The Marginalian

Oh boy do I have a website for you! I love browsing https://www.themarginalian.org whenever I have a few hours to kill. It's a bit like TVTropes, but much more "literary" for lack of a better word. The author has spent decades building a digital commonplace book of everything she's ever read, and hyperlinked everything together in a way that you can get lost in her notes for hours on end and never surface. It's one of my favorite websites on the internet, and the best example of the power of marginalia and hypertext.

TANGENT One of my all-time favorite websites: https://www.themarginalian.org/ Highest possible recommendation for its thoughtful, intelligent, entirely human, poetic writing about various interconnected topics. Maria Popova is a treasure.

I usually get new book ideas from other books, maybe it's a reference to an author or a quote. This has been great for staying in the topic. Another similar source are articles I read online, specially the ones that look well researched. A site that has been a great source for ideas is https://www.themarginalian.org/ by Maria Popova. It's so well written and she usually brings together different books that are somehow connected by the topic of the article. The last post is a list of the best books for 2023, a lot of non-fiction ttps://www.themarginalian.org/2023/12/19/favorite-books-of-2023/

I love https://www.themarginalian.org/ (formaly called Brain Pickings)

The website they are discussing is a great intellectual resource for aspirin writers (or literary fans in general.) There are many posts asking about writing, how to get started or how to be inspired. Read Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings! (Or the Marginalian as it is now called.) https://www.themarginalian.org/

Non-tech and non-news (and not even that long), but I have to plug https://www.themarginalian.org/ (previously called "brain pickings"). The author reads voraciously and follows common threads across many works, compiling her thoughts into articles which often contain beautiful prose in their own right. I often pickup book recs from here that get me into reading about art, poetry, love, spirituality, and more, which I never would otherwise.

Ah I've only recently discovered Oliver Sacks and have just picked up his Letters and Gratitude [1, 2] from the local library! Marginalian also has a great exploration of his letters as well [3]: > I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love. [1] https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/letters [2] https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/gratitude [3] https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/08/oliver-sacks-letters-meaning…

My favorite Darwin fun fact is his detailed pros and cons list on whether to get married. https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-and-cons-of…

https://www.themarginalian.org/ has a Bitcoin address for donations on the page, and has received significant donations through that.

One of my favourite Ben Franklin stories was they were approaching a crucial vote where he didn't have the support he needed. He figured out he needed the vote of a specific person who had always been his enemy.[1] What he did was write the guy a letter saying that he had always wanted to read a particular book that this dude had in his library and ask to borrow it. After borrowing the book he returned it with a courteous letter of thanks and not only did the person support his vote but became his lifelong friend. Ben Franklin explained to others that asking the guy for a favour made all the difference because there was no way his brain could rationalise him doing a favour for someone he didn't like and therefore they became friends. [1] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-franklin-effect…

Highly recommend: Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture…

Allocate a time of the day, every day, for writing. You can spend the time writing whatever comes to mind, working on a story, or staring out the window, or reading about writing. For the latter, I recommend this list: https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/

Not technical but https://www.themarginalian.org/ is a fabulous online publication.

"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team." [0][1] 0: https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/01/18/woz-on-creativity-and-innova… 1: https://www.dailyfig.com/2016/11/11/steve-wozniaks-advice-for-technica…

The article mentions the Futurist Cookbook. Wikipedia has more info about it [1], including a link to the freely available Italian text. There is an English translation [2], but that one is not free. In a sense, espresso coffee is the ultimate Futurist hot drink: made with electricity, high-pressure water and stainless steel, giving energy and the will to perform great deeds. It is no coincidence that it became popular in Fascist Italy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking [2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/21/futurist-cookbook-marinetti/

Nabokov said: > Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/01/21/nabokov-on-what-makes-a-good…

People aren't sure what they want. In particular, you 20 years from now might not agree with what you think you want right now. See https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/22/why-love-hurts-eva-illouz/

Ira Glass said this best over a decade ago. Couple sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/29/ira-glass-success-daniel-sax…

As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts. The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices. Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind. Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away…

If you have not read this piece, I recommend it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/17/diseases-of-the-will-cajal-a… > The situation is far more serious: question everything. Someone who thrived at life or work to a satisfying enough point will always tell you something - nihilistic like "it does not matter", - or reaffirming like "that's a lot of stuff to write about, no matter how many people write about it" - or "that's a lot of stuff to deal with, are you in a state to work any of these inquiries problems?". - or they tell you all the above combined in the form of "that's where we are and there's reasons why and how we got here. Where do you wanna go?". In either case you are left with sticking to the prescribed reality or you say fuck it and go down any of the spiritual and or occultist rabbit holes. There's enough narratives for billions of lifetimes. When it comes to our online experience, the main questions are: how big or small is your network and how deep or shallow are the connections. Whether something is real is easier assessed in cooperation; as is whether and how something useless can be turned into something useful. But it all works solo just as much, except in cases where doubt is warranted, which is when more heads traverse more data, connections and patterns in less time. We found our inquiries entirely on our backgrounds and the motivations of our psychosocial (low base death growl in the back of my head…

no we shouldn't! because ai could never experience suffering Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail. We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself. https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/07/07/suffering-creativity-canetti…

Some of those tweet criticisms gets the side eye from me: > People seem to not realize that poetry isn't just a thing you can do. It requires knowledge of form and structure, and of course some amount of talent It's very much just a thing that you can do. Doing it well may be an art, but simply doing it is a humanity. "Knowledge of form and structure" is a pretty circular standard, like many aesthetic standards. Form and structure become established by becoming established forms and structures -- matters of meter and certain symmetries may have something of a longer standing but the sonnet isn't a cosmic constant. Form is arguably one of the cheaper ways of making poetry. Brilliance among post-structural poets is uncontroversial at this point. Authors like Wendell Berry might make a case for the use of old forms (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/18/wendell-berry-poetry-marriag… ) and that's certainly worth understanding for practitioners of the arts of words or living, but that doesn't mean everything else isn't poetry (as Berry himself implicitly acknowledges in his own poetry). Talent helps but sometimes you build up talent. Most people aren't Keats or Cummings from the get go. > they fail to appreciate that the sentiments it expresses are also hackneyed and trite So are sunsets and love. I appreciate novelty and sophistication as much as the next guy, maybe more. I can even see not thinking these poems are particularly "good" by some set of aesthetic…

Context for that quote: > Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none, — perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring for & a man might (whether he would is another question) work away like a Trojan. — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/12/darwin-family-work-happiness… Looks like Darwin really loved his wife and ten children. Indeed Wikipedia says “Charles was a devoted father and uncommonly attentive to his children” citing https://web.archive.org/web/20130723181529/http://www.aboutdarwin.com/… which says: > The home life Charles Darwin was unlike that of most Victorian country gentleman. The most striking difference was seen in how he interacted with his children. […] Charles always took a keen interest in whatever they were doing. and has many lovely quotes from his children like: > He cared for all our pursuits and interests, and lived our lives with us in a way that very few fathers do. […] He always put his whole mind into answering any of our questions. and the author of the page (David Leff) ends with: > The manner in which Darwin related to his family was truly special. In fact, based on conversations I have had with other Darwin enthusiasts and with some of his descendants, it is safe to say that for Darwin his family life was far more important to him than his research into the natural sciences.

According to Irvin D. Yalom, “One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning”.¹ Yalom considers that “The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts — not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter”.² For Frankl, best-known for his psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, meaning comes from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.³ Ernest Becker’s book The Birth and Death of Meaning asks the question, “Where does meaning come from?” The short answer is: meaning comes from culture – our lives feel most meaningful when we believe we are participating successfully in the cultural hero-system, and we measure the success of our performance through social affirmation. Culture prescribes the roles, how well we execute the roles creates feelings of meaning and self-worth, and we assess the success of our execution by way of positive social regard.⁴ For a long time, the…

> The mind is not part of nature? Nope. It's a theoretical construct with no empirically measurable properties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem : "The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body." This is a problem because there's no obvious connection between the mind and everyday reality. > As to Popper, there is no singular definition of science ... This is not true. Falsifiability and empirical evidence are part of the universally accepted definition of science. This is why mathematics, as important as it is to science, is not itself accepted as a science -- like psychology, it doesn't address empirical reality. Carl Sagan, quoted from "The baloney detection kit" (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-s… "Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable, are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle—an electron, say—in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." > It is really difficult for me to comprehend your point…

I have so many. JSTOR: It has a good selection of open access books[https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/] (supplement with individual publishers[you can find many from DOABOOKS, https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/covid19-information-and-resources… https://www.oapen.org/researchers/13516596-funder-compliant-publishers… or https://www.oaspa.org/] & doabooks[https://www.doabooks.org/]). I like reading that sort of thing. I've been enjoying Stand Out of Our Light[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/3F8D7BA2C0… by Cambridge University Press, which is legitimately engaging and not written very academically. Wikipedia: Duh. Favorite page is the Unusual Articles[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles] one. Internet Archive: Amazing. Especially the books. Supplement with the Online Books Page list of archives.[https://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/, click on 'Archives and Indexes'] Find Your News[https://findyournews.org/]: Directory-ish of nonprofit news outlets. Missing, last I checked, many of the ones in Hung-Su's list of slow news outlets[https://hung.su/slow-news-movement/], so I tend to use them together when I'm in a bingeing-on-nonprofit-news mood. NEH Humanities Magazine: The US National Endowment for the Humanities has a magazine[https://www.neh.gov/humanities] that covers a lot of historical subjects, and it's free (online at least). Similar ones are available from the Library of…

To focus on something I don't think gets a lot of play: > To me, the local minima looked "good" AI's entire business [0] is generating high quality digital content for free, but we've never ever ever needed help "generating content". For millennia we've sung songs and told stories, and we were happy with the media the entire time. If we'd never invented Tivo we'd be completely happy with linear TV. If we'd never invented TV we'd be completely happy with the radio. If we'd never invented the the CD we'd be completely happy with tapes. At every local minima of media, humanity has been super satisfied. Even if it were a problem, it's nowhere near the top of the list. We don't need more AI-generated news articles, music, movies, photos, illustrations, websites, instant summaries of research papers, (very very bad) singing. No one's looking around saying, "God there's just not enough pictures of fake waves crashing against a fake cliff". We need help with stuff like diseases and climate change. We need to figure out fusion, and it would be pretty cool if we could build the replicator (I am absolutely serious about the replicator). I remember a quote from long ago, someone saying something like, "it's lamentable that the greatest minds of my generation are focused 100% on getting more eyeballs on more ads". Well, here we are again (still?). So why do we get wave after wave of companies doing this? Advances in this area are insanely popular and create instant dissatisfaction…

Charles Darwin's writings in 1838 include an amusing list of pros and cons: CONS OF MARRIAGE — "Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books PROS OF MARRIAGE — "Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow. – Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. […] Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps" https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-and-cons-of…

„ We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.“ - Ed Catmull (from the book Creativity Inc.) edit: by way of the marginalian, which is excellent, one of the best sites out there- go read it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-catmull-bo…

When ever this notion comes up i cant help but wonder how good crashing and burning thanks to ignoring reality is for your mental health. Just because stuff isnt nice doesnt mean its safe to ignore. Its worth mentioning that dealing with negative thoughts and experiences is part of how we grow as people. Its why Bambis mother got shot in a Disney movie. Because sooner or later, kids have to deal with harsh stuff. Unfortunately adults do too. Their example, a parent with covid in a hospital, is a good one. This is serious stuff you need to come to terms with. If that seems overly harsh or depressing, i find Stanley Kubricks words about the indifference of the universe quite helpful. (Starting from "If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?") https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/26/stanley-kubrick-playboy-inte… In the end all we can do is decide how we want to deal with reality. Unless we want to later deal with the consequences of not having done so.