The Marginalian

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?

I am also the creator of The Universe in Verse, the author of a very long, very yellow book titled Figuring and a very slender, very colorful book titled The Snail with the Right Heart, the editor of an eight-year labor titled A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and a past-life contributor to The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, and other editorial exoplanets.