Monday Session 2   

From the annual World Happiness Report to body odors and foods to dental health, this course offers a potpourri of wellness findings from research and experts that may surprise, affirm, and motivate members. Why has Finland ranked #1 in global happiness for eight consecutive years? What does garlic do to body sweat? Which sports have been linked to a longer lifespan? An array of ideas and studies from different areas of wellness—physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual wellness—will be offered.

What would the millennia-long history of Britain be like if condensed into a five-week course? Exactly like this: it begins with the peopling of the island after the Ice Age and concludes post-Brexit. Stories of risings and fallings, invasions, immigration, revolutions (Glorious and otherwise), and wars (Great and otherwise) move us through the millennia to an understanding of the bigger picture.

This highly interactive course piggybacks on the author’s award-winning book of the same title. Participants will learn creative in-camera concepts, principles, and techniques, without having to spend hours in front of the computer manipulating images. Members will learn two photography paradigms/models. Included in those models are concepts and techniques like intuition, extracting, impressionism, surrealism through photography, and eastern philosophy applications to photography.

This course will begin with a synopsis of German expansion from 1933 through 1939, and will then focus on the German invasion of Poland and the resulting outbreak of war in September of 1939. This will be followed by discussions of the occupation of Denmark and Norway, the period of the so-called "phony war," and Germany's stunning victory in the West in 1940, which seemed to guarantee Germany's continental hegemony. The course will conclude with analyses of the German plan to invade Great Britain and of the ensuing aerial Battle of Britain, whose outcome thwarted the German invasion plan.

Cultures shine through the cracks of experience: moments of transformation that illuminate times, places, and peoples. Moments like death. The Japanese tradition dignifies poems that respond with candor and clarity, not despair. These pieces prize brevity and restraint—verse as an ordered response to perfect stillness, long understood as a consummation, not an ending. Emphasizing craft rather than grief, we will see Buddhism, Shinto, ritual honor, and samurai ethics in Japanese culture, past and present, in poetry on the edge.

Course Materials: Japanese Death Poems, ed. Yoel Hoffmann. Approximately $11.00 on Amazon. ISBN13: 978-1462916498. Other materials will be available as PDFs.

This course will explore Pittsburgh's environmental history from industrial devastation in the 19th century to economic decline and eventual renewal. Members will learn about the environmental dilemmas of air, water, and land pollution, and the impact of industry on the city's landscape.

Course Materials: Devastation and Renewal, by Joel Tarr.  ISBN: 978-0822941569 ($15.00 on Amazon. 

                             Beyond Steel, by Christopher Briem. ISBN: 1-60635-502-2 ($25 paperback).

This American history lecture course will focus on the biographies of key founding fathers: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. The time periods of colonial, revolutionary, and early U.S. history will also be explored in the context of their lives.

How did Freud's nephew convince American women to start smoking cigarettes? Who started the rumor that HIV doesn't cause AIDS? Did Putin try to convince us that Pfizer vaccines cause autism? This course explores the evolution of persuasive communication and propaganda drawing on psychology, sociology, and communication theory. Case studies include (but are not limited to) Nazi Germany and Cold War propaganda, Putin's strategy, and contemporary Iranian propaganda. We will also discuss recent government strategies involving A.I. images, social media manipulation, and influencer campaigns.