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WARRANT-01The Land Warrant
The Match
One statute created two classes of college, and only one class has ever been allowed to come up short. This course teaches the American land-grant system as an instrument rather than as a story, starting from the words on the page. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave each state thirty thousand acres of public land for every senator and representative it had under the 1860 census, told the state to sell it, invest the proceeds in a fund whose capital must remain forever undiminished, and spend only the interest, forever, on a college teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts to the industrial classes. Then Congress attached the machine that made those colleges powerful: the Hatch Act of 1887 paid for agricultural experiment stations, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 paid for the extension agents who carried research to actual farms. The 1890 Institutions were not eligible for either, and Congress did not authorize annual research and extension capacity grants for them until 1977. That is ninety years without research money and sixty-three without extension money, and it is stated in one sentence in a three-page congressional document any learner can download. The 1890 Act itself is stranger than its reputation: it granted cash rather than land, so the phrase land-grant HBCU is exactly true about legal status and misleading about endowment, and its operative proviso wrote separate but equal into federal higher-education funding six years before Plessy v. Ferguson. The course then works the match. Capacity grants require dollar-for-dollar non-federal money; the law lets the Secretary of Agriculture waive the top half of that requirement for an 1890 institution and permits no such waiver for the 1862 institutions of any state; all states meet their 1862 match, and in FY2020 nine 1890 institutions took waivers. The 2013 APLU count and the sixteen letters two federal secretaries sent to sixteen governors in September 2023 are taught as evidence with their objections attached, including the governors who disputed the method by name. The course ends where the evidence ends, with an agreement that arrived in 2026 carrying no money, a ledger of what this course tested and refused to print, and a research exercise that has you pull your own state's numbers out of the report Congress requires USDA to publish every year.
Coming soonWARRANT-02The Land Warrant
The County Committee
Federal farm programmes are national money handed out by three people who live down the road. This course teaches the mechanism from the statutes up, and it starts before any of it is about race, with a calendar. A farmer spends in spring and is paid in autumn, so a loan that arrives late is a loan that was denied, and every mechanism that follows is one that can spend time. Then the eligibility test, which changes what a refusal means: to borrow from the United States Department of Agriculture an applicant must be unable to obtain sufficient credit elsewhere at reasonable rates and terms in their own community. The federal farm lender is by statute the lender of last resort, so there is no next lender, and a denial ends the search instead of redirecting it. Two committee systems then sat in every county with almost the same name, and telling them apart is where careful people go wrong: the conservation and price-support committees created by the 1935 Act were elected by producers, and the Farmers Home Administration credit committees were not. A federal civil rights commission described the second kind in 1982 in one paragraph this course reads as a machine: three individuals residing in the county, at least two of them farmers, determining both eligibility and the limits of credit, nominated by the county supervisor and appointed by the state director. The same report counted who sat on those committees, printed a disclaimer that numbers alone do not prove discrimination, and contradicted itself about Tennessee in a way this course shows you rather than resolves. Section three settles a question its sibling course refused to answer, by opening the 1920 census: 925,708 Black farm operators on 41,432,182 acres, three quarters of them tenants, and acres owned never collected at all, because the enumerator's schedule never asked. Then title, where a family can lose land with nobody refusing it anything, because any one co-tenant can force the sale of everything. Then Pigford, taught as a designed settlement in which a standard of proof was traded against a payment, with the numbers, their dates, and an arithmetic check anyone can run. And finally what came after: an audit that found control weaknesses rather than fraud, a fraud allegation stated only because its source, venue, evidence and rebuttals can all be named, and a race-conscious remedy that was enjoined and rewritten so that eligibility turned on an experience rather than an identity. The course ends with a ledger of what it refused to print and three questions you can run on any programme in the country.
Coming soonUSING-LRN1Using Learn.WitUS
Learning on Learn.WitUS
Learn how to find a course on Learn.WitUS, tell an open course from one that is still coming soon, and read a sale price correctly. You will also search inside a course, keep and share notes, drill with Quick recall, join a live session, report a problem, and share what you are studying.
Coming soonUSING-PAR1Using Learn.WitUS
Learn.WitUS for parents
By the end you can open the Family view, read your child's course progress, grades, credentials and live-class attendance, and choose how your child's teachers are able to contact you. You will also know where a class grade, an adjusted grade and a live session come from, and what the app never shows a parent.
Coming soonUSING-TCH1Using Learn.WitUS
Build your first course
Take one course from an empty form to a page learners can buy, using the screens Learn.WitUS already gives you. By the end you can create a course, write and record its lessons, set its category and price, and get it reviewed and opened. Pairs with How to Create a Course That People Finish and Pass, which teaches how to write a course; this one teaches the screens you build it on.
Coming soonUSING-TCH2Using Learn.WitUS
Teach and run your course
Schedule live sessions, keep an always-on stream running between them, and fan one broadcast out to your socials. Then read everything your learners send back: lesson feedback, problem reports, the notes they share with you, and the searches that show what they were looking for.
Coming soonPERFORM-00PERFORM: Performance Craft
Acting: The Frame, the Stage, and the Read
A course about the half of acting that can honestly be taught at a distance: how to read a script for what a character wants, what every shot size does to a performance, how stage, film, television, commercials, vertical video, and narration each ask for something different, and how to watch your own self-tape without lying to yourself. It teaches no coaching, promises no work, and says so in the first lesson.
Coming soonPERFORM-01PERFORM: Performance Craft
Voice Acting: The Instrument
Before auditions, demos, or a single paid read, there is the instrument: breath, vocal folds, articulators, the mic, and the room. This course teaches how your voice actually works, how to keep it healthy, how to record it cleanly at home, and how to break down a script, then closes with an honest map of the business, with no promises a course cannot keep.
Coming soonCREDIT-00Credit: Who Gets Named
Who Gets Named
Doing the work and being named for it are two different events. They happen at different times, they leave different records, and the second one is decided by machinery you can learn. This course teaches that machinery: the Matthew effect, which sends credit to whoever is already eminent; the Matilda effect, which routes a woman's contribution to a male colleague; the authorship conventions that decide who goes on the paper and who is thanked underneath it; the split in patent law between the humans who must be named and the company that owns the result; the four moments at which an archive goes quiet; and how a correction actually happens, who does it, how long it takes, and what it can and cannot repair. Six people carry the evidence: Pauli Murray, whose argument the Brown litigation used; Vivien Thomas, who built an operation he was not permitted to author; Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken and whose name was replaced with a false one; Annie Turnbo Malone, whose business records mostly did not survive; Claudette Colvin, whom a movement chose not to name; and Selma Burke, whose claim on the dime has never been settled either way. Where the evidence is genuinely argued, this course teaches the argument and names who holds which position, because a dispute closed by assertion is not history.
Coming soonCREDIT-01Credit: Who Gets Named
Who Gets the Credit: Black Inventors and the Machinery of Attribution
Ideas get taken. Names get lost. But the interesting question is not whether that happened to Black inventors, which it plainly did, but HOW it happened, because the mechanism is a system you can learn and then use. This course teaches that system first: what a patent actually granted, who was legally permitted to hold one and when, the 1858 opinion that barred enslaved inventors and their enslavers alike, the Confederate answer to it, the assignment clause that moves a patent to an employer on the day it issues, and the several distinct ways a name disappears from work it did. Then it works through the verified cases with their documentation, patent numbers and dates included, from Thomas Jennings in 1821 to Lonnie Johnson in 1986. Then it does the thing most treatments of this subject refuse to do: it names the famous claims in this genre that do not survive checking, says what the evidence actually shows instead, and teaches you to run that check yourself in about ten minutes. A reader who can defend every claim they make is worth more to this history than a reader carrying a longer list.
Coming soonCREDIT-02Credit: Who Gets Named
Who Signs the Print
A fine art print is made by at least two people: the artist who makes the image, and the master printer who makes the edition. Only one of them signs it. That is not a rule about race, and getting that right is the whole point of this course, because the convention applies to every master printer who has ever worked, which means the medium itself manufactures a category of expertise the public cannot see. The interesting question is who ends up in that category, and what they build once they are there. This course teaches the convention end to end: what a pencil signature actually certifies (approval, not authorship, and it dates only from the second half of the nineteenth century), where the printer's credit really lives (an embossed chop that carries no name, and a documentation sheet the public never reads), and what a printer owns instead of a signature (the bon a tirer, the proof the whole edition must match). Then it follows Robert Blackburn, hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions, who printed its first seventy-nine editions, all of which carry other artists' signatures, and who answered the convention by building an open workshop rather than by arguing with it. Elizabeth Catlett answered it with a collective, Margaret Taylor-Burroughs with a museum, AfriCOBRA with a cheap and portable medium, Charles White with a classroom, and Emma Amos with a print portfolio that got her into a room she was the only woman in. The shape transfers: session musicians, ghostwriters, film colourists, translators and test kitchens are governed by the same three conditions, and the course ends by teaching you to spot them, and by showing two credit conventions that were actually corrected.
Coming soonCREDIT-03Credit: Who Gets Named
The Name on the Door
A building is credited to a firm, and a firm is named after whoever owns it. That one sentence explains more about architectural credit than any story about a stolen design, because it means the public credit line for a building answers a legal and contractual question rather than the question readers think they are asking. This course teaches the convention end to end: what a credit line actually names, what a licensed architect's seal certifies and what it does not, and why the architect of record and the design architect are two different jobs that only sometimes belong to the same person. Then it adds the second gate. Architectural licensure began in Illinois in 1897 and spread state by state, and it is real public-safety regulation with a real body count behind it, but it is also a gate, and the education and paid-experience steps behind it ran through admissions offices and hiring decisions. Julian Abele is the case, and the popular version of him is wrong in specific and checkable ways. He was chief designer in Horace Trumbauer's office and took the firm over after Trumbauer died, but employees there did not sign, and when he applied to the American Institute of Architects in 1942 the only buildings he could list as his own were his sister's house and the Duke work. That single document is worth more than the myth ever was. The course also refuses the flattering errors: he was not a servant, he was not the sole architect of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and there is no record that he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Norma Merrick Sklarek, Beverly Loraine Greene, Georgia Louise Harris Brown, Paul Revere Williams and Robert R. Taylor carry the rest of the argument, and the course ends where credit conventions can actually be changed: a cornerstone recut to carry two names, an award rule that admits two people instead of one, and a ledger of what this course tested and refused to print.
Coming soonCREDIT-WRI1Credit: Who Gets Named
Written by Himself
A byline is not a report of who wrote something. It is a term in an agreement, and the title page is where the agreement shows. Ghostwriting is the cleanest place in this catalog to see that, because the writer's name is missing by design and the writer was paid for exactly that: the absence is the deliverable, not a wrong done to anybody. So this course does not call ghostwriting theft, which would be wrong and correctable in public by anyone holding a publishing contract. It asks the harder question instead. Who ends up inside that contract, who ends up outside it, and what does a byline pay that a fee does not? The evidence is free, digitised and out of copyright, and the course reads it directly. Phillis Wheatley's 1773 Poems carries an attestation in its own front matter, signed by eighteen Boston men, certifying that a Black woman wrote her own poems: the credit document and the book are the same object. Frederick Douglass answered the same disbelief from the other direction, by putting the claim in his subtitle. Solomon Northup's book was edited by David Wilson, Omar ibn Said wrote his in Arabic in 1831, and Abby Fisher dictated hers because she could not write. Elizabeth Keckley took the byline and was punished for it, and was doubted anyway. And Harriet Jacobs is the model correction the whole series needs: her book was read as Lydia Maria Child's for roughly a century, and Jean Fagan Yellin restored it to Jacobs using Jacobs's own letters. Four of the strongest documents here are books by Black women whose authorship was disputed, which makes women the argument rather than an addendum. The course ends in the present tense, with the as-told-to trade, the collaborator credit ladder, and a deliberate refusal: where the record does not name the writer, this course does not guess.
Coming soonCREDIT-REC1Credit: Who Gets Named
Who Made the Record: Photography, Custody, and the Credit Line
A photograph of a person looks like something that happened. It is something somebody did, and this course follows the paperwork that decision leaves behind: who commissioned the picture, who was paid, whose name went in the caption, who owned the plate afterwards, and who is allowed to say no. It is a credit course, not a craft course, and it teaches nobody to take a photograph. It runs from Frederick Douglass, who published a theory of the record before he sat for one, through Kodak's Shirley card, where a technical default stopped looking like a decision, to the 1850 daguerreotypes Louis Agassiz commissioned in South Carolina, a record made about seven enslaved people to argue something about them. It then reads three credit lines a learner can go and check today: an archive that names Ella Watson, a museum catalogue that grades its own certainty with the words attributed to, and an acquisition record that three published accounts date to three different years. It ends on two claims made on one archive, Carrie Mae Weems against Harvard in the 1990s and Tamara Lanier against Harvard from 2019, taught as the pair they are, with the legal posture kept intact rather than smoothed into a story about who won. Every contested claim here is taught as contested with the holders named, and where this course could not reach a source it says so instead of guessing.
Coming soonCREDIT-CHO1Credit: Who Gets Named
Black creators in dance, and the copyright that would not hold them
Choreography was not a copyrightable category in the United States until 1 January 1978. Before that date a dance could be registered only if it passed as a dramatic composition, in Class D, which meant it had to tell a story or develop a character, and the rule came from a case a white dancer lost in 1892. After that date it could be registered only if it was fixed: written, notated or filmed. A dance that was danced and never written down was, in law, never a work at all. This course teaches that mechanism from the documents themselves, the 1909 Act, the Copyright Office's own Compendium, Circular 52, and the opinions in Horgan v. Macmillan and Hanagami v. Epic Games, and then reads the archive against it. You will open the Library of Congress finding aid for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Collection to a box of contracts and read four Black choreographers' names on four folder headings, one of them with a royalties schedule laid in and one of them closed to researchers until the year 2100. You will compare the two folders that hold what survives of the choreography of Revelations with the two boxes that hold its choral scores. And you will price a Labanotation score, because a score is not only a record, it is a revenue instrument, and every choreographer who was never notated was excluded from it. Nothing here is asserted that was not read from a source. Where the popular story is wrong, including about Alvin Ailey and about Janet Collins, the correction is the lesson.
Coming soonCREDIT-SCI1Credit: Who Gets Named
Esther Lederberg: The Technique, the Phage, and the Record
Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg developed replica plating, discovered bacteriophage lambda, and found the fertility factor that explained how bacteria mate. Molecular biology runs on all three. This course teaches the science first, in that order, because the alternative order is the problem: introduce her as somebody's wife and the work becomes the footnote, which is exactly the move the record shows being made about her for fifty years. Only after you can say what replica plating does and why a turbid plaque mattered does the course open the attribution question, and then it opens it with paperwork rather than outrage: the exact motivation of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the exact shares, the Nobel Foundation's own 1958 biography of the laureate, which mentions her in a marriage sentence and gives her job title as research associate, and the author lines of the papers themselves, checked one by one against the journals' own records. It also teaches the limits. The Nobel statutes cap a prize at three people and that prize already had three names, so the honest question is about how credit was allocated across a career and a literature, not a verdict on a committee whose deliberations nobody can read. The frame is the Matilda effect, named by Margaret Rossiter in 1993 and measured across thirteen scientific societies in 2012. And because getting it wrong in her favour makes the true record easier to dismiss, the last lesson corrects the corrections.
Coming soonDIDWORK-SHE1Did the Work
She Took the Seat and Held the Door
Twelve women who got into sports media and stayed, and what their careers teach anyone trying to enter a closed profession. Not a hall of fame. A study of mechanisms: the trial contract, the credential stack, the pipeline program, the non-linear resume, and the road knowledge nobody writes down. It is precise about firsts, because a course about who was first is worthless if it gets the ordinals wrong, and lesson 3 teaches you to check one yourself. It is equally precise about what came after: several of the twelve are no longer with the organization that hired them, and a course that shows only the hiring press release is lying to its students. Cited to network bios, hall-of-fame records, honours lists and contemporaneous reporting, APA 7 throughout.
Coming soonDIDWORK-HIM1Did the Work
How the NAACP Learned to Win
Five men, five instruments, and the slowest successful campaign in American civic history. W. E. B. Du Bois built a press so the facts existed. James Weldon Johnson built a branch network and aimed it at Congress, where it lost. Walter White went and got the evidence nobody would give him, and used it to beat a Supreme Court nomination. Charles Hamilton Houston designed a ladder of precedents and trained the lawyer who climbed it, and Thurgood Marshall argued thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court and won twenty-nine of them. This is a course about organizational strategy told through five careers: what each instrument can do, what it cannot, what a losing campaign still buys, and why the litigation everyone remembers only worked because the other three came first. Cited to the case reporters, the Senate's own record, the digitized Crisis, and named historians, APA 7 throughout.
Coming soonDIDWORK-SHE2Did the Work
The Editor of The Crisis
Jessie Redmon Fauset ran the literary pages of The Crisis from October 1919 to April 1926. She took the first poem Langston Hughes published outside his high school magazine, ran Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer and Arna Bontemps, and kept the rooms where those writers met each other. Hughes later named her one of three people who midwifed the New Negro literature into being. The movement is remembered by name; she is remembered as staff. This course is about why, and it is about editorial work rather than about a life: what an acquiring editor actually does, why none of it leaves a byline, and how credit for a movement travels to whoever signed the poems. It is built on the magazine itself, read issue by issue, because the masthead settles a tenure that every secondary account rounds off, and it separates writers she is documented to have acquired from writers who merely appeared while she was there, because those are different claims and the record does not settle both. Her four novels are the control case: she did have a byline, and is still barely read, so this course refuses the tidy story that erasure explains everything. Where the evidence is genuinely argued, it teaches the argument and names who holds which position.
Coming soonDIDWORK-SHE3Did the Work
Shirley Graham Wrote the Opera First
A composer, playwright, biographer and organizer taught in the order she built things, which means the opera comes first and the 1951 marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois arrives in lesson 15 as one fact among several. Her opera was staged in a Cleveland stadium in 1932 while she was still an undergraduate. The Federal Theatre put her in charge of a unit. She wrote a shelf of biographies for young readers, won prizes for them, and worked in a genre whose liberties with fact are worth arguing about. She organized, was surveilled, lost her passport, moved to Ghana, helped start a television service, and took Ghanaian citizenship. The course is precise about what the record supports and blunt about what it does not: the unqualified claim that she wrote the first opera by a Black woman is downgraded to the narrowest version the sources carry, four widely repeated details about the 1932 premiere are named as wrong, and what could not be settled is filed as an open source check rather than smoothed over. Cited to archives, contemporaneous press and the scholarly literature, APA 7 throughout.
Coming soonMONEY-01Your Money, and Who Decides
Credit, and the Decisions Made About You
Somebody you have never met keeps a file about how you pay, sells it to people deciding whether to lend to you, and is allowed to do that. This course is not about how to build good credit. It is about how a credit decision is actually made: what data feeds it, who is allowed to look, what the decider must tell you, and what you can do when the record is wrong. It starts before any of it is about scores, with a calendar, because the ordinary failure is not overspending but timing. Money is owed on one date and arrives on another, and closing that gap is what every consumer credit product sells. Then the vocabulary that the law, rather than the industry, defines. A creditor that receives a completed application does one of three things, and only one of them has a legal name: adverse action, defined to its edges in Regulation B, because the paperwork rights attach to the defined term and not to the feeling of being turned down. Then the file itself, which the Fair Credit Reporting Act defines as a communication bearing on your credit worthiness, credit standing, credit capacity, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living, and which a consumer reporting agency assembles for monetary fees. Who may buy it is a closed list in the statute that ends with the words and no other. What may appear in it, and for how long, is a second list, and most adverse items fall off after seven years. Then the score, which the statute defines as a numerical value derived from a statistical tool used to predict the likelihood of certain credit behaviors, which means it is a prediction rather than a measurement, that there is more than one of them, and that the four key factors printed beside it are the part you can act on. The centre of the course is a piece of paper you can hold: the adverse action notice, which federal regulation requires to be specific and to indicate the principal reasons, and which may not simply say you failed to reach a score cutoff. Read beside this catalog's own course on federal farm credit, where a government gate had to state its eligibility standard in statute, the parallel is exact and one level down. Then the dispute: a reasonable reinvestigation, free of charge, inside thirty days, with the company that supplied the item put on notice within five business days and obliged to investigate too. Then the price, and why the annual percentage rate exists at all, which is so that two offers can be compared. The course closes on the method rather than on a table, because model versions and program terms move while statutes do not, and it ends by having you read your own record. It is information about how institutions decide, not advice about your money, and it says so in three separate lessons.
Coming soonMONEY-02Your Money, and Who Decides
Banking, and Who Has No Bank
A generic banking course teaches you how to open a checking account. This one teaches what a bank account actually is, what it costs, what happens when you do not have one, and what fills the gap. It starts with the deposit contract, because the thing you call your money is legally a claim against a company, and the insurance that backs that claim has a structure worth learning even though its dollar cap has a date on it. Then the two gates. The first is the identity rule at 31 CFR 1020.220, which requires a bank to collect four things before it opens an account for you, and which does not say the words driver's license or Social Security number, though almost everyone believes it does. The second is the gate almost nobody knows exists: banks screen applicants through companies like ChexSystems and Early Warning Services, those companies are consumer reporting agencies under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and that single legal fact gives a rejected applicant a right to be told which company was consulted, a right to a free copy of the file, and a right to dispute what is in it. Then the cost structure, taught as a price rather than a rule: a monthly fee waived above a balance threshold is the same account sold at two prices, sorted by who has the least. Overdraft is taught from the opt-in regulation and from the rule Congress nullified in May 2025, because a course that described that rule in the present tense would be wrong. Then the substitute market, priced rather than scolded: money orders, check cashing, prepaid cards and payment apps, with the fees the FDIC and USPS publish, and with the reason a household with an unpredictable balance rationally prefers a fee it can see to a fee it cannot predict. The evidence spine is the FDIC's own biennial survey, which asks unbanked households why, publishes their answers, and shows that the single most cited reason is not having enough money to meet a minimum balance. The course ends with distance, with what saving actually looks like across the population according to the Federal Reserve, and with five things you can do to read your own account, none of which is advice about what to do with your money.
Coming soonMONEY-03Your Money, and Who Decides
Cash Flow, and When the Money Actually Moves
A bill is due on the first and the paycheck lands on the third. That is not a budgeting failure, it is two calendars that were set by different people under different rules, and this course is about those rules. It teaches no budgeting technique at all, on purpose: budgeting has no mechanism, no decision-maker and no recourse, while timing has all three and every one of them is public. When money arrives is a federal schedule. The Expedited Funds Availability Act and Regulation CC say how soon a bank must let you use a deposit, and the answer depends on what you deposited, where you deposited it, and what time of day the bank says its day ended. Cash handed to a teller is one rule, a payroll direct deposit is another, a government check is a third, and an ordinary check is a fourth, with six named exceptions that can extend any of them and a written notice owed to you whenever one is used. When money leaves is a different kind of rule and a much shorter one. The Uniform Commercial Code says a bank may charge items to your account in any order it finds convenient, which means the same four payments on the same day can produce one overdraft or three depending on a sequencing choice you never see. The course works that arithmetic rather than complaining about it, because the arithmetic is the part you can act on. Then the rails: cash, check, an automated clearing house credit, a card, a wire, and instant payment, six ways money moves with six different clocks, and only some of them are what the availability rule calls an electronic payment. Then the paycheck itself, where the arithmetic surprises people: weekly is fifty-two paydays a year, biweekly is twenty-six, semimonthly is twenty-four, and biweekly and semimonthly are not the same thing even though both are often called twice a month. Federal law sets a regular pay day and does not set how often it comes; your state does, and the statute has a number in it. A Social Security payment date is set by a published rule keyed to a birth date, which means it can be computed a year ahead. The course closes on the two questions worth knowing the answers to: which of these timings is a legal duty with a remedy attached, and which is merely the way a bank has chosen to run its day. It ends by having you map your own dates, request your own bank's availability policy, which any person may ask for in writing, and read your own state's payday statute. It is information about how the payment system keeps time, not advice about your money, and it says so in three separate lessons.
Coming soonMONEY-04Your Money, and Who Decides
Predatory Products, Priced
A scam and a predatory product are not the same object, and confusing them costs people money twice. A scam is illegal on its face, and the remedy is fraud law. A predatory product is legal, sold by a licensed business under a written contract, with its price printed on the page, and the remedy is arithmetic. This course prices the legal ones. It starts with the tool the law itself requires, the annual percentage rate, which exists under the Truth in Lending Act so that two offers stated in different units can be compared, and it teaches the conversion that turns a flat fee into one. Then the small-dollar loan, where the cost is not in the first loan but in the renewal, a mechanism the Supreme Court described in a single sentence about fine print and a federal jury in New York found a lender had understated by a factor of nearly ten. Then rent-to-own, where the total of payments can approach or exceed twice the cash price, and where no annual percentage rate appears at all, because Regulation Z's definition of a credit sale turns on whether the customer agreed to pay, and a lease you may end at any time is not that agreement. Then the products that attach to money you are already owed: a tax refund that federal law holds until a stated date for the households most likely to be offered a loan against it, and overdraft, which is priced. Then the line that decides who bears a loss when money leaves an account, which is the most useful thing this course teaches. Regulation E defines an unauthorized electronic fund transfer as one initiated by someone other than you without your authority, and the error-resolution machinery, the liability caps and the burden of proof on the institution all hang on that definition being met. A transfer you were tricked into making yourself does not meet it. The course closes on who is targeted, taught from public enforcement records rather than from assertion, and on how to read one: a complaint is an allegation, a stipulated order is a settlement, and a jury verdict is a finding, and the difference matters. It gives no financial advice, prints no national rate, dates every figure, and teaches you to find your own state's rule rather than trusting a table.
Coming soonMONEY-05Your Money, and Who Decides
Taxes, and the Money Taken Before You See It
For most working people in the United States, federal income tax is not a bill that arrives. It is money that is already gone, taken by an employer under a duty the law places on the employer rather than on you, before the pay statement is printed. This course is not about how to do your taxes. It is about the machine that decides how much is held, what the document you sign actually is, and who the rules land on. It starts with the two separate deductions on one pay statement, taken under two different chapters of the Internal Revenue Code, only one of which comes back to you as a credit at the end of the year. Then the withholding certificate, the single dial an employee controls, and the regulation that renamed it when the allowances it was built around were removed. Then the reason a refund is not a gift: the statute says withheld tax is allowed to you as a credit, so an overpayment is your own money returning, while a refundable credit is something else entirely and the law is explicit about which is which. Then the return as a document with legal consequences, signed under penalties of perjury by force of a single sentence of the Code, starting a three-year clock to assess that becomes six years on a large omission and never runs at all on a false return or on no return. Then filing status, which is not a preference but a determination made as of the last day of the year, and which on a joint return makes each spouse liable for the whole tax rather than half. The centre of the course is the place where the tax system stops collecting revenue and starts paying money out: the refundable credit, defined by a sentence saying the excess shall be considered an overpayment, and the earned income credit, which is conditioned on having worked and is the largest cash safety-net program in the country. Then the date Congress wrote for those credits and for nobody else, which holds the refunds of the lowest-earning filers until mid-February and is the window every refund-advance product is priced against. Then free filing, which turns out to be a private contract with an income limit derived from a percentile rather than a statute, a volunteer program born in 1969, and a government-built filing tool that was suspended. It closes on examination: what an audit legally is, what clock it starts, and what published research using named methods found about who is selected, including a disparity concentrated in exactly the credit this course spends a section on. It gives no tax advice, prints no current bracket or credit amount, dates every figure, and says so in three separate lessons.
Coming soonMONEY-06Your Money, and Who Decides
Housing: the Lease, the Loan Estimate, and the Map
A housing decision is not a choice between two lifestyles. It is a choice between two contracts, and almost every term that matters is already written on a document somebody is legally required to hand you. This course will not tell you whether to rent or to buy, and it gives no financial advice. It teaches the machinery instead. A lease buys a right to occupy for a term; a mortgage loan buys money and pledges the property back as security, which is why the early payments are almost all interest and why the schedule that proves it is arithmetic anyone can do. Renting is governed by state law, which means there is no national answer about deposits, notice or eviction, so the course teaches how to find the statute that governs your own address and demonstrates the method on one labelled state rather than printing a table that would be wrong in forty-nine places. Buying is governed by two federal forms designed to be laid side by side: the Loan Estimate, which a creditor must deliver within three business days of an application, itself defined as six specific pieces of information, and the Closing Disclosure, which the consumer must receive at least three business days before consummation. Between them sit the good-faith rules that decide which quoted costs may move and by how much, the annual percentage rate that the form itself says is not your interest rate, and the total interest percentage, which states what the loan costs as a share of what was borrowed. The comparison of renting against buying is then done honestly, in the same units, over a stated horizon, with the transaction costs on both ends counted, because the familiar claim that renting throws money away is a conclusion with no arithmetic attached. The last third turns to valuation and to the record. An appraisal is an opinion of value, you are entitled to a free copy of every one, and appraising is written into the Fair Housing Act's own definition of a covered transaction. Then the map: racially restrictive covenants are still in the county land records, a 1948 Supreme Court decision made them judicially unenforceable without erasing them, a university project has mapped hundreds of them in one city, and in at least one state a statute says exactly what an owner may record to strike one from their own deed. It closes by having you read one real document about your own housing.
Coming soonMONEY-07Your Money, and Who Decides
Retirement: the Plan, the Fee Disclosure, and the Floor
This is not a course about how to invest, and it will not tell you what to buy, how much to save, or when to start. It teaches the machinery instead, because the machinery is public and the advice would be a guess. Start with the fact that decides everything else: a workplace retirement plan exists only because an employer chose to sponsor one, so whether you have access is a fact about the labour market rather than about your discipline, and the federal survey that measures it finds the gap running from 91 percent access in the best-paid quarter of private-sector occupations down to 49 percent in the lowest-paid quarter. From there the course reads the documents. An employee pension benefit plan has a statutory definition, and the plan document, not a website, decides what your employer contributes and when it becomes yours; the vesting schedules an employer may choose from are printed in the statute itself, your own deferrals are nonforfeitable from the day you make them, and what happens to the rest when you leave is a term you can look up rather than a rumour. Fees compound in exactly the way balances do, and one regulation requires the plan to hand you a disclosure that says so, to state each investment's cost both as a percentage and as a dollar amount per thousand invested, and to tell you at least quarterly what you were actually charged. The tax half is taught as a timing choice rather than a product choice, and the annual figures are taught as a method: a base amount fixed in statute, an adjustment made each year, and the notice where the current number is published. Then Social Security, taught from the statute rather than from a brochure: forty quarters of coverage, an earnings record that becomes conclusive three years, three months and fifteen days after the year it covers, thirty-five years of indexed earnings, and a benefit formula that pays 90 percent of the first slice of average indexed monthly earnings and 15 percent of the last. The course closes on the question almost nobody asks and everybody should: which of the people talking to you is legally required to act in your interest, which is held to a different standard written in a different rule, and where the free public records are that let you check either one before you listen.
Coming soonRIVER-05
Cairo: Where Two Rivers Meet
At Cairo, Illinois the Ohio joins the Mississippi and the expedition becomes a different journey. What happens physically where two large rivers meet, why a town at the most strategically perfect location in the interior did not thrive, and how to read a place by what is no longer there.
Coming soonRIVER-09
Finding Your Way, and Losing It
How navigation actually works on a large river, why capable people still get lost, and what to do when a plan fails, resources run short, or the group stops agreeing. The judgment half of an expedition, which is the half that decides how it ends.
Coming soonRIVER-08
Living on the Water
Months of camping, cooking, water treatment and resupply along a corridor that is mostly private land, levee district and regulated ground. What it actually takes to live beside a working river, and why the legal question comes before the practical one.
Coming soonRIVER-06
Sold Down the River
The phrase is not a metaphor. For decades this water carried enslaved people from the Upper South to the markets of Natchez and New Orleans, and to be sent down it meant separation from family, almost always permanently. What the domestic slave trade was, how the river served it, and why the ordinary phrase carries what it does.
Coming soonRIVER-11
Telling the River
The capstone. The expedition sent back both factual logs and fiction written from the same places on the same days, which makes the difference between them unusually visible. What each form can do, what neither may do, and a piece of work of your own about a place you can actually reach.
Coming soonRIVER-07
The Delta, and the Way North
A century after the trade that carried people south, the movement reversed. Millions left the South, and from the Mississippi Delta the way out ran on rails that paralleled the river the expedition is paddling. How the route worked, how word traveled, and why this is the third direction on one corridor.
Coming soonRIVER-04
The Engineered River: Locks, Dams and Barges
The Ohio and the Mississippi are not natural waterways with some structures added. They are machines for moving freight, maintained continuously and at enormous expense. What that machinery is, why it exists, and why it makes this the most dangerous part of the journey.
Coming soonRIVER-03
The Ohio, and the Line
For decades the Ohio River was the border between slavery and freedom, and more people escaped through this valley than through any other region of the country. The expedition crosses that line in its first days, traveling the opposite way. What the river meant, who ran the networks on the northern bank, and why a river makes such a strange border.
Coming soonRIVER-02
The Wabash, and What a Watershed Is
The first stretch of the journey, and the idea that makes the whole thing legible: every drop of water in this river came from somewhere, and everything upstream arrives downstream. How rivers form, why they bend, and why the Wabash matters far beyond Indiana.
Coming soonRIVER-01
What an Expedition Is
A team is paddling from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 1,100 miles of the Wabash, the Ohio and the Lower Mississippi. This course is how to follow it as an expedition rather than a trip: what the route actually is, what makes the water dangerous, and why the direction they are traveling is the most interesting thing about it.
Coming soonRIVER-10
What the River Carries
The expedition ends by paddling into the consequence of everything it paddled past. Each summer a low-oxygen zone forms in the Gulf where the Mississippi arrives, driven by nutrients gathered across the whole basin. How it works, why it is nobody's fault in particular, and what that makes it.
Coming soonSTORY-00Storytelling
How Stories Work
Six decisions survive translation into any medium: the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, and the turn. This is the core of the Storytelling series and it was written last on purpose, after the specialized courses had already put those six terms under pressure in a solo play, a ten-minute drama and a set of public meeting notes. It teaches each decision in depth, shows the same one operating in forms that look nothing alike, and is honest about what does NOT transfer: the things that are genuinely properties of a medium rather than of story. It covers structure as a promise to an audience, why most drafts fail at the change rather than the sentence, the ethics of telling stories about real people, and the discipline of knowing when not to make a story at all. Ends with a diagnostic you can run on any draft in any form.
Coming soonSTORY-TRU1Storytelling
Civic Documentation: Recording What Happened in Public
Public meetings decide budgets, contracts, zoning, policing and schools, and most of them happen in rooms with nobody watching. This course teaches the discipline of documenting them: what a public body actually is, how to read an agenda before you go, how to behave in the room, what open-meetings law protects and what it does not, note-taking to a standard a stranger can use, recording and photography with consent, interviewing after the gavel, and revising notes before memory fades. It covers where documentation ends and reporting begins, why that line protects you, and what defamation and the fair report privilege mean for someone publishing notes. Built on the Documenters Field Guide published by City Bureau, whose program trains and pays people to do exactly this work, with Indianapolis and Mirror Indy as the worked local example. Not affiliated with City Bureau or any local Documenters program. Education about the law, not legal advice.
Coming soonSTORY-TRU2Storytelling
News Storytelling
How do you tell a story when you are not allowed to invent any of it? News sits one rung up the permission ladder from documentation: you may select and arrange, and you may not make things up. This course covers what news is actually for, why the inverted pyramid puts the ending first and what that does to withholding, how to find the owner of a story about a policy, leads that are honest rather than merely arresting, attribution as the load-bearing habit, what you may and may not do to a quotation, numbers and the context that makes them mean something, the difference between a news story and a feature, corrections as a craft rather than an embarrassment, and the specific temptations of narrative journalism. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the discipline of verification as the thing that separates journalism from everything that looks like it.
Coming soonSTORY-TRU3Storytelling
Documentary
A documentary is a relationship that lasts long enough to change, and that is its central craft problem as much as its central ethical one. This course covers what documentary actually claims about the world, the recognized modes and what each one implicitly promises a viewer, access and the consent that has to be renewed rather than signed once, how structure is found in material rather than scripted in advance, interviewing at depth including the uses of silence, archive as evidence, the ethics of the edit where every honest film shapes and the question is how, the signals that keep reenactment and music honest, and who the film is finally for when the participant, the funder and the audience want different things. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the field's own account of its dilemmas rather than a list of rules.
Coming soonSTORY-TRU4Storytelling
Oral history
Oral history is the only form in this series whose primary evidence is a person remembering, which makes it the one where being wrong is sometimes the most valuable thing in the recording. This course covers what an oral history is and what it is not, why the word is narrator rather than subject, memory as evidence rather than as unreliable testimony, research before the interview, the life-review interview and the long silences it needs, equipment and metadata that will outlive your laptop, the legal and ethical layer of the deed of gift, transcription and the choices it forces, interviewing family and interviewing about trauma, and what an archive owes a narrator decades later. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, using the Oral History Association's published standard rather than a private house style.
Coming soonSTORY-PER1Storytelling
Monodrama I: Writing the Solo Piece
One performer, no scene partner, nowhere to hide. A monodrama is the hardest place to bury a weak story and therefore the best place to learn how stories actually work. This course teaches the six decisions that survive translation into any medium (the change, the owner, want and obstacle, withholding, scene and summary, the turn) by making you apply them to the form that exposes all six at once. It covers what a solo piece can and cannot do, who the audience is to your speaker and why that question decides everything else, how to build place and time with no set, the reliability problem, structural options from the single-sitting confession to the fractured memory piece, how to end, and how to revise. Worked examples are real plays you can read or watch, from Beckett to Anna Deavere Smith to Duncan Macmillan. Ends with a performable draft. Part one of two: performing and staging it is Monodrama II.
$19
STORY-PER2Storytelling
Monodrama II: Performing the Solo Piece
You have a draft. Now you have to stand up. This course takes a solo script onto its feet: direct address as a physical problem rather than a literary one, how one body builds a place with no set, what an audience does to a piece that a room alone never reveals, objectives and actions as tools for finding what a line is DOING, status and the psychological gesture, voice and breath for sixty minutes of speaking, memorisation that survives nerves, how to rehearse alone without going stale or going numb, the technical minimum for lights and sound when you are also the operator, and how to take a piece in front of people and change it afterwards. Includes the safety practice that solo autobiographical work requires and that nobody warns performers about. Part two of two: Monodrama I writes the draft.
Coming soonSTORY-PER3Storytelling
Short-Form Drama: Constraint as a Structural Tool
Ten minutes is not a shortened play. It is a different machine, and the constraint is the teacher. This course covers what actually fits in ten minutes and what never will, how to start a story that is already in motion, the single-situation principle that makes short work possible, why most short pieces fail at the ending rather than the beginning, the one-act as a longer but still single-pressure form, and how short-form video drama inherits the same structure under different delivery. It teaches adaptation between runtimes in both directions, the production realities that decide whether a short play ever gets staged, and how to use the form as a laboratory: a ten-minute piece is the cheapest way to test a structural idea before spending a year on it. Real plays throughout, from Glaspell to Ives to Albee.
Coming soonSTORY-DIS1Storytelling
Digital and social storytelling
Every other form in this series gets an audience that has already agreed to pay attention. This one does not: attention is re-earned every few seconds, by someone holding a phone, sound off, mid-scroll, who did not choose your story and can leave at no cost. This course teaches what that constraint does to structure rather than what any platform currently rewards. The cold open and why the first three seconds are a structural problem and not a trick, the loop, designing for sound-off, the algorithmic middle that stands between a maker and an audience, serialization and the promise a series makes, comments as part of the text rather than a reaction to it, the ethics of a form built for spread including the corrections problem, and what survives a platform's death. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with platform specifics labeled and dated because they are the part that rots.
Coming soonSTORY-99Storytelling
Mockumentary
The capstone of the Storytelling series, and the only course in it that requires the others. A mockumentary is invented work wearing the clothes of work that may not invent, which means you cannot make one well without knowing exactly why documentary conventions persuade. This course reads the True track backwards: what each convention promises, how a fiction borrows it, and where the borrowing becomes a lie. It covers the persuasion grammar of documentary, comedy and satire as separate engines, the character who does not know they are being watched, the frame of an audience that is in on it, the 1938 Welles broadcast and the panic that mostly did not happen, deepfakes and synthetic media as the same problem at industrial scale, and the one line that separates satire from fraud. Ends by asking you to make both a real documentary segment and a false one about the same subject.
Coming soonSCI-01Science & Math
How to Read a Number: Statistics for Citizens
Every civics argument arrives with a number attached. This course teaches you to check one: what was counted, who counted it, when, and compared to what. Polls and margins of error, rates versus counts, the denominator that decides the story, charts built to mislead, and the arithmetic of representation itself. No calculations required, and none of the numbers in it are invented.
Coming soonSCI-02Science & Math
How We Know What's Out There
Astronomy taught as evidence rather than as facts to memorize. Start where navigation ends, with finding yourself by the sky, then climb the distance ladder one rung at a time: parallax, spectra, variable stars, exploding stars, redshift. Finish able to take any number in a popular astronomy article and trace it back to the thing somebody actually measured. No equations.
Coming soonSCI-03Science & Math
The River and the Watershed
The physical half of the river story: where the water comes from, what it carries, what it does to the land, what lives in it, and how you would tell whether it is healthy. Built alongside a real paddle from Indiana to the Gulf, and usable on whatever creek is nearest to you.
Coming soonSCI-04Science & Math
Intro to Citizen Science
How to design a study you could actually run, and how to know what your own data can and cannot support once you have run it. The question, the protocol, the sampling, the confounders, the recording, and the honest write-up. Finish with a study you could start next month.
Coming soonREPORT-00The Reporter
Reporter 00: What a Beat Is
A beat is a territory you hold, not a story you are assigned. How to map one, how to listen in a community before you need anything from it, how to keep a source who has nothing for you today, and how to notice an emerging issue while it is still boring. The start of the Reporter track, written for people who already report.
Coming soonREPORT-01The Reporter
Reporter 01: Public Records
Asking for records, and what to do when they say no. Who is covered and who is not, what counts as a record, writing a request that cannot be misread, fees and the public-interest waiver, exemptions and the answer that refuses to say whether a record exists, reading a denial, and the appeal. Federal FOIA as the spine, Indiana as the worked example, and your own state as the homework.
Coming soonREPORT-02The Reporter
Reporter 02: Reading Somebody Else's Report
A beat reporter is handed reports constantly, and most of what goes wrong happens between the executive summary and the table underneath it. Worked end to end on one real 84-page document: who published it and what they do, an anatomy, a summary sentence chased back to its table, what a data definition changes, how to resolve an endnote, and a publisher that writes down its own limits. Sits directly on top of How to Read a Number.
Coming soonREPORT-03The Reporter
Reporter 03: Interviewing People Who Did Not Seek This
Talking to someone who did not choose to be in a story: what informed consent means when you are not a researcher, what trauma does to an account and why that is not lying, giving a source control over pace and order, minors and guardians and who is actually consenting, what you may promise, when to stop, and what you owe after publication. Written for reporters, not clinicians.
Coming soonREPORT-04The Reporter
Reporter 04: Verification on Deadline
What an hour actually buys. Breaking a claim into checkable pieces, finding the original rather than the copy, establishing source, date, location, and motivation, corroborating with something genuinely independent, and looking for the evidence that would prove you wrong. Ends where the track's whole argument lands: the decision not to publish, treated as a professional act rather than a failure.
Coming soonREPORT-05The Reporter
Reporter 05: The Law You Work Inside
A map, not legal advice. What a defamation claim actually requires and where the actual-malice standard came from, the four privacy torts and which one a reporter really meets, why how you gathered something is judged separately from what you published, recording consent, shield protections and their limits, publishing material somebody else obtained, and the specific moments to stop and call a lawyer. Federal law and leading cases as the spine, Indiana as the worked example, your own state as the homework.
Coming soonREPORT-06The Reporter
Reporter 06: Solutions Journalism, and What It Is Not
A method, not a mood. Rigorous reporting on responses to problems: the four qualities that define it, the two things it is constantly confused with, how to find a response worth reporting, what counts as evidence of results, why the limitations section is the part that makes it journalism, and how it sits beside accountability reporting on a working beat rather than replacing it.
Coming soonREPORT-07The Reporter
Reporter 07: The Pitch, and the Shapes a Story Can Take
How to pitch an enterprise project so an editor can say yes, and how to choose the form a story takes for a reason rather than a habit. The five parts of a pitch, what a refusal actually tells you, matching a shape to the question rather than to the material, and what a newsletter, a social-first piece, and a short video each demand that the others do not.
Coming soonREPORT-99The Reporter
Reporter 99: Capstone, Report the Beat
Run the whole method once, on a beat you choose. One records request filed and followed. One public data report read against its own tables. Two interviews conducted to the standard the track sets. One quick-turn story and one enterprise pitch. And a written note of what you could not confirm, which is the piece of work this capstone is actually graded on.
Coming soonRSRCH-00The Researcher
Research as a Job, Not a Mood
The difference between being curious and being paid. A brief you can be held to, a budget of hours, a negative result you can deliver, and a file somebody else can build on without calling you. The start of the Researcher track, for people who already know how to look things up.
Coming soonRSRCH-01The Researcher
Search Craft
Most people were never taught to search. This is the trade version: what a database actually indexes, why controlled vocabularies find what free text misses, how to read a failed search for information, and how to harvest the vocabulary of a field from the first document you find. The biggest speed multiplier in professional research.
Coming soonRSRCH-02The Researcher
Archives, and How a Collection Is Actually Organised
A library is arranged by subject so you can find a known thing. An archive is arranged by origin so you can understand an unknown thing in context, and searching one like the other is why capable researchers conclude a document does not exist. Finding aids, provenance and original order, the hierarchy from fonds to item, reading-room practice, and what a catalogue's silence means.
Coming soonRSRCH-03The Researcher
Tracing a Person Through Records
Nobody documented your subject. Institutions documented their own business, and the person appears as a by-product: in a census, a payroll, a deed, a docket, a passenger list. How to build a life from records made for other reasons, how to handle a name that changes spelling every time it is written, and what to do when the records were never made at all.
Coming soonRSRCH-04The Researcher
Fact-Checking as a Discipline
The checker's job, done properly: annotate every assertion, back-check each one to its actual source rather than to another article, grade what cannot be confirmed, and hand it back in a form the writer can act on. A defined role with a defined method, and the most directly hireable skill in the Researcher track.
Coming soonRSRCH-05The Researcher
Rights, Permissions and Clearances Research
Who owns this image, is it really free to use, what does the licence oblige you to do, and who do you write to. The research method behind clearing archival material, taught from the real refusals a working image project ran into: the public-domain tag that was wrong, the iconic photograph nobody can publish, and the difference between having the right and having the file.
Coming soonRSRCH-06The Researcher
Documents Against People
A record says one thing and a witness says another. The instinct is that paper wins, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous. What a document can and cannot establish, what testimony can and cannot establish, why a confident document is more hazardous than a vague one, and a method for reporting a conflict you cannot resolve.
Coming soonRSRCH-07The Researcher
The Research File
The operations of handing work over: capturing a citation at the moment you find it, notes that survive a year, confidence grades applied consistently, the research memo that says what it all means, and a handover somebody can actually pick up. The course that turns everything you found into something usable by a stranger.
Coming soonRSRCH-99The Researcher
Capstone: Build a Handoff-Ready File
One subject, worked end to end, producing a file a stranger could pick up and continue. Scoping something you can actually finish, planning by institution rather than by hope, a mid-project checkpoint that catches the usual failure, a self-review against the handoff test, and the finished file as the first item in a portfolio.
Coming soon