Philosophers
& Founders
The Word Made Tech
We teach reading and writing as powerful spiritual technologies
for self-understanding and for freeing your mind.
BECOME HUMAN in a MACHINE WORLD
Alexandra Barylski, M.A.R.
CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR
Alexandra Barylski is the Executive Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, an award-winning poet, and a deep literacy advocate and entrepreneur.
Alex works with the world’s leading scholars, writers, scientists, and artists, editing and curating their work for over 100,000 readers. Writers who work with her are published in major academic presses, leading journals, and news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
At Yale Divinity School, she studied with Christian Wiman, former Editor of Poetry Magazine, and was the 2018 Peter Taylor Fellow for poet and writer, Afaa Weaver, at Kenyon College.
Alex co-founded The Writing College with philosopher, Samuel Loncar, Ph.D (Yale). At The Writing College, she teaches deep literacy as a philosophical practice founded on two decades of experience in research and work in writing labs, liberal arts universities, technical colleges, prisons, and prep-schools.
“Alexandra Barylski is a perceptive, broad-minded, and unfailingly intelligent editor. Any aspiring or established writer would be lucky to work with her.”
- Christian Wiman
Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts, Yale
poet, author, and former Editor of Poetry Magazine
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D.
CO-FOUNDER & ARCHITECT
Samuel Loncar builds bridges between the ivory tower and the public square. A philosopher with a Yale Ph.D, he works as a writer, institution builder, consultant, keynote speaker, and applied ethicist.
He is the Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, a magazine integrating the research university and public culture. At Marginalia, he designs and oversees the integration of science and humanistic research for a global audience of over 100,000 readers.
Currently, he is directing The Meanings of Science in the Modern World Project, a multi-phase project that began at Oxford University, convening a team of global science experts to formulate a new vision of the scientific enterprise, and has now led to over 30 high-impact publications on cutting edge science, reaching 300,000 people, and a new project on the revolution in biology currently underway, supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation
He works with large and small corporations as well as invited individuals on short-and long-term projects, which have included full-time work with China’s largest audio company, Himalaya, and speaking for clients like the United Nations, Flagship Pioneering, Red Bull Arts, Oliver Wyman, Trinity Church Wall Street, and the Shabtai Society at Yale.
His work as a writer and philosopher has been read at Google, taught in classes and universities across the world, featured in the Browser and Chronicle of Higher Ed, and translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Farsi. He is the founder and creator of the Becoming Human Project ( EST. 2020), designed for a species in transition. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
“Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is smart and persuasive and a joy to listen to. His writing is both lively and profound, and his erudition is so contagious, it makes you want to drop everything…”
- Costica Bradatan
Los Angeles Review of Book, Philosophy Editor
& Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University
The true purpose of education
“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself. . .
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. . .The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk.
This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”
-James Baldwin
"A Talk to Teachers”