themarginalian.org

What It Takes to Be Free

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

themarginalian.org

Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck

Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Claire Stapleton

It's about the very human desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, and the danger of attaching that desire to power. Pyle believes so completely in his own good intentions that he can't see the harm he's doing in their name. But also about what happens when our faith in institutions begins to collapse while our longing for purpose and belonging remains intact.

themarginalian.org

How to Hold Your Helplessness: Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell’s Salve for the Anxiety of Overwhelm

A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.

themarginalian.org

James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

themarginalian.org

Loneliness, Resilience, and the Right Choice: Poet Diane Ackerman on What She Learned While Working at a Suicide Prevention Hotline

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The ‘Rocky’ mastermind who hid his struggles & the man behind Victoria’s Secret image

Sylvester Stallone spent his life convincing the world he was unbreakable. But behind the Rocky and Rambo franchises was a man shaped by an abusive childhood, a desperate need to prove himself, and an obsession with toughness that nearly destroyed his body and relationships.

themarginalian.org

How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become.

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.