The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “politics”

About War
About War

“Outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace.”

read article

D.H. Lawrence on the Hypocrisies of Social Change and What It Actually Takes to Shift the Status Quo
D.H. Lawrence on the Hypocrisies of Social Change and What It Actually Takes to Shift the Status Quo

read article

Nikolai Vavilov and the Living Library of Resilience: The Story of the World’s First Seed Bank and the Tragic Hero of Science Who Set Out to End Humanity’s Suffering
Nikolai Vavilov and the Living Library of Resilience: The Story of the World’s First Seed Bank and the Tragic Hero of Science Who Set Out to End Humanity’s Suffering

The most moving story of self-sacrifice in the history of science.

read article

How to Bear Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm
How to Bear Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm

“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.”

read article

How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers
How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”

read article

Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive
Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive

read article

The Power of Being a Heretic: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Critical Thinking, Emotional Imagination, and How to Rehumanize the World
The Power of Being a Heretic: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Critical Thinking, Emotional Imagination, and How to Rehumanize the World

“If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination… begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling.”

read article

Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society
Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society

“My responsibility is to speak the truth as I feel it, and to attempt to speak it with as much precision and beauty as possible.”

read article

What America Means: Poet Muriel Rukeyser on the Source of Character and Creativity
What America Means: Poet Muriel Rukeyser on the Source of Character and Creativity

“Creation is a delicate and experimental thing… Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.”

read article

The Spirit of Revolt: The Radical Russian Dissident Prince Peter Kropotkin on How to Reboot a Complacent Society
The Spirit of Revolt: The Radical Russian Dissident Prince Peter Kropotkin on How to Reboot a Complacent Society

“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.”

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.)