16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian

Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart...