themarginalian.org

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

personalcanon.com

i used to think that novels were a waste of time

Reading a novel don't always make us more moral, for instance—although my moral intuitions have been shaped by reading about the adulterous affairs of Russian aristocrats, and the political idealism of Norwegian PR consultants. The modest claim I'll make here is that novels and films have made me a better person, through the obscure mechanisms of style and form and story, and I'll never be without them again.

whyisthisinteresting

The Ugly, Essential Books Edition

It would be great if all the important books also looked the best, but like dogs or bartenders this is usually not the case. In our matrix, there is a category lurking in the lower right: long-term keeper books that are under-designed and sometimes a bit embarrassing to display, yet personally very important. The best are as ugly as they are essential.

themarginalian.org

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

We do not need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

honest-broker.com

12 New YouTube Videos I'm Recommending Right Now

Even from this tame adaptation you can see how wild this stuff is from a purely musical perspective—no polka dots required.

3quarksdaily.com

Dancing in New York: Variations on a Theme

Its power, like that of Bach's series of variations, accumulates slowly, moment by moment. By the end, as the original theme returns, you are left with the feeling of having experienced a great arc, a fully realized idea explored in all its possibilities and permutations.

whyisthisinteresting

The Golf Umbrella Edition

The golf umbrella is the king of umbrellas. It is a portable Superdome, a mobile gazebo that you can hold in one hand. It arches overhead in a graceful geometric dome like an alien butterfly, and the sound (heavens, the sound!) of fat raindrops bouncing off impermeable tensioned nylon is a summer hymn.

3quarksdaily.com

The Surprising Folklore of Analog Horror

Audiences experience analog horror as viewers of cryptic and sinister tapes, which often take the form of training videos, documentaries, or children's television, endowing the subgenre with a characteristic tone of dark or uncanny nostalgia.

themarginalian.org

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.

noahpinion.blog

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

While the paper by [ Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla (2026) ] provides pretty good evidence that ordinary people's aesthetic objections to bad, very unfit-to-context buildings affect their support for development (to the extent they care about anything development-related)…no one has shown that any specific set [of] design standards would materially improve public support for development, apart from pretty obvious stuff like "don't put up new buildings in low-density areas that are much taller than their neighbors")

honest-broker.com

The Shock of the Old

The great minds of the Renaissance believed that such works represented timeless standards of artistic excellence that could not be erased by the passing centuries. In other words, evaluating art was like pursuing the good life. After you discovered the pathway to do that, you kept to the course.

3quarksdaily.com

Heated Rivalry In Russia

After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.

3quarksdaily.com

Morgan Meis on The Sublime

It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I'm not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily.