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)
They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark hummus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of all that is alive. Beneath our feet,...
“Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed.” Though researchers since Darwin may have spent considerable effort on the science of smiles, at the heart of that simple human expression remains a metaphysical art — one captured...
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. “My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters. Since ancient times, human beings have been enchanted by the immutable relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, no matter the circle’s...
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.” We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable...
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of...
“The people we love are built into us.” “There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude — the solitude she came to know, over the course of her long and prolific life, as the seedbed of creativity. Living alone can be...
“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?” “Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an...
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this...
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.” “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,”...
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it,” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem thought experiment, illustrating the paradoxical psychology of why have such a...
“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.” We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping mechanism for the blooming buzzing confusion of what we are. We label, we classify,...
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life,...
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