themarginalian.orgadded August 2026
The Marginalianby Maria Popova14h ago
The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Neurocognitive Pillar of What Makes Us Who We Are By Maria Popova “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his brilliant treatise on...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova18h ago
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being By Maria Popova When the twenty-two-year-old Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963)...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova1d ago
The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction By Maria Popova This essay is adapted from Traversal.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova1d ago
The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings By Maria Popova This essay and poem are now part of the Universe in Verse book.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts By Maria Popova The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living By Maria Popova “When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova2d ago
The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom By Maria Popova We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova3d ago
How to Bear Your Desolations By Maria Popova The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova3d ago
The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You By Maria Popova The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova3d 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 Popova4d ago
Where Love Goes When It Goes By Maria Popova This is an excerpt from Traversal. Where does love go when it goes?
The Marginalianby Maria Popova4d ago
How to Bear Your Loneliness By Maria Popova “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova4d ago
Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island By Maria Popova Not often — a...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova4d ago
How to Hold Death and Carry Life: A Zen Master Explains Existence to a Child and Outlines the Three Essential Principles of Zen Mind By Maria Popova If death is so enormous a mystery that we remain...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary By Maria Popova Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live By Maria Popova The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova5d ago
The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty By Maria Popova It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova6d ago
Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing By Maria Popova In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova7d ago
Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing By Maria Popova “The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova7d ago
Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality By Maria Popova Life is an ongoing dance between the subjective reality of what it feels like to be...
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