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.

longreads.com

Inside the Shaolin Monastery that Helped Build Victor Wembanyama

"Power comes from inside," he said. "I would look at him and say: You are not a cat; you are a tiger. For power to come out, you have to change the inside first."

themarginalian.org

Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change

In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy.

jefftweedy

Left of the Dial (Replacements cover)

As an addict, you have to remind yourself that you're still an addict, even when you aren't doing things that are terrible for you.

3quarksdaily.com

I suspect that I was outsourcing my own eating

Really, though, my bereavement was internal and external justification for something I would have wanted to try anyway. I've trended toward heaviness my entire life, and food has always been a font of shame.

3quarksdaily.com

‘I saw the backlash coming’: civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw on America and race

In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise.

longreads.com

My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984

Printer wrestles with the person his chaotic childhood has trained him to be—and what pieces of himself he can salvage from the wreckage.

3quarksdaily.com

The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt

The tissue was just hanging there, loose and slack. My skin had seemingly doubled in size. It was drooping, deflated. I'd never seen anything like it, until I realized I had. It looked like the leg of my grandfather when he was 90 years old.

3quarksdaily.com

On the Joys of Collecting Junk

My friends, being my friends, invariably champion the necessity of objects piling up in my yard.

themarginalian.org

The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

noahpinion.blog

You are what you consume

But at the end of the day, it's consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual. That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you've grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don't really need.

longreads.com

Who Is Black Comedy For?

Black comedy's revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the other eyes upon it—or, as Collins puts it, "Black comedy that primarily serves Black audiences." Where Bennett errs, however, is in holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.