# public domain (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 28 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover public domain. Page: Feed: --- ## [The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/21/odds-and-ends-maija-hurme/) _2026-08-22 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother’s voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for… ## [How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/21/anais-nin-d-h-lawrence/) _2026-08-22 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death." ## [The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/21/the-other-significant-others/) _2026-08-21 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." ## [How to Bear Your Desolations](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/any-common-desolation-ellen-bass/) _2026-08-21 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive." ## [How to Bear Your Desolations](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/any-common-desolation-ellen-bass/) _2026-08-21 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive." ## [The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/weeds-and-stars-lisa-rosenberg/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. — “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave… ## [How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/martha-nussbaum-loves-knowledge/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart." ## [How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/martha-nussbaum-loves-knowledge/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart." ## [Where Love Goes When It Goes](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/traversal-love/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ This is an excerpt from Traversal. Where does love go when it goes? It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, bellowing in the bosom of every brokenhearted lover, reverberating through the body of every civilization’s love songs and sonnets, radiating from cave drawings and dive bar graffiti. It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it… ## [How to Bear Your Loneliness](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/pema-chodron-loneliness/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness." ## [Every Channel. One Login. (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/3FWtOJSfJdkT) _2026-08-20 · **Sponsored**_ 17,000+ live channels, movies and sports on any device. Free trial, no IP lock. ## [How to Bear Your Loneliness](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/pema-chodron-loneliness/) _2026-08-20 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness." ## [Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/19/rockwell-kent-wilderness/) _2026-08-19 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands." ## [Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/19/rockwell-kent-wilderness/) _2026-08-19 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands." ## [How to Hold Death and Carry Life: A Zen Master Explains Existence to a Child and Outlines the Three Essential Principles of Zen Mind](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/19/dropping-ashes-on-the-buddha-death/) _2026-08-19 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Zen practice ... requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning." ## [Introducing Microlighter](https://daverupert.com/2026/08/microlighter/) _2026-08-19 · daverupert.com_ I made a smol client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API called MicroLighter . I’ll talk about why I made it in a bit but first I wanted to… ahem … highlight… some of the features. Zero-dependencies ~2kb minifed+gzipped Uses CSS ::highlight(token-name) , not spans Leverages Textmate’s language grammars Human-readable light-dark() themes All languages/grammars loaded… ## [Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/moonlight/) _2026-08-19 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life and tore from its body our only satellite with its miraculous proportions that render randomness too small a word —… ## [Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/moonlight/) _2026-08-19 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life and tore from its body our only satellite with its miraculous proportions that render randomness too small a word —… ## [How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/camus-sea/) _2026-08-18 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch the blue horizon, to touch its infinite loneliness and infinite happiness. I have watched many horizons in the lifetime since, and always they shimmer with the same strange duality, the same absolute… ## [The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/when-women-were-birds/) _2026-08-18 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay." ## [Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/georgia-okeeffe-flower/) _2026-08-18 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." ## [profullstack on Ko‑fi (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/f5RW0i4tYGVJ) _2026-08-18 · **Sponsored**_ Open the creator's Ko‑fi page. ## [Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/18/georgia-okeeffe-flower/) _2026-08-18 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." ## [Public Domain Again Sues Trump Administration](https://www.publicdomain.media/p/public-domain-again-sues-trump-administration-foia-budd-falen-interior-department) _2026-08-18 · Public Domain · Public Domain_ The lawsuit seeks public records related to scandal-plagued Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen ## [Count Binface or Lord Buckethead? A Comedic Copyright Controversy](https://hughstephensblog.net/2026/08/17/count-binface-or-lord-buckethead-a-comedic-copyright-controversy/) _2026-08-17 · hughstephensblog · Hugh Stephens Blog_ Lord Pailface Copyright is a deadly serious business, as the AI company Anthropic found out when it was sued for copyright infringement and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to implicated authors, or as the online platform Afterlife discovered when it was ordered by a Canadian court to pay $20 million to plaintiffs for publishing unauthorized … Continue reading "Count Binface or Lord Buckethead? A… ## [Trump Administration Halts Border Work In Big Bend National Park As Outrage Grows](https://www.publicdomain.media/p/trump-pause-border-work-big-bend-national-park) _2026-08-17 · Roque Planas · Public Domain_ The commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner will visit the beloved Texas park to conduct an evaluation and meet with stakeholders. ## [So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial.](https://copyrightlately.com/corretjer-brown-public-domain-boricua-en-la-luna/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=corretjer-brown-public-domain-boricua-en-la-luna) _2026-08-17 · Aaron Moss · Copyright Lately_ A federal court held that twelve of the Juan Antonio Corretjer poems Roy Brown set to music are in the public domain. Whether Brown had permission to record "Boricua en la Luna" is going to a jury. The post So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial. appeared first on Copyright Lately . ## [Shadow-piercing local component variables](https://daverupert.com/2026/08/how-to-pierce-your-shadow-belly-button/) _2026-08-17 · daverupert.com_ Stuart Robson’s post Solving CSS @layer Ordering in Design Systems with Design Token Metadata , a response to Chris Coyier’s Thinking Horizontally in CSS @layer , came to me at a serendipitous time. You know I love a good blog-and-response, but these posts on the topic of lowering the specificity of component-level tokens and scaling that out was a problem I was having with some of my web… ## [Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/17/cicadas/) _2026-08-17 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ “The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before the final silence. Each summer, cicadas arrive by the billions with their strange… ## [Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/17/cicadas/) _2026-08-17 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ “The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before the final silence. Each summer, cicadas arrive by the billions with their strange… ## [Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/17/wholeness-and-the-implicate-order-david-bohm/) _2026-08-17 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ How to "include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border." ## [The Art of Looking: Eleven Ways of Viewing the Multiple Realities of Our Everyday Wonderland](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/16/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/) _2026-08-16 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you." ## [Auto-trade Cross-Exchange Gaps (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/D82Z7Z9KVYW4) _2026-08-16 · **Sponsored**_ Find cross-exchange spreads, backtest strategies, and execute automatically with risk controls. ## [How to Read the Signal of Your Life](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/15/george-kubler-actuality/) _2026-08-15 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the… ## [The Gentle Giant: Oliver Sacks and the Art of Choosing Empathy Over Vengeance](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/15/oliver-sacks-on-the-move-empathy/) _2026-08-15 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ An existential lesson gleaned from a brush with death and foolishness. ## [The Ocean and the Meaning of Life](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/15/rachel-carson-the-edge-of-the-sea/) _2026-08-15 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp... the ultimate mystery of Life itself." ## [The Ocean and the Meaning of Life](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/15/rachel-carson-the-edge-of-the-sea/) _2026-08-15 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp... the ultimate mystery of Life itself." ## [Bulldozers Plow Through Big Bend National Park As Trump’s Border Work Surges Ahead](https://www.publicdomain.media/p/bulldozers-big-bend-border-wall) _2026-08-14 · Roque Planas · Public Domain_ Video footage shows heavy machinery operating in the famous Santa Elena Canyon amid outcry over new border infrastructure in Texas's most beloved park. ## [How Love Comes to You](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/14/how-love-comes-to-you/) _2026-08-14 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the living life keeps surprising us, keeps reminding us that all too often the wildest bet is the winning bet. And all the while, we, living mysteries, keep surprising ourselves. To give up on anything a dream,… ## [How Love Comes to You](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/14/how-love-comes-to-you/) _2026-08-14 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the living — life keeps surprising us, keeps reminding us that all too often the wildest bet is the winning bet. And all the while, we, living mysteries, keep surprising ourselves. To give up on anything — a… ## [Constellating Wonder: Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian (October 23, 2026)](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/14/marginalian-20/) _2026-08-14 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ 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… ## [Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/14/arundhati-roy-success/) _2026-08-14 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple." ## [How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/13/ginkgo/) _2026-08-13 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Pressed between the pages of Alice s Adventures in Wonderland a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch. I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four majestic… ## [How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/13/ginkgo/) _2026-08-13 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch. I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four… ## [The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/13/henry-miller-on-turning-eighty/) _2026-08-13 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked." ## [The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/13/kiln-quantum/) _2026-08-13 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result something not greater than the… ## [The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/13/kiln-quantum/) _2026-08-13 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the… ## [Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/12/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/) _2026-08-12 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." ## [Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/12/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/) _2026-08-12 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." ## [J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/11/j-r-r-tolkien-on-fairy-stories/) _2026-08-11 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds." ## [J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/11/j-r-r-tolkien-on-fairy-stories/) _2026-08-11 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds." ## [The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/11/dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/) _2026-08-11 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." ## [The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece](https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/11/dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/) _2026-08-11 · Maria Popova · The Marginalian_ "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."