Groups, rings, and compact Hausdorff spaces have underlying sets and admit "free" constructions. Moreover, each type of object is completely characterized by the shadow of this free-forgetful duality cast on the category of sets, and this syntactic encoding provides formulas for direct and inverse limits. After we describe a typical encounter with adjunctions, monads, and their algebras, we introduce a new "homotopy coherent" version of this adjoint duality together with a graphical calculus that is used to define a homotopy coherent algebra.