Recent articles
September 2, 2026
Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we...
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September 1, 2026
A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, conne...
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August 30, 2026
Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality
In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and u...
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August 30, 2026
How to Apprehend Reality as It Really Is: Thoreau on Knowing vs. Seeing
"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."
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August 28, 2026
The Tree and the River: A Wordless Love Letter to How Nature Always Wins
Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A sapling has growth...
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August 26, 2026
The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak
In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that...
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August 24, 2026
The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions
Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the...
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August 24, 2026
The Moomin Strategy for Living with Uncertainty
"All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured."
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August 24, 2026
The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Neurocognitive Pillar of What Makes Us Who We Are
"Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique."
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August 22, 2026
The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts
The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at...
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August 20, 2026
The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You
The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. — “All things are so very uncert...
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August 19, 2026
How to Hold Death and Carry Life: A Zen Master Explains Existence to a Child and Outlines the Three Essential Principles of Zen Mind
"Zen practice ... requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning."
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August 18, 2026
How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live
The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch...
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August 15, 2026
How to Read the Signal of Your Life
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billi...
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August 14, 2026
How Love Comes to You
We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the livi...
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August 14, 2026
Constellating Wonder: Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian (October 23, 2026)
At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay...
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August 12, 2026
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling
"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."
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August 10, 2026
The Wisdom of Water: Alan Watts on the Ocean and the Meaning of Life
Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pil...
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August 10, 2026
Anaïs Nin on Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Creativity
"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
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August 7, 2026
How to Hold What Harrows You
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by...
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August 2, 2026
The Grasshopper and the “Lusory Attitude” Essential for Playing the Game of Life
On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occu...
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August 1, 2026
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age
Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a ...
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July 29, 2026
Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness”
"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing."
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July 28, 2026
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The m...
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July 24, 2026
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south ...
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July 23, 2026
Dostoyevsky in Love
“I love her happiness more than my own.”
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July 19, 2026
From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life
Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of p...
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July 17, 2026
How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of “Interbeing”
"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love."
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July 17, 2026
De Profundis: Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s Stirring Letter on Suffering and Transcendence, Penned in Prison
"I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me... There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul."
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July 15, 2026
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather th...
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