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 (540)
“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.” “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Perhaps most fascinating in Michael Lewis’s altogether fantastic recent Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama is, indeed, the President’s...
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when...
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and...
Once, in an extreme of despair, I posed to my therapist a version of the haunting thought experiment Mary’s Room: How, I asked her, can a person who has never been modeled healthy, secure, steadfast love even recognize it when it comes along — to what extent is this knowing teachable, learnable? If a person has...
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” Because the capacity for love may be the...
“You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” “The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in contemplating principles, talking vs. doing, and the human pursuit of greatness in a...
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she filled her poems with flowers and made of them a lexicon of feeling, part code...
“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” “One should try to write as if posthumously,” Christopher Hitchens (April 13, 1949–December 15, 2011) famously opined in a New York Public Library talk three days before his fatal cancer diagnosis. “Distrust compassion; prefer...
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise...
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of...
“One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us.” In early September 1947, a year after she rewilded the...
“Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.” “An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence. “And unless it is said...
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