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On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter …
Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages. “Have faith,” someone I loved said…
The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of ot…
The prisons we choose to live inside hardly ever look like prisons while we are living in them. If the twentieth century was the age of dictatorships — I grew up in one — reducing human…
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are…
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world&…
Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worl…
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be ver…
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance —…
Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the…
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the wh…
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being a…
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon)…
The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, who…
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusi…