This is for everyone.

My first great adult fling — literature, the great books — matured over time into a longing to share with others. In my twenties, I watched our republic crack and crumble, and did what I could through my career and essays to demonstrate the profound necessity of education to a healthy democracy. My efforts were futile and my writing unread.

Ten years ago, I dreamed of creating a website that provided access to the great public domain works of the past. But what I had in mind was not possible with the technology of just a few years ago. That has finally changed.

There are many amazing and useful websites that archive and share public domain literature free of cost to anyone who wishes to download it. I appreciate and salute their efforts. I would not be able to undertake this project without the work of countless librarians the world over. But what I had in mind was something else.

Not a library — a library of libraries. Not a search engine — a knowledge engine. A new method to provide citizens with what they need to think and be free.

In the mid-twentieth century, a group of academics at the University of Chicago led by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins sought to compile and publish what they saw as the Western canon. This was not just another encyclopedia — it was a testament that Western thinkers read and responded to one another in what Adler called the Great Conversation.

They called this 54-volume corpus the Great Books of the Western World, and it was introduced by a two-volume Syntopicon that organized the thoughts of each writer by topic, or "idea." A reader curious about democracy or dialectic could open the Syntopicon and find the relevant citations to everyone from Aristotle to Hume across the rest of the volumes. All they had to do was find the volume titled Aristotle and turn to the citation itself.

Of course, this is terribly impractical, and limited by the state of media in the twentieth century. You may have seen these famously unopened volumes on the bookshelves of your grandparents — collecting dust, not promoting knowledge.

That is where the idea for Syntopi.com came from. The first free liberal arts education that only requires you to use it. No applications. No tuition. No classism.

There are several major caveats to the extent and scope of this project. It is both expansive and narrow. Expansive in that it is built upon two and a half millennia of writing by the West's great thinkers. Narrow in that the 1952 canon Adler chose is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly Western. That was a choice his editors made, and the historical record now bears the weight of it. Syntopi.com is faithful to that canon as an archival object — these are the texts that defined a particular conversation in a particular century — not as a prescription for whose voices matter. The work of expansion belongs to others, and to a future version of this project that will need different sources and different rights.

What you'll find here: 35,000 citations across 5,500 passages, cross-referenced and searchable by topic, idea, and author; a galaxy of the 102 Great Ideas you can navigate by hand; AI-narrated readings of every passage; and a tutor you can argue with about what you've read, or use to compare how two thinkers approached the same question.

The technology to build this did not exist just a few years ago. That is true. Without artificial intelligence to help me compile and sort, code and refine the website, this would not be possible — it would remain a figment of my imagination.

I've written critically about AI and I stand by what I wrote. There's a difference between a tool that helps you build something you've thought about for a decade and a tool that does your thinking for you. Claude did the first kind of work I needed — extracting passages, parsing Adler's outline, building the editor and the visualizations — and none of the second. The intellectual frame is mine. The judgments are mine. The writing you're reading is mine.

In any case, it now exists. An effort to give everyone access not to infinite information, but to curated knowledge.

There it is. Take it.