themarginalian.org
Every themarginalian.org story we have translated and published, newest first. · 94 stories
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James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You
Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in an
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The Madman Who Saved Mothers: The Invention of Handwashing and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philo
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Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You
"Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, o
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How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain
"We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”
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The Secret Power of Ambivalence
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the fut
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Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it
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Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
Inside the brain's secret portal to remembering the future.
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How to Remake Yourself When You Are Undone: Lincoln and the Gift of His Suicidal Depression
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-ba
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Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward
"However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth... steps in and does something."
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Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living
"Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies."
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Why Are We Not Better Than We Are
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."
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But We Had Music: Nick Cave Reads an Animated Poem about How to Be More Alive
How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives? Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creatin
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A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things
We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality.
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How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently
"Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?"
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Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline
"So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself."
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David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists
"It's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations"
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Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity
"Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?"
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Mister Rogers on the Most Important Mindset for a Parent
"It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short."
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Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person
We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes t
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Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy."
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The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Live in Wonder
Recovering the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.
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How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust
"The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural f
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Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life
Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probab
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The Common Language of Science: Einstein’s Clarion Call to Divided Humanity in a Rare 1941 Recording
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