themarginalian.orgadded August 2026
The Marginalianby Maria Popova14h ago
Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward By Maria Popova During our recent conversation at the Boston Book Festival, the wise and wonderful Amanda Palmer...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova20h ago
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living By Maria Popova “Do you need a prod?” the poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living with maximal...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova1d ago
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are By Maria Popova “A life of patient suffering… is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,” the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova1d ago
A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things By Maria Popova We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently By Maria Popova “In disputes upon moral or scientific points,” Arthur Martine counseled in his...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline By Maria Popova “How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists By Maria Popova Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity By Maria Popova Almost everything I write, I “write” in the notebook of the mind, with the foot in motion — what happens at the keyboard upon returning from the...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova3d ago
Mister Rogers on the Most Important Mindset for a Parent By Maria Popova Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova3d ago
The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear By Maria Popova “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova4d ago
Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person By Maria Popova We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova4d ago
Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability By Maria Popova We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior tenacity into the magnitude of...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Live in Wonder By Maria Popova There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust By Maria Popova “The state of enchantment is one of...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life By Maria Popova Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
The Common Language of Science: Einstein’s Clarion Call to Divided Humanity in a Rare 1941 Recording By Maria Popova What makes Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) endure as “the...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova6d ago
How to Say “YES” to Your Life By Maria Popova It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova7d ago
Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death By Maria Popova We are born into the certitude of our eventual death.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova7d ago
James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing By Maria Popova In 1989, Paris Review founding editor and trailblazing interviewer George Plimpton edited a wonderful collection titled The Writer’s Chapbook: A...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova8d ago
What Happens When We Die By Maria Popova When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of...
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