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
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...
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...
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...
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,”...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of...
The point, of course, is to see the whole — what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to uncover the fragments and discover how each works but to understand their harmonic unity — the sum that, as the forgotten genius...
It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular...
We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within — descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our...
It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In...
You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing...
Long ago, we traded the trees for tools, trying to bend the world to our will. We rose to our feet, ambling under the weight of an oversized brain that grew the opposable thumb we call thinking and made with it more tools — language to...