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Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald...
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. “What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother...
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Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is...
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The Galapagos and the Meaning of Life: A Young Woman’s Bittersweet Experiment...
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild. A decade after...
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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your...
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Beautiful Bacteria: Mesmerizing Photomicroscopy of Earth’s Oldest Life-forms
For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see;...
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A Republic of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power...
“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding...
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Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for...
“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.” For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment...
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The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for...
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite...
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The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question...
“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of...
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A Lighthouse for Dark Times
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that...
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Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life
“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.” Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our...
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Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on the Antidote to...
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and...
View ArticleLouise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance
“Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.” The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on...
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The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the...
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The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful...
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they...
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Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection
Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic...
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The Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create
“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”...
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Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why...
“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of...
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There’s a Ghost in the Garden: A Subtle and Soulful Illustrated Fable about...
One of the things no one tells us as we grow up is that we will be living in a world rife with ghosts — all of our disappointed hopes and our outgrown dreams, all the abandoned novels and unproven...
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How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet...
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is...
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