NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full.   If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it's free.   Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe. Hello Blog! This is a special annual edition 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 touched your life in a meaningful way this year, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. Love, Lichen, and the Art of Trusting Time: The Best of The Marginalian 2025 Bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a fleeting enthusiasm and what a lifelong gift. It is good to have an annual hindsight ritual in one's life and one's work, the more so the more the two converge. Here are the twenty-five "best" Marginalian essays of 2025 — a composite measure of what you most loved reading and what I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide. (Bless the otherness of minds.) The Three Elements of the Good Life Do Not Spare Yourself An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature's Tiny Titans of Tenacity A Defense of Joy HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery Any Common Desolation What a Weasel Knows: Annie Dillard on How to Live How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel's Extraordinary Letters from Prison The Souls of Animals How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy Anima: One Woman's Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson's Most Famous Poem Forgiveness Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects Carl Jung on Creativity The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences How Not to Waste Your Life Favorite Books of 2025 share with someone you love/Read Online/ donating=loving This year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains 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 it 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. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.   one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201 Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list   update subscription preferences