A Broadsheet for the Examined Mind
Chivalry, pentangles, and the beheading game in fourteenth-century England
A full close-reading guide to the Pearl Poet’s Arthurian romance: the beheading contract, the pentangle, the three hunts and temptations, and the green girdle that turns a chivalric test into a meditation on fear, faith, and truth.
A close guide to the climax of Paradise Lost: Eve’s proposal to work apart, Satan’s serpentine rhetoric, the eating of the fruit, Adam’s choice, and the immediate aftermath of shame, lust, and blame.
A working guide to MLA 9: paper formatting, author-page citations, quotation mechanics, the nine core elements, and model Works Cited entries for books, articles, websites, films, lectures, and more.
A complete sonnet-by-sonnet companion to the forty-six poems on the ENGL-200A reading list: the procreation sequence, the rival poet, the constancy poems, and the Dark Lady sonnets, each with a close reading and a route into an essay.
Literature, philosophy, and the fine arts
A close guide to the climax of Paradise Lost: Eve’s proposal to work apart, Satan’s serpentine rhetoric, the eating of the fruit, Adam’s choice, and the immediate aftermath of shame, lust, and blame.
A complete sonnet-by-sonnet companion to the forty-six poems on the ENGL-200A reading list: the procreation sequence, the rival poet, the constancy poems, and the Dark Lady sonnets, each with a close reading and a route into an essay.
A comprehensive guide to poetry terminology for senior school and university readers: prosody and scansion, rhyme and sound, figuration and rhetoric, stanza and fixed forms, and a practical method for turning terms into analysis — with worked examples and the confusions examiners see most.
The past, its arguments, and its receipts
The Indian Act is often described as outdated, but it still shapes status, band membership, reserve land, and governance. This dispatch explains how a nineteenth-century statute became a living architecture of belonging — and why reform is not the same as abolition.
The pass system had no basis in the Indian Act, yet it regulated First Nations movement across the prairie West for decades. This dispatch explains how the system worked, how people resisted it, and why its archive is so difficult to reconstruct.
Treaty 7 is often described as a land cession, but the Elders’ narrative treats it as a relationship with ongoing obligations. This dispatch explains what was negotiated at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, why the written and oral records differ, and what “original intent” means for treaty rights today.
Mechanisms, models, and worked problems
A quantitative guide to enzyme kinetics: the steady-state derivation, Km and Vmax, catalytic efficiency, inhibition patterns, assay design, and the edge cases that make real data deviate from the Michaelis–Menten curve.
A mechanistic guide to the cell cycle: interphase and M phase, cyclin–CDK control, the G1/S, G2/M, and spindle checkpoints, the stages of mitosis, and the routes from checkpoint failure to cancer.
Writing, citation, and exam craft
A working guide to MLA 9: paper formatting, author-page citations, quotation mechanics, the nine core elements, and model Works Cited entries for books, articles, websites, films, lectures, and more.
A working lexicon for academic writing: turpitude, laconic, apodictic, and other words that earn their keep, with brief glosses, model sentences, and usage traps — plus a wider list for the margin and a test for deciding when a plain word is the better one.
A practical guide to analysis verbs: how to match the verb to the evidence, the confidence ladder from notes to establishes, the difference between imply and infer, thirty-six verbs in six families, reporting verbs, and the overclaiming habits that make examiners distrust a sentence.
Filter your revision by course code. Each course page collects every dispatch set for that seminar, from the first lecture to the final exam.
