Building a Global Home for Ideas: Yale Alumni at the Heart of Marginalia Review of Books

Yale Institute of Sacred Music alumna, Alexandra Barylski M.A.R. ’20, and Yale Divinity School alumnus, Samuel Loncar M.A.R. ’12, Ph.D. ’19, are reshaping how scholarly ideas reach the public through their co-leadership of Marginalia Review of Books—a pioneering online magazine and non-profit think tank that connects cutting-edge academic research with a global public audience. As philosophers, scholars, educators, and editors, Barylski and Loncar’s vision is rooted in the endless quest for knowledge and coherence, bringing the best insights from science, art, and scholarship into a higher wholeness.

Their partnership at Marginalia began after Barylski read Loncar’s inaugural essay, “Beyond Borders: America, Immigration, and the Future of Information.” As an educator and poet with experience teaching in prisons and prep-schools, Barylski recognized a mission that she wanted to help realize, so she reached out to join the editorial team. 

Under Barylski’s leadership as executive editor and through Loncar’s vision as the editor-in-chief, Marginalia has evolved into an independent international publication, demonstrating how interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and sciences can address urgent cultural and intellectual questions. Its paywall-free articles have been translated into multiple languages, reaching over 150,000 global readers. Contributors have included a Nobel Laureate, a NASA project lead, prize-winning poets, and professors from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale. The publication’s articles have been featured in outlets like The Browser, Arts & Letters, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and its content is regularly anthologized and printed. 

Bringing the best of the humanities and sciences together while explaining their value and relevance to the public is the foundation of their mission. When Loncar was a featured Ph.D. graduate in the Jul/Aug 2019 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, he spoke about their plans to create a non-profit around science, religion, and the humanities. 

In 2024, Loncar and Barylski founded the Institute for the Meanings of Science at Marginalia, where Barylski works at the cutting-edge of fundamental science research as the projects manager. The Institute advances fundamental science by creating a new, integrated culture of scientific literacy and debate, and it was born from the success of Marginalia’s Meanings of Science Project.

The Templeton World Charity Foundation funded the project, which integrates leading scholarly insights on science to deepen both academic research and public understanding. The project was co-directed by distinguished YDS alum, Peter Harrison M.A. ’85, the former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. The project has been recognized for creating a new approach to science communication, bringing together scholars from numerous disciplines while making their academic research understandable to a broad public audience. Convened at Oxford in the summer of 2022, the project produced more than thirty publications, now being prepared for a forthcoming book with a major university press.

Building on this success, Marginalia received a $260,000 grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation for The Meanings of Life Project: The New Biology, launched with Philip Ball, long-time editor at Nature and winner of the Royal Society’s 2022 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Award and author of How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Directed by Loncar and managed and edited by Barylski, the project convenes leading scientists, scholars, and industry leaders to advance the new scientific vision of life that puts purpose and meaning at the center of biology. Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society and former director of the Francis Crick Institute, was the first core member. 

In April 2025, Marginalia also launched the Center for Jewish Christian Understanding. The Center was created from Barylski’s vision to organize and expand Marginalia’s interdisciplinary research on Judaism and Christianity to address the roots of modern antisemitism so that it can be eradicated. The Center has worked with contributors like Rabbi David Wolpe, the Max Webb Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple, and Rev. Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkowsi, Kraft Family Chair Professor and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. 

According to Loncar and Barylski, knowing about religion is as culturally important as knowing about science. “It’s not about creed,” says Loncar, “it’s about education. The modern world was conceived in a matrix of religious thought that includes Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, all shaped by Greek philosophy. If a person desires to have a deep understanding of our most complex crises in the modern world, including in the sciences, then one needs to know about religion.” Loncar is a philosopher and scholar of religion, and his book on this subject, Philosophy as Religion and Science, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.