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?
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- self
- living
- science
- being
- live
- creativity
All posts (505)
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 neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about 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 the fundamental mythos of the modern world, that happiness is a matter of...
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 more profoundly than the people who, with the self-permission to defy the...
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,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of...
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 life, that will stay with me for the rest of it. THANKS Here we are, living these...
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 the armors of certainty to be complicated by contraction and more tenderly...
“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 of the time.” It happens so rarely because we so often choose the wrong person...
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 outlive him. I was visiting a friend on the other side of the continent when I...
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 being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly...
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 Willard Gibbs knew, “is simpler than its parts,” simpler and more beautiful, the way...
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