The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “culture”

Gorgeous Grimm: 130 Years of Brothers Grimm Visual Legacy
Gorgeous Grimm: 130 Years of Brothers Grimm Visual Legacy

What evil stepmothers and conniving wolves have to do with understanding the future of reading.

read article

The Toaster Project: A DIY Quest for the Origins of Stuff
The Toaster Project: A DIY Quest for the Origins of Stuff

A nine-month journey to find what we lost between fifteenth-century smelting and China’s factories.

read article

Austin Kleon on Cultivating Creativity in the Digital Age
Austin Kleon on Cultivating Creativity in the Digital Age

The genealogy of ideas, why everything is a remix, or what T.S. Eliot can teach us about creativity.

read article

The Conscience of Television
The Conscience of Television

What Lucille Ball has to do with the dot-com bubble, or why 2001 was the beginning of the end for TV comedy.

read article

What Makes Hitchcock’s Films Great: An Animated Recipe
What Makes Hitchcock’s Films Great: An Animated Recipe

A scoop of suspense, a sprinkle of dry wit, a pinch of love, half a MacGuffin, and one whole cameo.

read article

Lessons for the Living from the Brink of Death
Lessons for the Living from the Brink of Death

How to take life one ephemeral dinner party at a time, or why hope is a gift of the hopeless.

read article

The Bippolo Seed: Seven Rare Dr. Seuss Stories Brought to Light
The Bippolo Seed: Seven Rare Dr. Seuss Stories Brought to Light

How eBay uncovered a buried literary treasure, or what a Massachusetts dentist has to do with vintage magazines.

read article

Today Yesterday: 5 Vintage Visions for the Future of Technology
Today Yesterday: 5 Vintage Visions for the Future of Technology

Instapaper circa 1981, or what medical wonderlands have to do with making cash entirely obsolete.

read article

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

From Shakespeare to Einstein via Lucretius, or how a long-lost Roman poem gave rise to the Renaissance.

read article

Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”: A Neuropsychology Reading
Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”: A Neuropsychology Reading

Unpacking the lyrics of the iconic happiness anthem to find surprising science-tested insights on well-being.

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.)