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)
You wouldn’t know it, looking at the tiny elderly woman in the white lab coat bent over a table in a halogen-lit government office, you wouldn’t know she had spent her youth doing science with her whole body: extracting herself from a deadly mudflat with stubbornness and applied physics; narrowly escaping permanent...
A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves...
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an...
Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his...
I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be...
In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to see The Heart of the Andes — a single painting exhibited by itself in an unknown young artist’s studio. Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his time Latin America, which had sent Darwin...
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to...
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple."
“I think we moderns lack love,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war. The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to...
Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages. “Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love...
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