The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads by Michelle Legro

The Idea Factory: Insights on Creativity from Bell Labs and the Golden Age of Innovation
The Idea Factory: Insights on Creativity from Bell Labs and the Golden Age of Innovation

Successful innovation requires the meeting of the right people at the right place with just the right problem.

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The Laws of Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science
The Laws of Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science

What Charles Dickens has to do with equilibrium and entropy.

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How Mankind Conquered the Night and Created the 24-Hour Day
How Mankind Conquered the Night and Created the 24-Hour Day

What the world’s oldest profession has to do with light pollution.

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The Greatest Grid: How Manhattan’s Famous Street Map Came to Be
The Greatest Grid: How Manhattan’s Famous Street Map Came to Be

What Edgar Allan Poe, the Dead Rabbits, and Charles Dickens have to do with New York’s defining feature.

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How “the Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Invented a System for Remote-Controlling Torpedoes That Laid the Groundwork for Wifi
How “the Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Invented a System for Remote-Controlling Torpedoes That Laid the Groundwork for Wifi

“When you talk to a sympathetic mind about technology, gender, age and experience disappear completely.”

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The Lady Anatomist: The Wax Sculptures of 18th-Century Artist-Scientist Anna Morandi Manzolini
The Lady Anatomist: The Wax Sculptures of 18th-Century Artist-Scientist Anna Morandi Manzolini

In eighteenth-century Italy, the “medical Venus” becomes the professor.

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From Invisible Ink to Cryptography, How the American Revolution Did Spycraft and Privacy-Hacking
From Invisible Ink to Cryptography, How the American Revolution Did Spycraft and Privacy-Hacking

What personal data has to do with George Washington’s dabbles in chemistry.

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The Ice Balloon: The Story of the Disastrous 1897 Expedition to the North Pole by Air
The Ice Balloon: The Story of the Disastrous 1897 Expedition to the North Pole by Air

A summertime jaunt to the Arctic Circle, spoiled.

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Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots

The art of mechanized storytelling, or what a cardboard robot has to do with melodrama and Law & Order.

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The Natural History of Evolution, in Stunning Black-and-White Photographs of Animal Skeletons
The Natural History of Evolution, in Stunning Black-and-White Photographs of Animal Skeletons

What a flamingo, a capybara, and a guinea pig have to do with the beginnings of recorded time.

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