My brain has gone to summer camp. I don’t mean that it’s turned to mush; I mean that it’s become one big playground lately. Kindergarten. My brain wants to play. I get like this sometimes. Suddenly, so much out there seems interesting. Web surfing can be dangerous for people with brains like mine.

So:

Here’s a sardonic and entertaining 1952 New Yorker essay written by Dwight MacDonald, ridiculing Mortimer Adler’s grand project, the Great Books of the Western World. It’s one of those witty, curmudgeonly, midcentury pieces that you’d expect to see in The New Yorker.

Here is another list of Great Books.

Here are lots of lists of Great Books.

And some more.

Here you can access many of the Great Books.

Here is St. John’s College, whose entire four-year curriculum consists of the Great Books.

Here is The Center for the Study of Great Ideas, founded by Mortimer Adler.

Here are The Mortimer J. Adler Archives, including what you need in order to live a good life.

Here are some of Adler’s Syntopicon essays; the Syntopicon is essentially the index to all the Great Ideas contained in “The Great Books of the Western World,” the whole thing that Dwight MacDonald made fun of (see above).

And here is A Syntopicon of Donald, which apparently was begun just this week. What a bizarre coincidence.

OK, my brain can go to lunch now.

Here’s another primer on Lawrence v. Texas. (I’m not going to shut up about this until the case is decided, and probably not for a while after that.)

:-)

(Note that it’s supposed to be decided this month, not next month, as that piece misstates.)