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The Marginalian

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Marginalia on our search for meaning.

Essays / personalScienceHistory

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6,725 from 30 Aug 2007 to 31 Oct 2026
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October 2026

  1. Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song
  2. Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends
  3. Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World
  4. When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
  5. What Is Your Refugium?
  6. The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
  7. What It Takes to Be Free
  8. Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
  9. Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
  10. Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
  11. Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work
  12. 20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
  13. The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds: Margaret Wise Brown’s Lost Masterpiece about Mortality and the Meaning of Life, Newly Illustrated
  14. 20 Favorite Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
  15. The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Timeless Tenets of Critical Thinking
  16. Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
  17. How to Be Transformed When Things Fall Apart
  18. The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet
  19. Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life
  20. Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
  21. Introducing the Museum of Delight
  22. How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands
  23. Corrective for a Broken Heart
  24. How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living
  25. How to Grow Old without Letting Life Become a Parody of Itself
  26. The Constitution of the Inner Country: Leonard Cohen on Language and the Poetry of Presence
  27. How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
  28. Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife
  29. When Relationships Change: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Embracing the Intermittency and Mutability of Love
  30. Nineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian
  31. How to Unself in Order to Be Who You Really Are
  32. Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian and the Search for Meaning: Free Livestream This Friday
  33. The Map to the Route of Your Life
  34. Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being
  35. The Single Most Effective Remedy for Despair: Advice from T.H. White’s Merlyn
  36. The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream
  37. The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom
  38. Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
  39. How to Hold Your Helplessness: Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell’s Salve for the Anxiety of Overwhelm
  40. How Not to Waste Your Life
  41. An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection
  42. NostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the Prison of Predictive Technologies
  43. James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You
  44. How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life
  45. Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World
  46. A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things
  47. Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person
  48. The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Live in Wonder
  49. Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life
  50. How to Say “YES” to Life

September 2026

  1. C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination
  2. How to Handle a Narcissistic and Abusive Parent: Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to Father
  3. How to Speak Forest
  4. How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment
  5. How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction
  6. Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy
  7. On Losing a Parent
  8. How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
  9. J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life
  10. The Moving Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Fossil Came Back to Life to Bring Humanity Together in the Middle of Our Deadliest War
  11. The Unspeakable World: Alan Watts on How to Touch the Pulse of Life
  12. How to Change Your Life
  13. How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”
  14. The True Purpose of Tarot
  15. How to Reconcile Your Most Painful Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference Between Regret and Remorse
  16. The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility
  17. Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
  18. Joan Didion on Letting Go

August 2026

  1. Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality
  2. The Tree and the River: A Wordless Love Letter to How Nature Always Wins
  3. The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak
  4. The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions
  5. The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts
  6. The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You
  7. How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live
  8. Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life
  9. How Love Comes to You
  10. The Wisdom of Water: Alan Watts on the Ocean and the Meaning of Life
  11. How to Hold What Harrows You
  12. The Grasshopper and the “Lusory Attitude” Essential for Playing the Game of Life
  13. Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

July 2026

  1. Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship
  2. The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: Ceramics, Serpentine, and How to Get Over Heartbreak
  3. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
  4. From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life
  5. How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
  6. How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback
  7. The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo
  8. 20 Ways of Surfacing from the Blues: Sydney Smith’s 200-year-old Strategies for Raising Low Spirits in a Letter of Advice to a 13-year-old Girl
  9. The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written
  10. The Violinist Who Solved the Ancient Riddle of How the World Holds Together
  11. Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are

June 2026

  1. Legendary Artist Sheila Hicks, at 92, on the Secret to Creative Vitality
  2. True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again
  3. Diatoms and the Meaning of Life
  4. Life Is a Story That Begins in the Middle: Bayo Akomolafe on the Rewilding Power of Obstacles
  5. The Man Who Thought with His Heart: George Forster and the Birth of Sensitive Science
  6. The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up
  7. How to Be More Alive: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day
  8. How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged
  9. Robert Louis Stevenson on Falling in Love and Loving Beyond the Fall
  10. Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life
  11. How Nature Imagined the Figment of You
  12. Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller
  13. Einstein and the Eagle: How Relativity Is Saving Earth’s Rarest Raptor
  14. The Only Three Distinctions Between People

May 2026

  1. How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love
  2. Existentialist Embroidery
  3. Swimming and the Meaning of Life
  4. How Not to Be Imprisoned in the Past
  5. Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World
  6. bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins
  7. What It’s Like to Be a Panda
  8. In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times
  9. The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair
  10. Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself
  11. Martian Gargoyles and Lunar Fish: Chilean Artist Alejandra Acosta’s Wondrous Embroidered Illustrations for This World’s First Book Theorizing Life on Other Worlds
  12. Poetry: I Too, Dislike It
  13. Empire, Emoji, and the Ecology of Love: The Bittersweet Story of the Ancient Plant That Originated the Heart Symbol
  14. Viktor Frankl on the Secret to Success
  15. Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change
  16. The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

April 2026

  1. The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction
  2. The Force and the Flower: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Creativity
  3. The Bird That Is Your Life
  4. Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing
  5. A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire
  6. Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass
  7. Rehabilitating the Active Imagination: Samantha Harvey on How to Be a Reader in the Age of Fractured Attention
  8. Is This Blue: Chilean Philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on Love and How We Know the World
  9. How to Make the Impossible Possible: Cristina Campo on the Crucial Difference Between Hope and Trust
  10. Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair
  11. Between the User and the Used
  12. Sentinels of the Soul: Kahlil Gibran’s Moving Letter to a Soldier in a Senseless War
  13. Wherever You Think There Is Nothing
  14. The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love

March 2026

  1. How Flamingos Got Their Pink
  2. Corrective for a Broken Heart
  3. Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair
  4. Where Love Goes When It Goes
  5. Reweaving the Rainbow: Divinations for Living from the Science of Life
  6. Roots and the Meaning of Life
  7. Pi and the Seductions of Infinity
  8. How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair
  9. How Patterns Change
  10. Finding Sanity in Sprezzatura: The Lost 16th-century Italian Art of Living with Fluency, Serenity, and Openness to Wonder
  11. How the Bicycle Was Born: Mount Tambora, the Year Without a Summer, and the Stubborn Courage to Reimagine the Possible
  12. How to Be a Tree: Notes on the Resilience of Letting Go
  13. Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time
  14. The Figments of Love and the Hallucinations of Reason

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