At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — passages from books, links to neuroscience studies, reproductions of 16th-century Japanese woodcuts — in an office email to seven colleagues. They in turn began sharing it with friends, who began sharing it with friends. The fractal spread and, within a few years, the Library of Congress had included it in its permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. It changed shape (the essays grew longer, the questions deeper) and name (Brain Pickings became The Marginalian) but continued beating with the same heart, reckoning with the ongoing bewilderment of being alive — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder, always offered freely: no advertising, no AI, not even an assistant, a thoroughly one-woman labor of love sustained by the love of strangers.
To celebrate twenty years of it, I am inviting friends from various walks of life — poets and physicists, musicians and actors, artists and historians of science — to read fragments of the writings, poetry and prose, that have most touched me over the years as I introduce each with a short reflection on its resonance to the eternal questions we live with: what do we make of our suffering, why did the world have to be beautiful, how do we see more clearly and love more purely.
With the format of The Universe in Verse and the feeling-tone of my Marginalian essays, the evening will feature live appearances and special contributions across spacetime by a constellation of beloved humans who have made my own life more livable over the years, among them Debbie Millman, Joan As Police Woman, Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Natascha McElhone, Sophie Blackall, Stephon Alexander, Natalie Batalha, Willow Defebaugh, Wendy MacNaughton, Zoë Keating, Nick Cave, Paola Prestini with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and surprise guests.
If you aren’t attending in atoms at breathtaking Saratoga Performing Arts Center — a state-of-the-art outdoor amphitheater in Upstate New York, surrounded by waterfalls and hot springs, awned by an old-growth forest in full autumnal glory — you can join us virtually via this free livestream:
(And if you find it enriching your day, or your life, consider a donation to lend a helping hand with the heaping production costs.)
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no 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 lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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