The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “science”

Aldous Huxley on Drugs, Democracy, and Religion
Aldous Huxley on Drugs, Democracy, and Religion

“Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.”

read article

The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity’s Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dictate Our Daily Lives
The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity’s Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dictate Our Daily Lives

“Time is a coordinate that lets us most simply understand the evolution of the universe.”

read article

Happy Birthday, Standard Time: How the Railroads Gave Us Time Zones
Happy Birthday, Standard Time: How the Railroads Gave Us Time Zones

How the quest to prevent train collisions forever changed the global clock.

read article

Marketing the Moon: How NASA Sold Space to Earth
Marketing the Moon: How NASA Sold Space to Earth

When the mission became the message and NASA undertook the monumental task of explaining rocket science to an audience looking to the stars.

read article

Mary Roach on the Science of Masturbation and the Outrageous Vintage Pseudoscientific Techniques for Controlling It
Mary Roach on the Science of Masturbation and the Outrageous Vintage Pseudoscientific Techniques for Controlling It

A cautionary tale of what happens when religious dogmatism attempts to subvert science.

read article

Mood Science and the Evolutionary Origins of Depression
Mood Science and the Evolutionary Origins of Depression

What language and symbolism have to do with mood and how light exposure and sleep shape our mental health.

read article

We Are Made of Dead Stuff: Amazing Animation Made of Leaves
We Are Made of Dead Stuff: Amazing Animation Made of Leaves

“You and most of the matter in your body are just two or three degrees of separation from things like pond scum.”

read article

Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in Space
Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in Space

“Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare…”

read article

Einstein on Fairy Tales and Education
Einstein on Fairy Tales and Education

“How far superior an education that stresses independent action and personal responsibility is to one that relies on drill, external authority and ambition.”

read article

The Life and Death of Mountains
The Life and Death of Mountains

The humility of understanding how Earth’s most monumental creations crumble to the bottom of the sea.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)