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?

https://www.themarginalian.org/

RSS

Latest posts

• How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity 2025-11-02 03:14pm
• How Not to Waste Your Life 2025-10-31 01:01pm
• The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity 2025-10-29 01:20pm
• What It’s Like to Meet an Orca 2025-10-27 08:42pm
• Endless forms of Wonder: The Nautilus, the Leopard, and the Spirituality of Wildness 2025-10-25 04:55pm
• The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences 2025-10-23 08:45am
• A Chosen Path of Light: Alain de Botton on Successful Friendships 2025-10-21 12:09pm
• Perfect Mind: The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth 2025-10-19 11:04am
• The Engine of Our Redemption: Nick Cave on How to Use Your Suffering 2025-10-17 01:13pm
• I Feel, Therefore I Understand: Humboldt on the Essence of Science and How to Read the Poetry of Nature 2025-10-16 09:59am
• Annie Dillard on How to Live 2025-10-14 04:42pm
• How to Be a Good Explorer in the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself 2025-10-13 11:55am
• How to See the Milky Way: Instructions for Being More Alive 2025-10-10 02:48pm
• How Not to Be a Victim of Success 2025-10-09 04:57pm
• The Three Elements of the Good Life 2025-10-05 10:33am
• Heed Your Daemon: Rudyard Kipling on Writing 2025-10-05 06:18am
• Eight Takes: How to Tell a Truer Love Story 2025-10-03 07:39am
• The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science 2025-10-01 05:34pm
• The Feather Detective: How Roxie Laybourne Pioneered Forensic Ornithology 2025-09-30 07:16pm
• The Cell vs. the Crystal: The Philosopher-Naturalist John Burroughs on What Makes a Great Poem and a Great Person 2025-09-28 09:06am
• Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are 2025-09-25 06:23pm
• How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo 2025-09-23 06:48am
• Ode to a Good Pen: Or, How to Write the Book of Love 2025-09-20 04:11am
• The Heart of the Andes and the Invention of Virtual Reality: Frederic Edwin Church’s Immersive 19th-century Paintings of Natural Wonders 2025-09-16 11:08am
• The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery 2025-09-12 05:45pm
• Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success 2025-09-11 10:55am
• Virginia Woolf on Love 2025-09-09 06:23pm
• By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy 2025-09-05 07:55pm
• On Looking: Poet Lia Purpura on the Art of Noticing 2025-09-04 12:39pm
• Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI 2025-08-31 08:38am
• A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go 2025-08-29 10:38am
• Undersound: The Secret Lives of Ponds and the Mysterious Musicality of the World 2025-08-26 09:09am
• Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity 2025-08-22 06:31pm