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)
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human...
Born in the heyday of the denial of the human animal’s animality, in a world where nature was considered an ember of wildness to extinguish with civilization, its partitioned mystery dissected by various sciences walled off from one another, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859) set out to...
Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer — philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help — life stares mutely back at...
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its...
We spend our lives trying to see our own light, to catch its surprising refractions on the face of the world, to play in its waterfalling golden blue radiance until we are ready to lie down in the bright black of time as the stars go on spinning, their fractured hieroglyphics encoding the memory and mystery of being...
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossifty the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard,...
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly...
It is worth remembering that anything worth doing, anything bound to earn its keep in the house of tomorrow, takes a long time, takes riding the troughs of doubt with unassailable devotion, takes balancing a clarity of vision with the courage of uncertainty. This is true of art and true of love and true of every...
“Mistake” is another word for a working draft we are unable or unwilling to revise, a draft that stands at odds with the story we wish to tell about who we are and what we want. It is a judgment one part of us lashes on another. To indict as having chosen poorly what we once chose willingly is to renounce and...
The aim of science is to illuminate the mysteries of nature and discover the elemental truths pulsating sublime and indifferent beneath the starry skin of the universe. The aim of art is to give us a language for wresting meaning from the truth and living with the mystery. Creativity in both is a style of noticing,...
Page 49 of 51