themarginalian.org

The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair

I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.

themarginalian.org

Let Your Heart Be Broken

The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.

longreads.com

ISpyForGood

When I started paying my own rent and utilities, I frequently lied to the landlord and the gas company, saying the check was on its way when it wasn't. I didn't believe that scamming, or any illicit activity, even if done correctly, could ever be fruitful enough to get me or anyone else out of poverty—though it could easily attract the police or people of ill intent, who would make life worse.

longreads.com

All My Dad’s Sons

Dad heard about a team at a youth prison in West Virginia that was supposed to be better than us. He loaded us into the van one morning and we drove two hundred miles to play them. This was a maximum-security facility for juveniles, up in Salem. We had to be buzzed in through a thick steel door and then through another one and another, but they wouldn't let us into the gym. We could hear someone in there screaming. Then it was silent, and the door opened. On one end of the court, the other team was about to warm up, and on our end—where we were supposed to warm up—a kid was mopping a puddle of blood.

themarginalian.org

Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

themarginalian.org

Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness

I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

lennysnewsletter.com

Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Head of Product, Notion)

agency—not skills—is the thing that separates people who thrive from those who fall behind

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.

themarginalian.org

The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

We place life's bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.

themarginalian.org

The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction

All the black robins in the world today, numbering around 250, are fractal emissaries of her genes — a winged reminder that immensities of harm can be undone by a single act of tenacious tenderness.

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Ukemi Edition

Your first judo class involves none of that whatsoever. Instead, you spend the overwhelming majority of your time falling down. You fall on your back and your side. You roll into a fall. You get reprimanded for sticking your arm out or not keeping your chin tucked. You are learning ukemi, the art of breakfalling. It is the foundational skillset that has allowed me, as a 41-year-old, to show up to the dojo multiple times a week and get thrown onto my back with full force by friends and strangers, and head home after to toss my kids around, carry the groceries, and do plenty of other things I'd struggle to do if I'd hurt myself.

themarginalian.org

How to Make the Impossible Possible: Cristina Campo on the Crucial Difference Between Hope and Trust

Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats "let us hope" does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.

lennysnewsletter.com

Listen: A visual guide to getting out of a creative slump

Why it's necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start How to reframe scorn as a positive signal The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

wired.com

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

The Gulf's water system is built with layers of backup, but it relies on continuous operation to hold.

themarginalian.org

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart's enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

longreads.com

Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life.

In that time, he also lost his job, racked up a range of tech costs, and suffered through hacks and harassment, all stressors on his mental health.

3quarksdaily.com

On a new history of pedantry

Worthwhile intellectual work is unavoidably challenging, and sometimes even unpleasant.

noahpinion.blog

Maybe you should have bought an electric car

If you drive a gas-powered car, you are economically vulnerable to these periodic price shocks. If you drive an electric car, you are not vulnerable. It's as simple as that.

themarginalian.org

Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

honest-broker.com

The Story of My Mysterious Pain

That's what pain does. It reduces even the most eloquent to moaning and groaning.

themarginalian.org

Corrective for a Broken Heart

Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken? 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.

readtrung.com

How Jensen Manifests The Future

When I believe it in my mind — you know how it is — you manifest a future, and that future is so convincing there's no way it won't happen. There's a lot of suffering in between, but you've got to believe what you believe. Then, you reason about how to get there.

themarginalian.org

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

For as long as we are waiting, we are not living. If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

upstartsmedia.com

Harvey's Winston Weinberg On Anthropic, Cold Emailing Sam Altman, And A 'One-Shot' Merger Near-Disaster

I think sometimes as a founder you have the sense of 'Oh, there's a quick, easy way to win this.' And you learn over time that there isn't, that doesn't exist.

longreads.com

‘Get Down! Get Down! They’re Gonna See Us!’: Six Months of Hiding From ICE

What if ICE was lurking at the parking lot or in the lobby? If he got deported, what would the family do? For two days, he didn't go to work. He lay in bed, hoping it would heal.

themarginalian.org

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.

themarginalian.org

Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

there must be something deeper than hope — more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness.

ftav

Free lunch is cancelled

What's unfortunate is that things have a habit of happening all at once, and "could be worse" won't pay for many carefree retirements.

themarginalian.org

What Forgiveness Takes

about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.

themarginalian.org

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The world’s most disruptive company & the best-selling author on the planet

If you really think about it, "intensity," "consistency" and "authenticity" apply to almost everything that matters. Raising children requires intensity — that ferocious love and superhuman strength that shows up at 3 a.m. when you're exhausted but still rocking a baby back to sleep. Building something meaningful requires consistency — the unglamorous act of showing up again and again, long after the initial excitement fades.

noahpinion.blog

The future isn't what it used to be

The future is a blank wall of fog, rushing toward us at top speed, and nobody knows what to do.

themarginalian.org

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives.