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An Illustrated Ode to Love’s Secret Knowledge
When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an...
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Between Encyclopedia and Fairy Tale: The Wondrous Birds and Reptiles of...
Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be...
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The Consolations of Chronodiversity: Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen...
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here...
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From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem...
“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.” We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be...
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Winnicott on the Psychology of Democracy, the Most Dangerous Type of Person,...
In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that...
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Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl
“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.” Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open...
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How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote...
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history...
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How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into...
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Don’t Waste Your Wildness
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into...
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The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn
There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living...
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Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words...
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Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship
People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they...
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Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is...
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Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald...
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life. “What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother...
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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your...
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The Galapagos and the Meaning of Life: A Young Woman’s Bittersweet Experiment...
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild. A decade after...
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Beautiful Bacteria: Mesmerizing Photomicroscopy of Earth’s Oldest Life-forms
For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see;...
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A Republic of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power...
“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding...
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Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for...
“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.” For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment...
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The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for...
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite...
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