The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)
@brainpickings
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Joined October 2009
Born on this day in 1865, Wilson Bentley was only a teenager, with an early camera and a supportive mom, when he captured the otherworldly beauty of snowflakes in his pioneering photomicroscopy
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"You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that's okay, love is better." A classic transfusion of tenderness:
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Marie Curie is known as the first woman to win a Nobel and still the only scientist to win two Nobels in two different sciences. Unbeknownst to most, she was also a humanitarian hero who saved myriad lives driving her X-ray ambulances (with her daughter, who also won a Nobel)
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At the link, this week's oasis of selected sanities – how to see with an astronaut's eyes, an illustrated love letter to words and the meanings between them, E.B. White on rehumanizing humanity:
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A #birddivination for today from the barred owl. Available as a stand-alone print at and as part of the deck of 100 (along with the story behind this strange labor of love) at
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In the bleak winter of 1916, amid WWI, enormous canvases dappled in pointillist patterns of color began appearing across the French countryside, bandaging the brutality with beauty. Remembering Franz Marc, born on this day in 1880, who inspired generations of artists and one of Mary Oliver's greatest poems
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Elizabeth Bishop, born on this day in 1911, on why everyone should experience at least one long period of solitude in life
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“Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth.” Remembering Iris Murdoch, who returned her borrowed stardust on this day in 1999
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“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.” Remembering Iris Murdoch, who parted the final veil on this day in 1999
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Born on this day in 1878, philosopher Martin Buber gave us what remains the single best formula for a genuine and nurturing relationship
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How Mendeleev, born on this day in 1834, discovered the periodic table in a dream
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How nature works, in stunning psychedelic illustrations of scientific professes and phenomena from a 19th-century French physics textbook
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A #birddivination for today from the azure-winged magpie. Available as a stand-alone print at and part of the deck of 100 (along with the story behind this improbable labor of love) at
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Charles Dickens, born on this day in 1812, on grief and how to heal a mourning heart
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From the pioneering immunologist who first linked the central nervous system and the immune system, the science of stress and how it impacts our susceptibility to burnout and disease
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How to grow re-enchanted with the world – a salve for the sense of existential meaninglessness and burnout
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“Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power.” On Charles Dickens's birthday, his abiding advice on how to be a decent person, penned in a letter to his youngest son:
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Pythagoras, Sappho, and the music revolution
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“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is said to have said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Arthur Rackham's century-old illustrations of Irish fairy tales
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For those times when we forget just how much our frames of reference shape our experience of the world, a magnificent poem magnificently read by Rosanne Cash:
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