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
“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...
“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,...
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...
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...
“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...
Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the...
Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs. Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) endures as one of modern history’s most beloved authors, a wiseman of storytelling and a...
“Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another always?” “Future love does not exist,”...
In 1703, the world’s most esteemed scientific journal published a surprising letter from an anonymous correspondent. (At the time, until well into the twentieth century, anonymity often meant the scientist writing was a woman, though the...
Whenever there is a will, there are two things: a way and an obstacle in the way — that place midway between desire and destination where one’s will collides with the will of the world, with the parameters of permission for imagination...
Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that...
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know...
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian...
“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.” “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent...
“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.” “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul,...