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
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- self
- science
- creativity
- living
- being
- live
- letter
- makes
All posts (540)
At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a new relationship between space and time, the warp and weft of a single fabric that...
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have...
This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon book into the common soil of popular literature. He had...
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.” “Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,” young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that...
“Come with me. I’ll teach you the flowers and the stars.” Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for — tenderness to salve our bruising contact with reality, to warm us awake from the frozen stupor of near-living. Tenderness is...
“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.” Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment....
“If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God… he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing.” “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the...
The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less...
“Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.” “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” researcher Rosalind Cartwright reminded us in her fascinating treatise on the science of dreams. “The biggest lie of human...
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely...
“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.” The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness. We may know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we may know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and yet in our longing for...
“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.” And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of our species is the price we pay for the mind’s magnificent...
Page 14 of 45