jefftweedy

Messi, Me and a Wild Connection

Being in Soldier Field packed to the rafters with a predominantly Hispanic audience at a time like this wasn't lost on me. It's hard not to look at it as something that does have a broader philosophical message.

noahpinion.blog

In defense of Asian American art

Asian American culture is probably destined to be a sort of transitory, ephemeral thing. The classic second generation experience — 'My parents really drove me hard and kids made fun of my weird lunch, until I went to college and met other people with the same background' — almost never lasts beyond the second generation. Assimilation happens.

themarginalian.org

The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak

"My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world's intentions for me," Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, "began on that Saturday afternoon." The defeat was total and triumphant.

themarginalian.org

The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Neurocognitive Pillar of What Makes Us Who We Are

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a "narrative," and that this narrative is us, our identities. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: America’s favorite capitalist villain & the investor betting on the rebels

By the end of several days together, I found myself wondering whether Mr. Wonderful was the real Kevin O'Leary — or simply the most successful role he ever played.

longreads.com

A Strange Continent

I had hoped, while my kids were still kids, that we'd live in Texas for a year, that they'd know something of my childhood—not just America generally, but something about the neighborhood I grew up in and the space and the year-round warm weather that makes childhood an outdoor sport, and not an indoor one as it is in England from October onward.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 113

Play any FIFA game long enough, and its soundtrack becomes inseparable from that period of your life.

honest-broker.com

Talking About My Generation

The Boomers invented it—check out the usage of the term generation gap during the course of the 20th century. The rupture happened when I was still a child, so I inherited it along with most of the other things older Boomers gave to America.

themarginalian.org

Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are

All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.

lennysnewsletter.com

How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two

The question that best predicts how a tech worker feels about their work, in 2026, is no longer 'What do you do?' or 'Where do you work?' It's 'What has AI done to your sense of who you are?'

themarginalian.org

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

longreads.com

On Description

There was another shape formed by these descriptions. It was what my life would have looked like if things had gone according to plan, and how this current situation, far from anywhere I'd ever lived or imagined, may or may not have differed from that normal, which might also inform whether or not I was doing OK, in some process of recovery, and, therefore, whether or not my father needed to worry.

longreads.com

Diabolical Motherhood

You are yourself, of course: a human with desires and opinions and wants and needs, who likes stupid action movies, who wants to learn Italian someday, who would rather eat lo mein than General Tso's, who prefers this route to the grocery store over that one. But you are also a vessel for potential offspring, Schrodinger's uterus awaiting a tenant. Babies take priority, while birthing parents are disposable.

themarginalian.org

Why You

Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.

themarginalian.org

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

honest-broker.com

Authenticity in Music

The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn't know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates. Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it's an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish, not what you gain.

jefftweedy

Let's Build a Car (Swell Maps cover)

The best rock stars, in my opinion, are the true believers who put themselves together for the sheer joy of inventing themselves.

themarginalian.org

The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up

They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom. There is no greater freedom than the self-permission to be entirely ourselves, an entirety we must go on embracing as it goes on expanding, goes on revealing its edges and its shadows.

themarginalian.org

What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Selfhood in Literature and Life

Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic.

themarginalian.org

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

themarginalian.org

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects.

theconvivialsociety

Do Not Resign From Life

We've made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

longreads.com

You Must Remember This

"It's scientifically interesting for me," he said. "You know, two brothers, and both writers. So similar, yet so different. It's quite interesting."

readtrung.com

The Ferrari Luce's EV Gamble

We're risking the destruction of a myth. I'm very sorry about that. I hope they at least remove the Prancing Horse from that car.

whyisthisinteresting

The Singlish Edition

Yet Singlish not only survived but became a marker of identity, something that distinguished Singaporeans from Malaysians, from expats, from mainland Chinese, from anyone who hadn't grown up inside the particular crucible of the city-state. The government's suppression attempts arguably accelerated its cultural value, the way prohibition makes a drink taste better.