themarginalian.org

The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother

She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer.

honest-broker.com

42 Milestones in the History of Conversation

When we stop speaking to each other, we soon start warring. Our better nature descends to the bestial.

readtheprofile.com

Who Is Meghan Markle?

I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications' distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them.

themarginalian.org

Corrective for a Broken Heart

It still beats, doesn't it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense. There is no one to pick up the pieces because there are no pieces.

upstartsmedia.com

His Climate Startup ‘Crash Landed.’ Now He’s Reinventing Doctor Visits With Daniel Ek.

"When you're on the up with a company, everyone is your best friend. Every angel investor and their uncle is like, 'Dude, I always knew that you were the most talented person ever. We're gonna support you, you know, 'til the end of time.' And then when things don't go well, it's like, block, block, block, block, block. Like, literally no one wants to return your call."

whyisthisinteresting

The Bibiliotherapy Edition

We live in an era when we diagnose ourselves and each other constantly, and we've developed an enormous infrastructure for explaining our problems. We've become very good at prescribing information, but information doesn't always provide consolation. Knowing more about grief, for example, isn't necessarily the same as feeling less alone in it.

themarginalian.org

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection

Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Holly Hartland

She smiled sweetly at me then, offering some words of comfort: AH, WELL THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH HAVING BOTH SETS OF GRANDPARENTS STILL ALIVE! WHEN THEY POP IT, YOU'LL BE SORTED!

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.

jefftweedy

John Prine is immortal

It sounds romantic, in a way, until you really put it together that he's singing to his son who may or may not be out on the streets. It always really touched me—'Come on home, No you don't have to be alone.'

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.

fs.blog

[Outliers] Charlie Munger’s Interview with Todd Combs

There are people who will make you feel that you're born into the wrong species.

themarginalian.org

Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person

What infuriates and enrages someone else saddens him — the sign of a superior heart.

honest-broker.com

17 Observations on Chivalry

Several of the victims were men who died because they instinctively put their own bodies in the line of fire to protect the woman seated next to them. This was not a wife or a mother or a daughter—just their date for the evening. I doubt any of these men had ever given the slightest thought to what they would do in a situation like this.

themarginalian.org

C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination

It is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock. In those blessed days I received, and answered, only two letters a week; one from my father, which was a matter of duty, and one from [my best friend] Arthur, which was the high light of the week, for we poured out to each other on paper all the delight that was intoxicating us both.

themarginalian.org

Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy

Most human beings never really see another person after they are five years old. In an intimate relationship, each party returns to the original naïve Child ego state, where he is free of such Parental prohibitions and Adult requirements, and can see, hear, and taste in its purest form what the world has to offer. This freedom of the Child is the essential part of intimacy, and it turns the whole universe, including the sun, moon, and stars, into a golden apple for both parties to enjoy.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: Uber’s founder staging a comeback & the superagent who told Taylor Swift ‘no’

A dyslexic kid from Chicago who almost didn't finish high school, he treats grudges as fuel and daily phone calls as a closing strategy — Oprah, Larry David, his own wives. He lost Taylor Swift rather than let her buy WME à la carte.

theparisreview.org

Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists

This year so far, I had said, Hello, Goodbye, Do you have change for twenty dollars, Where is the bathroom, and I love you. I had meant every word.

jefftweedy

KC Rain (No Wonder) [demo with Sammy and Spencer]

One of the great, truly mysterious gifts in my life is that my children want to hang out with me at all, much less participate in the most sustaining thing I do throughout my life. And enhance it and help me grow, and let me be part of how they grown into musicians—to help them achieve being musicians in a way that allows them to express themselves, and hopefully keep music central to their lives in a way that's not just based on commerce or notoriety, but centered on the joy that comes with being able to play music with other people, and listening to other people when you play.

themarginalian.org

How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment

William James once asked of a scenario where Jack is deeply in love with Jill, whom everyone else sees as perfectly ordinary: who sees her more as she truly is? He answered, surely it is Jack; he apprehends a truth about Jill which is inaccessible to the rest of us. That is why enchantment doesn't have the qualities of a dream, or a spell, but rather of reality.

themarginalian.org

The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.

themarginalian.org

Seneca on True and False Friendship

He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. A man will be attracted by some reward offered in exchange for his friendship, if he be attracted by aught in friendship other than friendship itself.

wired.com

Want to Get Off Your Phone? Mina Kimes Suggests Having a Baby

"I think that's been the most helpful thing," says the ESPN journalist. "So there you go, Zoomers. There's a reason to have children."

themarginalian.org

Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The journalist tasked with reinventing ‘60 Minutes’ & the baseball exec who can’t win enough

There's a Japanese notion called "the red thread of fate" that says we're all connected by an invisible string to people whose lives we're meant to touch. Whether or not you believe that literally, I love the idea that our lives are constantly intersecting in ways we'll never entirely understand.

readtheprofile.com

My Annual Birthday Check-In: 13 Lessons From my 35th Year of Life

We spend so much time preparing ourselves for disappointment that we rarely consider the opposite skill: how to receive success, happiness, love, or abundance without immediately bracing for its disappearance. When life becomes better than we imagined, we sometimes stop trusting that it will last & we start waiting for the other shoe to drop. We become so afraid of losing the thing we love that we don't even enjoy having it.

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.

honest-broker.com

How to Make a Marriage Proposal

It gradually became clear to me that we would either need to break up or get married. And I had no intention of breaking up with Tara.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with James McBride

We spend enormous amounts of time listening to people tell us how to get rich, get fit, build companies, and improve our lives. Far fewer people listen to those who have actually lived one. Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from conversations with people in their eighties and nineties.

themarginalian.org

How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jonny Gannon

Ironically, the 'Ugly American' in the novel is not the arrogant, culturally tone-deaf official the phrase has come to mean, but a man named Homer Atkins — a practical engineer who earns trust by living among local people, understanding their needs, and solving problems with humility rather than bureaucracy. The book's enduring message is that lasting influence comes from building durable relationships and developing local knowledge.

themarginalian.org

Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.

themarginalian.org

Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Unable to ask for what we really need — because it is too vulnerable-making and demands too much trust — we end up playing for strokes that are invariably compromises on what we most hunger for, simulacra of the deepest satisfaction: real intimacy.

themarginalian.org

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

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself…

themarginalian.org

How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback

To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood.