The Marginalian
The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
Latest Posts
Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks of character and conduct, comporting...
“No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of factuality.” “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,”...
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here suspended between the time of insects and...
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone...
Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life. We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both. Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move...
“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.” “I work like a gardener,” the great painter...
“To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is...
“Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit.” “In the street and...
Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told her was “the only sensible advice she ever...
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not...
“The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible.” One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in...
Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our...
You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. She is looking at the staff lines of a strange symphony in blue, her cautious disbelief punctured by a burst of delirious wonderment. Brushes and tubes of paint are scattered about her — paint she...
“He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.” J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) firmly believed that there is no such thing as writing “for children” and that creative fantasy serves to set...