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Hello Reader! This is the annual recap of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. The weekly newsletter remains on its regular pulse-beat and will be with you at the usual time. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive (as have I) thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: You are among the kind-hearted 1% making this available to the free-riding 99%, and I appreciate you more than you know.

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Love, Music, Solitude, and How to Be More Alive: The Best of The Marginalian 2022

It is an annual tradition to look back on the year’s readings and sieve the most nourishing — a tradition all the more vital and vitalizing in stormy years, when these oases of light are all the more precious.

Here is the usual composite “best” of the year — a hybrid of the pieces I poured the most heart into writing and the pieces most widely read and shared by those whose hearts they touched.

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The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life

Read it here.

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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Read it here.

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The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love

Read it here.

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Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past

Read it here.

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Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology (Joan As Police Woman Sings Emily Dickinson)

Read/watch it here.

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Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness

Read it here.

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

Read it here.

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How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

Read it here.

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Art as Living Amends: Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World

Read it here.

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Full Tilt: Dervla Murphy’s Fierce and Poetic Account of Traversing the World on Two Wheels in the 1960s

Read it here.

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The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand

Read it here.

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What Happens When We Die

Read it here.

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Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Read it here.

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3 Things to Learn from a Child, 7 from a Thief: Bob Dylan’s Favorite Hasidic Teaching

Read it here.

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Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Read it here.

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How to Bear Your Fear and What It Means to Love: A Tender Meditation in Ink, Watercolor, and Wonder

Read it here.

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My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)

Read/watch it here.

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The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Ourselves and Each Other

Read it here.

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200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening

Read it here.

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The Cello and the Nightingales: Beatrice Harrison and How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Empathy for Nature

Read it here.

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How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

Read it here.

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Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us

Read it here.

Dirge Without Music: Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy (Amanda Palmer Reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, Animated by Sophie Blackall)

Read it here.

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The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

Read it here.

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How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

Read it here.

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Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Read it here.

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The Milky Way, the Pond, and the Meaning of Life: Thoreau on Solitude, Sympathy, and the Salve for Melancholy

Read it here.

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M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

Read it here.

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The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

Read it here.

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Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Creative Mornings (January 13, NYC)

Creative Mornings — the world's largest face-to-face creative community — is a free breakfast lecture series taking place once a month in more than 200 cities around the world, run entirely by volunteers: free breakfast, free coffee, and a free lecture by a member of the local creative community. On January 13, I will be breaking my five-year sabbatical from talks and speaking at the New York chapter on the month's theme — Sanctuary — with live music by the inimitable Joan As Police Woman. Join us.

DATE: January 13, 2023

TIME: doors 8:30AM, performance 9AM

LOCATION: The New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th Street, New York, NY 10023
INFO + TICKETS

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Author Margaret Wise Brown Edna St Vincent Millay Poet Donald Hall reallife peaceful bull Philosopher Rockwell Kent Small Alaskan IslandRead Tracy K Smith News United Humanity Simone de Beauvoir First Collective Empathy The Bittersweet Story The Fragile Species The Milky Way

Ram Dass on love, music and the price of what we cherish, Herbie Hancock's antidote to burnout

Sunday, December 25, 2022

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The Universe in Verse 2022: free holiday broadcast

Saturday, December 24, 2022

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What is time? 200 years of ravishing reflections, from Kierkegaard to Borges to Nina Simone; Margaret Wise Brown's radical life, illustrated; and more

Sunday, December 18, 2022

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Love, music, solitude, and how to be more alive — the best of The Marginalian 2022, in one place

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