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The Syntopicon

Essays, one great idea at a time.

Each of these takes a single old idea — desire, rhetoric, the will, the state — and walks straight into it. Plain language, no gatekeeping. Wander in anywhere.

Citizen

Why Socrates Wouldn't Leave The door was open. That's the part nobody tells you

Custom & Convention

The Preface Copernicus Never Wrote In the spring of 1543, a book came off a printing press in Nuremberg that would eventually move the Earth. It was called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and its auth…

Desire

You Never Wanted the Feeling In 1954, in a lab at McGill University, a rat pressed a lever to send a small jolt of electricity into its own brain. Then it pressed it again. Then again

Family

Father of the Fatherland In the year 2 BC, the Roman Senate gave one man a new name

Logic

We Will Know In September of 1930, in the city of Königsberg, an old man stood up to give a speech about the future

Memory & Imagination

You Were Never There When Jean Piaget was a boy, he had a memory he could see. He was about two years old, strapped into his pram, being wheeled along a busy avenue near the Champs-Élysées in Paris.…

Poetry

Nobody Home Every night for years, in a house in London, a blind man lay in the dark and made poems he could not write down

Rhetoric

Just Rhetoric Outside the walls of Athens, on a hot afternoon, two men wade into a stream to cool their feet. One of them is barefoot most of the time anyway. His name is Socrates, and he has…

Space

The Fullest Thing You Own In a workshop in Florence, sometime around the year 1660, a group of careful men set out to squeeze water until it gave up

State

Born To It In a house in Baltimore, sometime around 1827, a woman named Sophia Auld sat a boy down and began teaching him the alphabet. The boy was about eight. He was quick. He learned hi…

Universal & Particular

Only a Word An old man is about to take a young man apart, and the young man has no idea it's coming

Will

Seen, Not Sealed There is a young man alone in a temple, and he is talking himself out of his own life