The Marginalian
The Marginalian

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The Art-Science of Perspective: How an Innovation in Figurative Drawing Powered Galileo’s Astronomical Revolution
The Art-Science of Perspective: How an Innovation in Figurative Drawing Powered Galileo’s Astronomical Revolution

A journey from the farthest cosmic horizons of reality to the depths of our poetic truth.

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Favorite Books of 2018
Favorite Books of 2018

The anatomy of feeling, the science of psychedelics, Ursula K. Le Guin’s final poetry collection, arresting essays by Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Lamott, and Audre Lorde, a physicist’s lyrical meditation on science and spirituality, and more.

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The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality
The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality

“What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.”

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Why the Sea Is Blue: Rachel Carson on the Science and Splendor of the Marine Spectrum
Why the Sea Is Blue: Rachel Carson on the Science and Splendor of the Marine Spectrum

“The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness; the green water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life.”

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How to Change Your Mind: Michael Pollan on How the Science of Psychedelics Illuminates Consciousness, Mortality, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
How to Change Your Mind: Michael Pollan on How the Science of Psychedelics Illuminates Consciousness, Mortality, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.”

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The Best of Brain Pickings 2018
The Best of Brain Pickings 2018

The splendors of the unknown, the uncertain, and the unclassifiable, truth and beauty at the intersection of poetry and science, the timeless tangles of the heart.

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Against Common Sense: Vladimir Nabokov on the Wellspring of Wonder and Why the Belief in Goodness Is a Moral Obligation
Against Common Sense: Vladimir Nabokov on the Wellspring of Wonder and Why the Belief in Goodness Is a Moral Obligation

“This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”

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Adrienne Rich on Resistance, the Liberating Power of Storytelling, and How Reading Emancipates
Adrienne Rich on Resistance, the Liberating Power of Storytelling, and How Reading Emancipates

“The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon… argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the ‘incomparable medium’ of language…”

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Stephen Hawking on What Makes a Good Theory and the Quest for a Theory of Everything
Stephen Hawking on What Makes a Good Theory and the Quest for a Theory of Everything

“There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.”

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Theodore Roosevelt on the Two Pillars of Good Citizenship and the Most Dangerous Enemy of Democracy
Theodore Roosevelt on the Two Pillars of Good Citizenship and the Most Dangerous Enemy of Democracy

“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.”

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