Jul 21, 2024
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
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…