The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads by Maria Popova

Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence
Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence

“We are ourselves creating our own successors… We are daily giving them… that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.”

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Fluid Becoming Solid Becoming Wonder: Artist Meghann Riepenhoff’s Otherworldly Cyanotype Prints of Ice Formation
Fluid Becoming Solid Becoming Wonder: Artist Meghann Riepenhoff’s Otherworldly Cyanotype Prints of Ice Formation

A fluid serenade to this blue world, with a side of Rebecca Solnit.

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Unselfing Social
Unselfing Social

An invitation.

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Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence
Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence

“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.”

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Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes
Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes

“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.”

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Emerson on How to Trust Yourself and What Solitude Really Means
Emerson on How to Trust Yourself and What Solitude Really Means

“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

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The Banquet of Life: Some of the Finest Advice on Growing Old, Growing Young, and Becoming Your Fullest Self
The Banquet of Life: Some of the Finest Advice on Growing Old, Growing Young, and Becoming Your Fullest Self

“People ask: ‘Would you or would you not like to be young again?’ Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible… You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

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The Enigma of the Eel: The Elusive Science of Earth’s Most Mysterious Creature
The Enigma of the Eel: The Elusive Science of Earth’s Most Mysterious Creature

“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.”

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Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.”

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The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing
The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing

“…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

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