The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “the creative spark”

The Big New Yorker Book of Cats
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Serious cat people, like first-rate art critics, are chivvied by passion into perspicacity. Believing is seeing.”

read article

Brave Genius: How the Unlikely Friendship of Scientist Jacques Monod and Philosopher Albert Camus Shaped Modern Culture
Brave Genius: How the Unlikely Friendship of Scientist Jacques Monod and Philosopher Albert Camus Shaped Modern Culture

“Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”

read article

“Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome,” Transactive Memory, and How the Internet Is Making Us Smarter
“Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome,” Transactive Memory, and How the Internet Is Making Us Smarter

“A public library keeps no intentional secrets about its mechanisms; a search engine keeps many.”

read article

How Einstein Thought: Why “Combinatory Play” Is the Secret of Genius
How Einstein Thought: Why “Combinatory Play” Is the Secret of Genius

“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”

read article

How Charles Eames Proposed to Ray Eames: His Disarming 1941 Handwritten Love Letter
How Charles Eames Proposed to Ray Eames: His Disarming 1941 Handwritten Love Letter

A modernist fairy tale of true partnership.

read article

David Bowie’s Formative Reading List of 75 Favorite Books
David Bowie’s Formative Reading List of 75 Favorite Books

From poetry to history to theory of mind, with plenty of fiction and a few magazines for good measure.

read article

Famous Writers on New York: Timeless Private Reflections from Diaries, Letters and Personal Essays
Famous Writers on New York: Timeless Private Reflections from Diaries, Letters and Personal Essays

Mark Twain, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, E. B. White, Washington Irving, Anaïs Nin, Italo Calvino, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joyce Carol Oates, and more.

read article

Patti Smith’s Advice to the Young, by Way of William S. Burroughs
Patti Smith’s Advice to the Young, by Way of William S. Burroughs

“To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.”

read article

The Best Books on Writing, NYC, Animals, and More: A Collaboration with the New York Public Library
The Best Books on Writing, NYC, Animals, and More: A Collaboration with the New York Public Library

A celebration of timelessly wonderful reads in an elaborate diorama of papercraft book sculptures.

read article

Greil Marcus on How the Division of High vs. Low Robs Culture of Its Essence
Greil Marcus on How the Division of High vs. Low Robs Culture of Its Essence

“What art does … is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t.”

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.)