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The Marginalian

A Lamentation for Linnaeus: In Praise of Confusion and Rewilding Wonder November 21, 2025
Long ago, we traded the trees for tools, trying to bend the world to our will. We rose to our feet, ambling under the weight of an oversized brain that grew the opposable thumb we call thinking and made with it more tools — language to name what we saw, organizing principles for what we […]
Maria Popova
If You Forget Me: Pablo Neruda’s Staggering (Un)breakup Poem November 19, 2025
Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish — if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and parted, the fire is forever embering between them, […]
Maria Popova
Chasing Fog: The Science and Spirituality of Nature’s Grounded Cloud November 18, 2025
One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog that had erased Manhattan. A sight with the strangeness of […]
Maria Popova
How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes November 16, 2025
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it […]
Maria Popova
Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India November 13, 2025
You know that moment late into the night when the body, famished for rest, is kidnapped from the land of sleep by a mind aflame with rumination, paging through the ledger of regrets — the message you shouldn’t have sent, the hand you should have raised, the kindness you withheld — until the temperature of […]
Maria Popova
How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication November 11, 2025
Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they realize they are having profoundly different experiences of the same situation and find themselves suddenly hanging from the precipice of the abyss with one hand, sparring […]
Maria Popova
Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity November 10, 2025
Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, […]
Maria Popova
Words: Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Language November 5, 2025
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each other, feel the shape of the world, hold our own experience. We live in language — […]
Maria Popova
How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity November 2, 2025
When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of more than 20,000 known species of lichen — […]
Maria Popova
How Not to Waste Your Life October 31, 2025
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives […]
Maria Popova

social security

Before you retire – try this tool to calculate your ...

This entry was posted in social security and tagged calculator social security on November 12, 2015 by Pliny the Elder

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a My Social Security account at the following link: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/myaccount/ It’s free and there are a lot of useful tools to help you keep track of your earning and estimated benefits.

National my Social Security Week – July 19th through 25th

This entry was posted in social security and tagged social security on July 21, 2015 by Pliny the Elder

Question: Are bank charges on social security funds legal? How can these charges be avoided? Answer: This is an excellent question. Here is a link with good information on how you can protect funds from your social security payments from bank fees. If you are concerned about a bank charging overdraft or insufficient funds fees […]

Question: Are bank charges on social security funds legal? How ...

This entry was posted in Information and tagged social security on November 29, 2014 by Pliny the Elder