Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who existed in the margins of their time and place. (That is why Brain Pickings became The Marginalian .) They were people who were already other enough by some variable (realists in a religious world, women in a man’s world, queer people in a corseted world) that they had little to lose by thinking and living outside the mainstream, by seeing what others did not want to look at and translating what they saw into the sort of radical ideas that have moved this world forward. We are so accustomed to speaking of privilege as the unearned advantage of floating effortlessly atop the glittering surface of the mainstream, but we think little of the unlikely advantage that comes from this strange freedom of the margins.…