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 Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Natascha McElhone, Debbie Millman, Sophie Blackall, Uma Thurman, Stephon Alexander, Natalie Batalha, Willow Defebaugh, Paola Prestini, Wendy MacNaughton, Zoë Keating, Joan As Police Woman, Nick Cave, and surprise guests.
Accompanying the show will be a curated bookstore, featuring my twenty favorite books of all time and signed copies of my own, as well as a pop-up Museum of Delights (housed in an airstream from the 1950s), where some of my ceramics and serpentine creations will be given away by the impartial hand of chance in a raffle.
To honor the spirit by which The Marginalian has endured over the years, tickets are offered on a pay-what-you-please basis, ranging from basic operating costs to the extremes of appreciation. To those who need them, free tickets are available by request.
DATE: October 23, 2026
TIME: doors 5PM, performance 6PM
LOCATION: Saratoga Performing Arts Center (108 Avenue of the Pines, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866)
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