The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “just weird”

Ancient Romans’ Fanciful and Entertaining Pre-Scientific Beliefs about Animal Behavior
Ancient Romans’ Fanciful and Entertaining Pre-Scientific Beliefs about Animal Behavior

What the greed of the octopus has to do with the ram’s preferred bedside and the hyena’s gender-bending.

read article

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.

read article

Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams
Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams

The mathematical poetics of time, or what matrices reveal about the matters of the heart.

read article

Three Classic Fairy Tales Examined Through the Lens of Architecture
Three Classic Fairy Tales Examined Through the Lens of Architecture

What Rapunzel’s braid-to-tree connection has to do with the rotational circumference of Baba Yaga’s house.

read article

Mail-Order Mysteries: Real-World Stuff from Vintage Comic Book Ads
Mail-Order Mysteries: Real-World Stuff from Vintage Comic Book Ads

What hypno-specs and atomic pistols have to do with the duality of the human condition.

read article

27 of Humanity’s Strangest Inventions
27 of Humanity’s Strangest Inventions

If you can’t deliver the newspaper on your amphibious bicycle, you can always fax it.

read article

Urville: An Autistic Savant’s Remarkable Imaginary City, 20 Years in the Making
Urville: An Autistic Savant’s Remarkable Imaginary City, 20 Years in the Making

A rare glimpse of the extreme frontiers of human ability and imagination.

read article

What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions
What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions

What songwriting has to do with string theory.

read article

A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895
A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895

“Don’t ask, ‘What do you think of my bloomers?'”

read article

From Frida Kahlo to Freud, Finger Puppets of Cultural Icons
From Frida Kahlo to Freud, Finger Puppets of Cultural Icons

Unibrows for fingers, or what Einstein’s ‘do has to do with silent film and the Cuban Revolution.

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.)