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?
August 2026
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All posts (539)
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 heard,” from a man she never met — one of her two favorite authors. Sydney...
“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 one is demented with the mania of owning things.” Here was “the poet of the...
“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 knowledge over the epochs, the human brain — that crucible of consciousness,...
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 values. We read for the assurance that others have lived through what we are living...
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 the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet. When she met Alice...
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 has spent years mixing into the perfect shades of blue to color a world’s worth of...
“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 the ageless human imagination free. Nowhere was Tolkien’s ethos more perfectly...
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time. “Fearlessness is what love seeks [which]...
“The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age.” Long before there was Yo-Yo Ma, there was Spanish Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973), regarded by many — including Yo-Yo Ma — as the greatest cellist...
Art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed, springs from “the desire to make the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the majority of our epoch’s cultural production aiming to render the market maximally known — its profitably proven...
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine. “Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Before he was...
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…” Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986), celebrated as America’s first great female artist, was a woman of strong opinions on art, life, and...
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