduate school — who might have nine-to-five jobs, be caregivers, or generally have robust, busy lives — are seeking out structured learning communities both online and in person.
Last summer, I felt the urge to go back to school too. I wanted to chip away at a project that had nothing to do with my job, and to engage with material that wasn’t a daily news headline or a three-minute video. I enrolled in a six-week McNally Jackson course on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory taught by New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan. She has taught classes first through McNally Jackson and now independently on books by Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, Han Kang, Alice Munro, Italo Calvino, and Kazuo Ishiguro. A community formed quickly around Fan’s teaching of these books; some students have taken multiple seminars with her over the past year.
I was compelled to read Nabokov’s autobiography, but — as I often feel with meatier texts — I wanted someone to help me unpack it. I received no grade, no credit, and no certificate; there was no looming graduation date or final exam to erode the pleasure of the class. It turns out, as Fan suggests, being an adult while participating in these readings and discussions can lead to engaging with the text in a more honest way. The rush of needing to complete a reading assignment before class met that week delighted me in a way that hadn’t during undergrad; my copy of the book was dog-eared, underlined, and highlighted by the end of the course. I felt energized and engaged during the discussions and walked away with a sense of accomplishment that often eludes us in daily adult life. My cohort had post-course celebratory drinks at McNally Jackson Seaport, where the conversation continued with Fan hemmed into a booth holding court.
Gathering for seminars and lectures outside the classroom is not a new concept, but it remains hopeful: “There’s a long history of lecturers and independent educators getting together and saying our systems are failing on these issues so we’re going to teach them ourselves,” said Karen Attiah, a colleague of mine at the Washington Post and a former Columbia University professor. Last summer, Attiah was told by Columbia University administrators that her popular graduate-level class on race and western journalism, taught through the School of International and Public Affairs, would be canceled. When she pressed the school for a clear answer on why a class that had such strong enrollment would be cut, she was simply told that the dean would not renew her funding.
“This is not the time for media literacy / knowledge to be held hostage by the very same institutions that are bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear,” Attiah wrote a few months later in a post on Bluesky. She asked her followers if they would sign up for a condensed version of the class she intended to teach at Columbia. Thousands of people liked the post and hundreds expressed interest in the comments.
Buoyed by the response, she published a Substack post titled “Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I’m Going to Teach It Anyway,” and opened enrollment via Google Form for an independently taught version of the class with a sliding-scale payment system. The class hit the 500 participant cap in 48 hours; since then, over 2,000 people have joined the wait list. “I hope that this can be a model for people to say, ‘We can think outside of these structures, these institutions, that trade on prestige and are asking us to believe in their prestige, even as they’re caving in on their own values that they use to market themselves,’” Attiah told me.
A few months before Attiah announced she’d be teaching her course on Substack, I noticed another new Substack publication called Lit Girl that publishes syllabi exactly like something you might find in a college class — books to read, supplemental articles, viewing, and listening all separated into “terms” and “modules.” With stylish branding and curation, the platform tapped into the “cool-girl reader” aesthetic à la Kaia Gerber’s Library Science and Dua Lipa’s Service95. It was founded by four friends: Riley Vaske, Emma Benshoff, Ashleigh Magee, and Tara Larsen. All are in their late 20s or early 30s and are voracious readers — none of them have worked or currently work in academia. “What we try to do with the syllabus is put books in conversation with each other,” said Benshoff, who works a corporate day job in Manhattan.
This thoughtful curation drew me to Lit Girl after I had begun to feel overwhelmed by the breakneck speed of new books, movies, and television shows whizzing by me every other day. I saw the Lit Girl syllabi, organized by theme, as an invitation to engage with media in a slower, more manageable, more meaningful way. The current term is about filters in literature: “Beginning with the Greeks, we’ll discuss how adaptations and translations reimagine their source materials, and the lens through which these narratives transform.” Materials for this syllabus include The Odyssey, Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the pilot of Apple TV’s Bad Sisters, Anaïs Mitchell’s album Hadestown, and a New York Times profile of translator Ann Goldstein. “If you are really into romance, there’s something for you here; and if you’re really into classics or more literary books, there’s something for you here,” Benshoff said. “And maybe you’ll surprise yourself and want to read both.”
Lit Girl is expanding into other content like long-form essays, interviews with writers, and city guides and is selling merch, planning for in-person events, and doing “full-service literary consulting.” (Its co-founders recently produced creator Eli Rallo’s “book cover reveal party” at Heroes.) Since Lit Girl launched in September 2024, its Substack and Instagram have grown at a rapid clip. Readers send DMs with photos of their syllabus printed and highlighted; some reach out to say that they couldn’t finish the readings in time for each term. (“I do kind of feel like people want there to be a test,” Benshoff added.)
Education doesn’t have to be only about career success. It can be purely for pleasure, to meet new people, or to satisfy a curiosity. “I think this brings out the best in us in a way that I’ve found really moving, and that’s rare sometimes in a hyperachievement-focused, hypercapitalistic society,” Fan said. Her students agree: Amit Shah, a retired publishing executive and writer based in Boston who has taken multiple Fan classes, said that there’s a feeling of freedom that comes with being an adult in a learning environment. “People feel more emboldened. They have more agency in saying, ‘I don’t get what this writer is trying to do,’” he said.
College classes may often be wasted on the young, but learning is a lifelong project. It gets more rewarding as we age: “In college, it used to just stress me out to feel like I had to come up with some great idea and it wasn’t organic,” said Lit Girl’s Vaske, adding that some of the same classes she took in undergrad might feel more enriching now, if she could revisit them. Choosing exactly what you want to learn about is another perk; the Brooklyn Institute of Research, a community-based educational center, offers classes on scholarly topics including portraiture and the “self in the ancient world,” while the movie-focused Cinejourneys leads Zoom classes on film theory.
As anti-intellectualism and disdain for the humanities has become more prevalent among digital communities and in the White House, in our fraught political and cultural moment these alternative learning spaces are building both on- and offline communities powered by accessibility and curiosity. Your own fulfillment is the reward.
This summer, Attiah will partner with the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., to host hybrid classes for her summer course that will include a syllabus, guest speakers, and live Q&A discussions. She wants her students to “walk away changed” with tools and knowledge to take back to their own communities. There’s a general feeling of powerlessness lately, she said, but this is where community learning fills the gaps: “You really don’t have to have permission to come together and share knowledge.”