readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The actor portraying Mark Zuckerberg & the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback

The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.

themarginalian.org

A Beginning, Not a Decline: Colette on the Splendor of Autumn and the Autumn of Life

The style of things, the kind of things that we shall love in later life are fixed in that moment when the child's strong gaze selects and molds the figures of fantasy that for it are going to last.

themarginalian.org

The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother's voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving.

themarginalian.org

How to Live and How to Die

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them: I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 114

"…is the tendency for adults over forty to have increased or enhanced recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood."

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 113

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

longreads.com

Skill Nostalgia

Nostalgia can be a toxic impulse, reactionary and uncritical, but it can also hold revolutionary potential for the future. Here, nostalgia is more than a self-soothing search for comfort; it's about engaging with loss, reconnecting with ideals that might improve the future.

longreads.com

How Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives

Though the woman died almost 20 years ago, Paul said, the curse remains in effect.

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."

themarginalian.org

Oliver Sacks on Memory, Originality, and Why Forgetting is Necessary for Creativity

I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one's memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.

themarginalian.org

How Not to Dwell on the Past

The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

ai-supremacy.com

Why OpenClaw Feels Different

The biggest difference is not that OpenClaw can answer questions. Plenty of systems can do that. The more interesting difference is that it can carry context forward in a way that feels less disposable.

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.

themarginalian.org

No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.

honest-broker.com

The Real Story Behind 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…. I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.