The Marginalian
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?
Latest Posts
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” The year of reading more and writing better is well underway with writing advice the likes of David Ogilvy’s...
Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pilgrimage toward mind. Perhaps our saline...
“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve… to live in the world with the absence of someone… ingrained in your understanding of the world… For the brain, [they are] simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and...
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” The third volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries has been on heavy rotation in recent...
The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth. The vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off...
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily...
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our...
“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” To face the question of what makes us who we are with courage, lucidity, and fulness of feeling is to face,...
On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occurred to me that what I was doing between...
Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a full stop to demarcate the terminus of...
In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it in a day. Born in England in the final...
“Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with...
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” “Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped,” Carl Sagan urged in his beautiful and timely case...
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the...
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great.” The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our...