Maria Popova

Maria Popova on Sanctuary


Maria Popova is a reader and a wonderer reckoning with the meaning of it all in writing. The Marginalian is the record of the reckoning — a one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a tender, thoughtful life of purpose and gladness, wonder-smitten by reality. 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 chronicle of her ongoing becoming — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from her extended marginalia on the search for meaning across science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling; a private inquiry shimmering with the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this?