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?
July 2026
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All posts (501)
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend,...
“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” “Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is...
In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collection that gave us his uncommonly insightful meditation on fairy tales, the language of fantasy, and...
On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief. UPDATE 2022: For more soulful animated poems, see my collaboration with On Being on an animated season of The Universe in Verse. Two hundred years ago, in a prophetic book envisioning a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic, Mary Shelley...
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.” “Friendship is unnecessary,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… it has no survival value; rather it is one of...
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world. Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually...
“By reaching beyond the brain… we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth...
In praise of “the gaiety of those who have nothing more to lose and so excel at giving.” The weather has seeded our earliest myths, inspired some of our greatest art, and even affects the way we think. In our divisive culture, where sharped-edged differences continue to fragment our unity, it is often the sole...
“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.” Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and...
What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this when he listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences. Everything beautiful and meaningful, from the grand elations to the small gladnesses that...
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