The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “science”

How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music
How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music

“Music takes place in time, but repetition beguilingly makes it knowable in the way of something outside of time.”

read article

The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs. Knowing and the Crucial Difference Between Truth and Meaning
The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs. Knowing and the Crucial Difference Between Truth and Meaning

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

read article

The Actual Algebra of Finding Your Soul Mate
The Actual Algebra of Finding Your Soul Mate

Breaking down the mathematical odds of winning at SoulMateRoulette.

read article

Darwin’s Battle with Anxiety
Darwin’s Battle with Anxiety

A posthumous diagnosis of the paralyzing mental malady that afflicted one of humanity’s greatest minds.

read article

How Rockets Really Work
How Rockets Really Work

The chemistry of ridable explosions.

read article

Rosie Revere, Engineer: A Stereotype-Defying Children’s Book Celebrating the Value of Failure
Rosie Revere, Engineer: A Stereotype-Defying Children’s Book Celebrating the Value of Failure

An illustrated ode to the brilliant flops that pave the way for brilliant breakthroughs.

read article

Neuroscientist Sam Harris on Happiness, Spirituality Without Religion, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence
Neuroscientist Sam Harris on Happiness, Spirituality Without Religion, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence

“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

read article

Pioneering Psycholinguist Vera John-Steiner on How Creativity Works
Pioneering Psycholinguist Vera John-Steiner on How Creativity Works

“In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.”

read article

How We Know What We Know: The Art of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart
How We Know What We Know: The Art of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart

A timeless guide to “understanding the truth that does not merely inform the mind but liberates the soul.”

read article

Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence, and the Truth of the Human Spirit
Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence, and the Truth of the Human Spirit

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”

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.)