Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U.S. six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania after “being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live.”
Did it work?
Well, yes and no.
She spent her family’s life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and, despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a bit of culture shock. “I mean, fitted sheets? Brunch?” She worked hard, a defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by. “I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount.”
At one of her jobs in 2006 a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of miscellany to provoke innovation and then Maria took the project on herself—weaving together write-ups on seemingly unrelated topics. One day was Danish pod homes, another the century-long evolution of the Pepsi logo, another on the design of a non-profit's new campaign to fight malaria. It was becoming clear: You never knew what you were going to get from Maria. And in an era of homogenization that was so ever-delightful.
Maria’s emails got popular and then she taught herself programming to put it all online on a site called BrainPickings.org.
I was blogging on 1000 Awesome Things every night in that internet paleolithic. I still remember so many times I’d be researching for some arcane bit of wisdom or trivia and Google would wisely fire me over to BrainPickings.org. I came to love the site which had a top-of-the-page tagline back then that read: “A scan of the mind-boggling, the revolutionary, and the idiosyncratic.”
And like my own blog’s 'About' page, this one didn’t reveal the author’s name, face, or identity. Was the internet just a bit more chat-room-anonymous back then? Or was this just before social media had been invented or figured out they needed our real names to maximize their ad revenues? Either way, Maria and I never got to know each other then … but, thankfully, a full 18 (!) years later the endlessly curious, cool, and erudite Maria Popova is ... still going.
George Saunders, our guest in Chapter 75, says Maria Popova manifests "abundant wit, intelligence, and compassion in all of her writings." Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3 says Maria "is indefatigable in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work." And Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a "cartographer of meaning in a digital age." Perhaps no surprise the Library of Congress has included her project, The Marginalian (once called Brain Pickings), in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials.
I agree with the accolades and find Maria, her blog, and her wonderful books (‘Figuring,’ ‘The Snail With the Right Heart,’ 'The Universe in Verse,' and ‘A Velocity of Being’) truly exquisite and much-needed reflections of everything that makes life beautiful.
Like 3 Books, her site The Marginalian has remained free and ad-free over the years. Maria has no staff, no interns, no assistant, and The Marginalian is, in her words, “a thoroughly solitary labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood.”
The world can feel heavy, intense, and overwhelming—media, politics, and news pulls us away from those harder-to-measure things that make life wondrous. Love, connection, trust, kindness, passions, memories. The invisible but much-more-important guideposts that emerge as we look back on our lives from the end of it. That’s where Maria and The Marginalian rescue us—to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves, or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork from a 100-year-old picture book that helps illuminates one of those impossible-to-articulate emotions that we all share and feel…
I loved this conversation with the much-requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide-ranging set of topics including, of course, her 3 most formative books…
Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia
View full transcript here
CONNECT with MARIA POPOVA
MARIA’s 3 Books
First book (16:14)
Second book (55:29)
Third book (1:30:29)
WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER
Quotes
“The self is a kind of book that is constantly being rereadand rewritten by the person living with it.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“The self is this narrative structure that we create as welive in order to feel coherent to ourselves.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“The living are not my forte.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Every allusion in a piece of writing is a kind of hyperlink to some other thing outside it, some idea or prior book. Every footnote is a hyperlink. If literature is the original internet, the mind is the original literature.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Our technologies of thought will always mirror the structure of the mind.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Creativity is this combinatorial thing, it’s a mosaic of pieces that we pick up because nobody’s born with knowledge.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Right now what I’m very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation because when you think about education, learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else’s knowledge and incorporating it into your own corpus of knowledge and calling it your own. That is what it means to learn anything. And so without appropriation, there could be no learning.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“If we’re not a little bit embarrassed of the people we usedto be, we’re kind of not doing it right.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“[A great poem] comes from a very personal place. If you wrote those poems from some extremely personal region of experience, then it zooms way out to the universal so that it's broad enough to be a perfect answer to pretty much any question. But then somehow it gives you back, you the reader back something deeply precise and personal out of the universal. That is what a great poem does.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I think the passion to create this drive, this life force is hardwired in us. It is part of our drive for connection. I mean, we create as a kind of hand outstretched in the dark for another hand.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Art is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.” (reference: ‘Cold Solace’ by Anna Belle Kaufman) — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I find identity the least interesting thing about people. Actually, identity and opinion. Unfortunately, we live now at a time and an era of identities and opinions being the kind of frontline to personhood.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Identity is a costume for the soul.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us. And the thing about opinion is that it's based on certainty. To have an opinion is to have a certainty about something. And wonder is the opposite of certainty. Wonder is this openness to reality, whatever it may bring, and without fear, right? And a lot of... Opinion is based on fear a lot of identity is based on fear, and defining yourself by what you are not.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I watched the commodification of cultural material, which we now call content. That is heartbreaking. Calling someone’s labor of thought and love content. And the reason is that it fills the containers that we sell, which are ads. Everything is a commodity. Look at what we’ve done to music. We’ve really, really fucked up music. Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Looking back on the history of culture, I see how important the power of modeling is, modeling possibility. You know, seeing someone do something you didn't think was possible makes you feel like it's more possible. And I do want to be the kind of test case for it working when it's a kind of cultural commons and not a consumerist thing. When young people are thinking about how to support their work, maybe turn to the community, maybe don't turn to the overlords of Silicon Valley.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I think our highest calling is to love the world. To love the world as it is and as we are.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“We too will one day be dead, and we might as well make something beautiful and meaningful in this sliver of spacetime that we’ve been allotted.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“It takes a great sobriety of mind to know both your depths and your limits.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Things that are difficult and get easier with time as you kind of harmonize and kind of learn the language and become immersed in this new world you're entering, which is when you read a book, you enter a world. When you enter a relationship with a person, you enter a world. If the difficulty subsides and the joy increases as time goes by, that is a good signal that just stick with it and push through the remaining discomforts and there will be a reward on the other side. If the difficulty increases and the heaviness and the friction increase, get out. Close the book, leave the relationship, just get out.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change. We are machines for homeostasis.We want to maintain the status quo, the comfort zone, and fearis a natural response to change. So in both cases, you can feel fear. The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear and then telling is this way to grow or is this a way to suffer?” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Language is not the container for thoughts and feelings. Language often times is thoughts and feelings.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“What I don't like about a lot of contemporary American children's literature is the saccharine nature of it. There's this total exclusion of complexity and darkness and sadness and this artificial sweetener of life. And I feel like that is such a disservice to growing minds and hearts and spirits.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“A war is essentially a combat of opinions gone to the extreme on the scale of nations.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
“Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast
Show Notes
‘Why Design Matters’ by Debbie Millman
‘Velocity of Being’ edited by Popova
‘Where The Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak
‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff
‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ by Hannah Arendt
‘Confessions’ by Saint Augustine
‘On The Shortness of Life’ by Seneca
‘The Journal’ by Henry David Thoreau
‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker
‘War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield
‘Figuring’ by Maria Popova
‘Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami’ by David Karashima
‘Tough Boris’ by Mem Fox
‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by John Steinbeck
‘East of Eden’ by John Steinbeck
‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck
‘Lincoln and the Bardo’ by George Saunders
‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Díaz
‘Einstein’s Dreams’ by Alan Lightman
The Brothers Karamazov’ by Fydor Doestoevsky
‘A Swim in the Pond in the Rain’ by George Saunders
