In the United States, education is moving beyond the university campus. Independent courses are flourishing in bars, bookstores, and breweries, offering lessons that range from the physics of baseball to the history of plastic surgery. The audience is made up of curious adults, often tired of digital mediation and pre-packaged knowledge.
In New York, Lectures on Tap hosts 45-minute talks on topics like the summer solstice or marital infidelity. Profs and Pints, launched in Washington D.C., has already expanded to ten cities. The format is simple: one topic, one informed speaker, one beer on the table.
But it’s not just about entertainment. According to several scholars, the popularity of these formats is also a response to mental atrophy caused by the internet, population aging, and the fragmentation of knowledge. Studying something—even just for one evening—has become an act of resistance to the habit of passive scrolling, an antidote to what some call digital brain rot.
Meanwhile, online learning is multiplying as well. Substack hosts newsletters that function like classes, with serialized content, reading lists, and homework. Some users turn to chatbots to generate personalized syllabi—with mixed results. Others join Zoom courses, attend seminars on Google Meet, or follow along by email.
Journalist Karen Attiah revived her course on race and media—canceled by Columbia University—by turning it into a newsletter. The response: five hundred sign-ups in 48 hours, and a waiting list of two thousand names.
At the same time, bookstores like Politics & Prose, as well as small-town breweries, continue to host courses on poetry, history, ticks, and architectural folklore. No university badge required—just a $10 ticket or a pay-what-you-can option. And it works just fine.
