The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “a life of one's own”

Alan Turing: Church, State, and the Tragedy of Gender-Defiant Genius
Alan Turing: Church, State, and the Tragedy of Gender-Defiant Genius

On the man who was caught between the past and the future in clothes a size too small, and profoundly changed our lives anyway.

read article

On Scientific Taste
On Scientific Taste

“Our taste derives from the summation of all that we have learnt from others, experienced and thought.”

read article

Remembering Ray Bradbury with 11 Timeless Quotes on Joy, Failure, Writing, Creativity, and Purpose
Remembering Ray Bradbury with 11 Timeless Quotes on Joy, Failure, Writing, Creativity, and Purpose

The literary hero in his own words.

read article

Joan Didion on Self-Respect
Joan Didion on Self-Respect

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”

read article

John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism
John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism

“Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban.”

read article

Woodcut: A Meditation on Time Through the Inked Cross-Sections of Fallen Trees
Woodcut: A Meditation on Time Through the Inked Cross-Sections of Fallen Trees

Bryan Nash Gill’s visual record of the passage of time.

read article

The Cultural History and Adaptive Function of Boredom
The Cultural History and Adaptive Function of Boredom

What Madame Bovary has to do with MRI and rock’n’roll.

read article

The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves
The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves

Lessons in the art of embracing identity from some of today’s most celebrated authors.

read article

A Poetic Definition of Science Circa 1997
A Poetic Definition of Science Circa 1997

“…science is a human cultural activity, not a purely dispassionate striving after truth.”

read article

Free Radicals: How Anarchy and Serendipity Fueled Science, from Newton to Tesla to Steve Jobs
Free Radicals: How Anarchy and Serendipity Fueled Science, from Newton to Tesla to Steve Jobs

How Goethe fueled Tesla, why Newton pricked his own eye, and other lessons in breaking the rules of science.

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.)