The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “science”

Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of Life
Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of Life

“For almost all oral cultures… the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.”

read article

Underland: An Enchanting Journey into the Hidden Universe Beneath Our Feet
Underland: An Enchanting Journey into the Hidden Universe Beneath Our Feet

“Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”

read article

Faster Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of Life and How Our Impermanence Both Frustrates and Fuels Our Creative Drive
Faster Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of Life and How Our Impermanence Both Frustrates and Fuels Our Creative Drive

“…a handful of dust trying to get back to supernova. Like every longing, everything alive.”

read article

Relationship Happiness and Your DNA: How One Gene Encodes Emotional Sensitivity
Relationship Happiness and Your DNA: How One Gene Encodes Emotional Sensitivity

Inside the nuanced science of serotonin and the underappreciated upside of being a sensitive creature.

read article

Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question
Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question

“The universe is the ultimate free lunch.”

read article

How Nature Works, in Stunning Psychedelic Illustrations of Scientific Processes and Phenomena from a 19th-Century French Physics Textbook
How Nature Works, in Stunning Psychedelic Illustrations of Scientific Processes and Phenomena from a 19th-Century French Physics Textbook

A scrumptious quest “to satisfy that invincible tendency of our minds, which urges us on to understand the reason of things.”

read article

Eating the Sun: A Lovely Illustrated Celebration of Wonder, the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human
Eating the Sun: A Lovely Illustrated Celebration of Wonder, the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human

“When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.”

read article

Trailblazing 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Social Change and the Life of the Mind
Trailblazing 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Social Change and the Life of the Mind

“Reformers are apt to forget… that the world is not made up entirely of the wicked and the hungry, there are persons hungry for the food of the mind, the wants of which are as imperious as those of the body.”

read article

Altered States of Consciousness: The Neuropsychology of How Time Perception Modulates Our Experience of Self, from Depression to Boredom to Creative Flow
Altered States of Consciousness: The Neuropsychology of How Time Perception Modulates Our Experience of Self, from Depression to Boredom to Creative Flow

“The brain does not simply represent the world in a disembodied way as an intellectual construct… Our mind is body-bound. We think, feel, and act with our body in the world. All experience is embedded in this body-related being-in-the-world.”

read article

The Universe in Verse: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander Reads “Explaining Relativity” by Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson
The Universe in Verse: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander Reads “Explaining Relativity” by Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson

“It is this, and the existence of limits.”

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.)