Our Inspiration
A gathering of flowers, in Latin, becomes the lovely word, florilegium (a bouquet), and in the literary culture of the middle ages, it was the humble and refreshing basis of marginalia.
As scholars scribbled notes in the margins of academic and literary classics, they created a new culture of scientific learning, bringing the world into conversation through dialogue and commentary.
Medieval florilegium was a carefully curated and sometimes richly decorated manuscript, reflecting its importance as a reference work in science, theology, philosophy, and other related fields.
The medieval university and scientific revolution were the fruits of these flower-gatherers of knowledge, and the Marginalia Review of Books is their flower-gathering child, the digital evolution of the university and its endless quest for knowledge and coherence, bringing the best insights from science, art, and scholarship into a higher wholeness.
As a charitable organization, we depend on the support of readers like you who believe everyone should access pay-wall free deep learning for the digital age.
The internet and education are in crisis.
The fragmentation of higher education parallels the divisions of the global community and the new tribalism the Internet has helped create, with each group closed into its own sphere of interests and information, custom-made to confirm its biases.
We were promised knowledge and tolerance for everyone, and are now more divided than ever.
We witness this division in the splintering of human meaning in art, religion, and culture from scholarship and science. Knowledge disintegrated into specialized silos lacks meaning and has no impact, yet meaning that is not based on science and scholarship magnifies human prejudice and tribalism.
Depth of meaning combined with rigorous thinking continues the best of the Enlightenment project, and it becomes our contribution to the public good: Deep Learning for the Digital Age.
Marginalia integrates the scientific power of the university and the democratizing accessibility of the internet to create new forms of critical knowledge that intersect journalism, scholarship, and public discourse.
We use the two great knowledge technologies of the modern world, the internet and the research university, to solve the crisis they have created: the fragmentation of rigorous knowledge from human meaning.
Curated by expert editors and guided by Marginalia' s vision of democratizing depth in an age drowning in the shallows, our pages unite the separated silos of the university, arts, science, and culture into a single space of insight and learning—all without a paywall.
Marginalia reaches a global readership, pay-wall free, and our articles have been read and assigned by Google employees, White House staffers, members of the European Parliament, and they are assigned on syllabi and used in classrooms around the world.
Founded in 2017 by philosopher and Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale University), Marginalia has provided a new digital commons for conversation about the most important subjects, from science and history, to art and religion.
As a charitable organization and magazine for the public good, all donations are tax deductible.
A Reader Supported Non-Profit
Our pages are the evolution of research university for the digital age and embody its origin: the quest for knowledge and coherence, integrating the best insights from science, art, literature, math, philosophy, and history into a higher wholeness.
We depend on readers like you to support our international, independent publication, keeping it pay-wall free for everyone.
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