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
- science
- self
- creativity
- living
- being
- live
- letter
- makes
All posts (539)
A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin...
“Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” wrote Rachel Carson. “Our world, and the worlds around and within it,” wrote Sy Montgomery a generation later, “is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom… far more...
Relationships are the great creative work of our lives. They are, like every creative endeavor, a process demanding both systematic intentionality and surrender. If we show up for that process with courage and consistency, it will surprise us, shatter our complacency, take us places we never thought we could go if...
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we...
Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the...
Two of the most dangerous myths we live with are the idea, handed down to us by the Romantics, that in true love two people meet each other’s every need and desire, and the idea, sold to us by the merchants of materialism and woven into the fundamental mythos of the modern world, that happiness is a matter of...
Nothing changes the history of the world more profoundly than changing the landscape of permission and possibility for people — what is possible and permissible for whom in a given culture. And no one has changed the history of the world more profoundly than the people who, with the self-permission to defy the...
In modern society, Simone de Beauvoir observed in her later years, “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life” — it is something upon which the vast majority of humanity looks upon “with sorrow and rebellion,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of...
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. Here are the books I read this year that clarified and magnified my life, that will stay with me for the rest of it. THANKS Here we are, living these...
How do we live whole in a breaking world? It helps to bless what is simply for being. It helps to thank everything for its unbidden everythingness. And still we need help — help holding on to the beauty amid the brutality, help stripping the armors of certainty to be complicated by contraction and more tenderly...
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” It happens so rarely because we so often choose the wrong person...
The son of a Wisconsin schoolteacher, Todd Bol was well into his fifties when he dreamt up the first Little Free Library, not expecting that tens of thousands of these tiny shrines to the love of reading would sprout around the world to outlive him. I was visiting a friend on the other side of the continent when I...
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