In the Fall of 2006, I joined BOLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis. In that first year and subsequent ones, I developed, led and co-led a number of courses in a variety of subjects (see below). After using an eBoard for a while, I then constructed websites for my courses.
In 2014, a new lifelong learning organization, LLAIC (Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative) was formed; I'm proud to be one of the founders, and also the developer and maintainer of the original LLAIC website for the first seven years (click here for the present LLAIC website). Since then, I've developed and co-developed some new courses, and taught them at both LLAIC and BOLLI. With the move to Lasell Village in May 2022, I presented them there as well. The courses are listed with the latest first.
Note: Many of the original websites were classic Google Sites, and are no longer available. The more recent ones are labeled "New Website".
Most recent courses (at Lasell Village):
From Drama to Film and Opera: Two Masterpieces Times Three (Fall 2025) (New Website)
Oscar Wilde's Salomé to the Richard Strauss opera
Georg Büchner's Woyzeck to Alban Berg's Wozzeck
Olivier Messiaen: Music of Faith, Love, and Birdsong (Fall 2024) (New Website)
The Uncertainties of Werner Heisenberg (Spring 2024) (New Website)
The Humanity of Heinrich Böll: Selected Short Stories. (Fall 2023) (New Webpage)
Our Mysterious Sub-atomic World: Quantum Mechanics without a Wrench (Spring 2023) (New Website)
Under construction:
For a course to be given in Fall 2026, a website for Five Physicists who Transformed our View of the World (a revised and updated version of the previous Five Physicists who Changed the World View).
Presentations (at Lasell Village)
Lise Meitner: A Nobel-worthy Physicist Denied the Prize (Sept. 2024)
The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger (Jan. 2024 book talk)
The Physics of Baseball (Sept. 2022, and updated for May 2026)
Previous courses:
The Golden Years of Foreign Film II: Ten More from the '50s and '60s (with Naomi Schmidt)
The films, in the order presented: The 400 Blows, The Man in the White Suit, Wild Strawberries, Knife in the Water, Pather Panchali, M. Hulot’s Holiday, The Shop on Main Street, Yojimbo, The Battle of Algiers, Viridiana
The Golden Years of Foreign Film: The '50s and '60s (with Naomi Schmidt)
The films, in the order presented: Rashomon, La Strada, The Seventh Seal, Hiroshima Mon Amour, I'm All Right Jack, Black Orpheus, Jules et Jim, Repulsion, Blow-Up, Z
Our Mysterious Sub-atomic World: Quantum Mechanics without a Wrench (Old website no longer available))
A Science Sampler:
Five by Three (with Karen Wagner and Gillian Geffin)
This was a two-part course, five weeks each, one subject per session. A later course was
A Taste of Science and Technology (with Gillian Geffin)
My contributions in both were:
Exoplanets: Other Suns have Planets too
Robotics: Facts and a little fiction
Physics of Baseball
Radiation: Natural and Man-made
Germans Look Back at World War II and its Legacies (contributed to Sophie Freud's course)
Masterpieces Times Three: from Drama to Film and Opera (New Website)
Includes Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box leading to the Alban Berg opera Lulu, and an older version of the plays Salome and Woyzeck
Three Masterpieces: from Drama to Film and Opera
Numbers in the News - A Reader's Guide to Studies, Polls and Other Figures
Here I learned the power of marketing - it took three tries to get the title right. When people see the word "statistics" they immediately run in the other direction, so the first version didn't get too many takers.
Numbers in the News: Statistics for Newspaper Readers
Studies, Polls and Other Figures in the News - A Guide for the Numerically Perplexed
Making Sense of Wine (contributed to Allan Kleinman's course)
Five Physicists who Changed the World View (Old website no longer available)
Who's Afraid of 20th-Century Music? (with Naomi Schmidt)
Updated May 13 2026