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
Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish — if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and...
One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog...
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless their bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we...
You know that moment late into the night when the body, famished for rest, is kidnapped from the land of sleep by a mind aflame with rumination, paging through the ledger of regrets — the message you shouldn’t have sent, the hand you...
Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they realize they are having profoundly...
Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of...
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each...
The hero of the modern myth is the victim, the emblem of the modern self the pronoun. We seem to have forgotten that we are survivors of innumerable spasms of space and time, creatures who never would have given up the gills for lungs if...
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of...
We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover...
The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing...
We are the only animal captive in a cage of its own making. Its bars can look like many things — the screen, the self, the scintillation of being right — but it is from within it that we look out and call our little view the world,...
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006 as a kind of field notebook on my expedition through the wilderness of life, searching for signposts. We live in a hexadecimal world that loves the round anniversaries, the numbers that polish...
“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,” Seneca wrote in considering true and false friendship two millennia...
We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the...