In nearly two decades of The Marginalian, nothing has stirred a more passionate response from readers than the strangest, most sidewise, most private of my labors — the bird divinations I ori…| The Marginalian
Great Writers on the Letters of the Alphabet, Illustrated by David Hockney| The Marginalian
“A is for apples, some green and some red, B is for breakfast we’re having in bed.”| The Marginalian
A delightfully dark journey into the love of language.| The Marginalian
Juggling jellybeans, keeping kangaroos, and other shockingly spoiled yackety-yacking.| The Marginalian
“Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster.”| The Marginalian
From evil stepmothers to Edward Gorey, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Hindu deities and iPad parodies.| The Marginalian
A delightfully dark vintage alphabet book from mid-century illustrator Edward Gorey, the Tim Burton of his day.| The Marginalian
Dream of Life: The Ultimate Documentary on the Iconic Artist Patti Smith| The Marginalian
Mondrian Meets Euclid: An Eccentric Victorian Mathematician’s Masterwork of Art and Science| The Marginalian
“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”| The Marginalian
“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”| The Marginalian
“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”| The Marginalian
“It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly…| The Marginalian
“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”| The Marginalian
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”| The Marginalian
“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”| The Marginalian
“The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is … to help man endure by lifting his heart.”| The Marginalian
It’s Only a Draft, After All: Graham Greene on Love and Death in Existential Reflections from His Dream Diary| The Marginalian
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”| The Marginalian
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering…every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization…every young couple in love…lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunb…| The Marginalian
Lovely animated adaptation of the iconic Carl Sagan classic.| The Marginalian
“If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.”| The Marginalian
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”| The Marginalian
“Love… is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.”| The Marginalian
A heartening testament to “the triumph of meritocracy” and to the idea that “each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.”| The Marginalian
Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Mae Jemison, and more pioneers who conquered curiosity against tremendous cultural odds.| The Marginalian
How a sole “scruffy signal” jokingly attributed to “little green men” forever changed our image of the cosmos.| The Marginalian
“We’re still groping for the truth… Science consists of continually making better and better what has been usable in the past.”| The Marginalian
“We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the tr…| The Marginalian
“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?”| The Marginalian
“Atomic science began as positive, creative thought.”| The Marginalian
“Who indeed will set bounds to human ingenuity? Who will assert that everything in the universe capable of being perceived is already discovered and known?”| The Marginalian
On what matters and what doesn’t.| The Marginalian
“The universe is humbling. Nature hides many of its most interesting mysteries.”| The Marginalian
A subtle reminder that we are separated from those less fortunate than us by little more than unmerited cosmic odds.| The Marginalian
“Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible… We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”| The Marginalian
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.| The Marginalian
Reverse-engineering one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet.| The Marginalian
Fine-tuning the machinery of distinguishing the valid from the non-valid.| The Marginalian
“Should is how other people want us to live our lives… Choosing Must is the greatest thing we can do with our lives.”| The Marginalian
“You’re playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.R…| The Marginalian
“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”| The Marginalian
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.”| The Marginalian
“Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others.”| The Marginalian
“Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”| The Marginalian
“The moral challenge and the grim problem we face is that the life of affluence and pleasure requires exact discipline and high imagination.”| The Marginalian
“The modern version of introspection is the sum total of all those highly individualized choices that we make about the material content of our lives.”| The Marginalian
“The strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.”| The Marginalian
A playful illustrated primer for every kind of family and every kind of kid.| The Marginalian
“On a cloud I saw a child, and he laughing said to me…”| The Marginalian
“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”| The Marginalian
A heartening transaction of literary pleasure.| The Marginalian
Two creative icons at the precipice of mortality.| The Marginalian
“Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.”| The Marginalian
What an American printmaker has to do with Mozart and WWII.| The Marginalian
“I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!'”| The Marginalian
“To not have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”| The Marginalian
“The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of.”| The Marginalian
How to keep the center solid.| The Marginalian
“You are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style, and when I read what you write, I hear you talking.”| The Marginalian
There is something especially magical about framing these moments of stillness and of absolute attention to the individual amidst this bustling city of millions, a city that never sleeps and never …| The Marginalian
“Serious cat people, like first-rate art critics, are chivvied by passion into perspicacity. Believing is seeing.”| The Marginalian
Mark Twain, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, E. B. White, Washington Irving, Anaïs Nin, Italo Calvino, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joyce Carol Oates, and more| The Marginalian
A celebration of timelessly wonderful reads in an elaborate diorama of papercraft book sculptures.| The Marginalian
“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”| The Marginalian
“Maps are the places where memories go not to die but to live forever.”| The Marginalian
80 years of iconic canine-inspired literature and art from The New Yorker archives.| The Marginalian
“…you don’t refuse to breathe do you…”| The Marginalian
What Jack Kerouac’s existential divide has to do with earmuffs, 9/11, and Edison’s “mechanical mind.”| The Marginalian
“There is nothing better for us to do than to take ourselves as we find ourselves and make the best of ourselves.”| The Marginalian
“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?”| The Marginalian
“One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it.”| The Marginalian
Wisdom from Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst, Laurie Simmons, Carroll Dunham, and more.| The Marginalian
“Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!”| The Marginalian
“Artists have no choice but to express their lives.”| The Marginalian
“Avoid socks. They are a fatal giveaway of a phony nonconformist.”| The Marginalian
“To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return.”| The Marginalian
A vibrant celebration of flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.”| The Marginalian
How deep time helps make sense of our fleeting human lives and why any meaningful creative endeavor requires sacrifice.| The Marginalian
A mind-bending new understanding of our basic existential anchor.| The Marginalian
“From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life.”| The Marginalian
“The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of…| The Marginalian
“It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”| The Marginalian
From black holes to star births, or what two decades of cosmic awe have to do with the future of space exploration.| The Marginalian
“It’s a pity that exciting things always stop happening when you’re not afraid of them anymore and would like to have a little fun.”| The Marginalian
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”| The Marginalian
Pioneering visual storytelling that endures as a manifesto for the magic of paper books.| The Marginalian
A sweet celebration of the mutual elevation made possible by dropping our assumptions about ourselves, others, and who is welcome in our world.| The Marginalian
Intelligent and imaginative tales of love, loneliness, loyalty, loss, friendship, and everything in between.| The Marginalian
“Children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.”| The Marginalian
How one of history’s greatest artists almost became history’s greatest anatomist.| The Marginalian
Mapping 450 years of humanity’s curiosity about the living world and the relationships between organisms.| The Marginalian
The world’s most compelling work at the intersection of these two relatively nascent yet increasingly powerful techno-cultural phenomena, network science and information visualization.| The Marginalian
Literature as a canvas, a book as a living organism, and rhythm as a texture — an incredible visualization of text.| The Marginalian
The lost art of learning to “stand in a place where we would rather not and expand in ways we never knew we could.”| The Marginalian
“Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy.”| The Marginalian
“Art is something that you encounter and you know it’s in a different kind of space from the rest of your life, but is directly connected to it.”| The Marginalian
“Our overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not.”| The Marginalian
