The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads from 2015

How Playing Music Benefits Your Brain More than Any Other Activity
How Playing Music Benefits Your Brain More than Any Other Activity

“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout.”

read article

Pulitzer-Winning Poet Mark Strand on the Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe
Pulitzer-Winning Poet Mark Strand on the Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

read article

Astrophysicist Janna Levin on Free Will and Whether the Universe Is Infinite or Finite, in Letters to Her Mother
Astrophysicist Janna Levin on Free Will and Whether the Universe Is Infinite or Finite, in Letters to Her Mother

“The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion.”

read article

Anne Lamott on How We Endure and Find Meaning in a Crazy World
Anne Lamott on How We Endure and Find Meaning in a Crazy World

“The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?”

read article

Emerson on Talent vs. Character, Our Resistance to Change, and the Key to True Personal Growth
Emerson on Talent vs. Character, Our Resistance to Change, and the Key to True Personal Growth

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

read article

Rilke on What It Really Means to Love
Rilke on What It Really Means to Love

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

read article

Young Tolstoy’s Diaries: Time, Moral Development, and the Search of Self
Young Tolstoy’s Diaries: Time, Moral Development, and the Search of Self

“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?”

read article

How Lewis Carroll’s Rules of Letter-Writing Can Make Email More Civil and Digital Communication Kinder
How Lewis Carroll’s Rules of Letter-Writing Can Make Email More Civil and Digital Communication Kinder

“If your friend makes a severe remark, either leave it unnoticed, or make your reply distinctly less severe.”

read article

The Quiet Book: An Illustrated Love Letter to Life’s Meaningful Pauses
The Quiet Book: An Illustrated Love Letter to Life’s Meaningful Pauses

A sweet celebration of the nuanced stillnesses that comprise aliveness.

read article

The Principle of Infinite Pains: Legendary Filmmaker Maya Deren on Cinema, Life, and Her Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers
The Principle of Infinite Pains: Legendary Filmmaker Maya Deren on Cinema, Life, and Her Advice to Aspiring Filmmakers

“The love of life itself… seems to me larger than the loving attention to a life. But, of course, each contains the other…”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)