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?
August 2026
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All posts (548)
“Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” “What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?” Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their correspondence about love. The question resonates because it speaks to a...
In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning...
“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.” I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my...
“On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.” “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” quantum pioneer Niels Bohr...
The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life; not easy knowing whether or not how you spend your time and mind and love is worthy of the improbable fact that you, against the...
“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.” Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to...
How a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor co-created the modern concept of empathy. Empathy, an orientation of spirit decidedly different from sympathy, has become central to our moral universe. We celebrate it as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, and the gateway to reaching our...
“I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living. That one of the greatest scientists of our time should be one of...
Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box —...
Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous...
“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after...
“We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.” Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture. In the early...
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