The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “history”

Hannah Arendt on How Bureaucracy Fuels Violence
Hannah Arendt on How Bureaucracy Fuels Violence

“The rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

read article

Liberace’s Little-Known Cookbook
Liberace’s Little-Known Cookbook

“Food and music are the two best things in life.”

read article

How Richard Dawkins Coined the Word Meme: The Legendary Atheist’s Surprising Religious Inspiration
How Richard Dawkins Coined the Word Meme: The Legendary Atheist’s Surprising Religious Inspiration

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”

read article

October 1, 1847: Miss Mitchell’s Comet and How Scientists Stand in Solidarity
October 1, 1847: Miss Mitchell’s Comet and How Scientists Stand in Solidarity

A heartening story of misfortune made right by the collective integrity of the scientific community.

read article

Ironic Serif: A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark
Ironic Serif: A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark

From 17th-century France to digital emoticons, by way of kooky characters and spectacular failures.

read article

How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928
How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Subverted Censorship and Revolutionized the Politics of LGBT Love in 1928

A beautiful fusion of the tools of science fiction, the feats of feminism, and the polemics of homosexuality.

read article

The Secret Museum: Van Gogh’s Never-Before-Seen Sketchbooks
The Secret Museum: Van Gogh’s Never-Before-Seen Sketchbooks

A bittersweet record of artistic genius and unlived dreams.

read article

Vintage Catalog Cards for Literary Classics from the Semi-Secret Archive of the Library of Congress
Vintage Catalog Cards for Literary Classics from the Semi-Secret Archive of the Library of Congress

An affectionate reminder that a book is a node in a complex human network of authors, readers, and librarians, connecting time, space, and sensibility.

read article

Brave Genius: How the Unlikely Friendship of Scientist Jacques Monod and Philosopher Albert Camus Shaped Modern Culture
Brave Genius: How the Unlikely Friendship of Scientist Jacques Monod and Philosopher Albert Camus Shaped Modern Culture

“Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”

read article

What George Eliot Teaches Us About the Life-Cycle of Happiness and the Science of Why We’re Happier When We’re Older
What George Eliot Teaches Us About the Life-Cycle of Happiness and the Science of Why We’re Happier When We’re Older

“One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy.”

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.)