Maria Popova has spent 20 years following the connections between things: a poet’s account of grief, a scientist’s discovery, a philosopher’s inquiry into love. In her hands, reading becomes a way of thinking through the practical and frequently bewildering business of being alive. What can we learn from another person’s solitude? How do we bear loss? What does paying attention make possible?
The Marginalian, which began in 2006 as an email to seven people under the name Brain Pickings, has grown into an expansive body of essays crossing literature, science, art, and philosophy. Still written entirely by Popova, free to readers and supported by donations, it offers the pleasures of a capacious mind pursuing a question wherever it leads. Her subjects range from Rachel Carson and Emily Dickinson to the philosophical possibilities of picture books. The connections emerge through patient reading and a willingness to let an unfamiliar mind rearrange her own.
On October 23, Popova brings that sensibility to Saratoga Performing Arts Center for Constellating Wonder, a celebration of The Marginalian’s 20th anniversary. The evening gathers poets, scientists, artists, and musicians to share passages from books that have sustained her, with Popova reflecting on their significance. Participants include poet Marie Howe, physicist Stephon Alexander, writer Diane Ackerman, and cellist Zoë Keating, alongside special contributions from Nick Cave and others. Tickets follow a pay-what-you-please model, with complimentary access available by request.
Speaking with Chronogram’s Jason Stern, Popova is warm, exacting, and quick to question the assumptions inside a question—including why an interview should happen at all. Their conversation moves through Leonard Cohen, the trouble with specialization, the intelligence of children’s books, and the inseparability of thinking and feeling. Throughout, she returns to reading as an encounter that can enlarge our lives—and to attention as the means by which we make a world.
Jason Stern: I was eager to interview you because I’ve been a fan of Brain Pickings and The Marginalian for 20 years.
Maria Popova: Can I ask, just out of my own anthropological curiosity, why an interview? What is it about an interview that feels like it adds something?
Jason Stern: Because you and I can have a conversation, and something may emerge in the process of speaking together—something approaching dialectical inquiry. Material that might not come out if I were assessing and reporting, or if you were writing something alone.
Maria Popova: That clearly fits for me because an interview conversation always takes you out of your own mind, which is kind of the most tedious place to be. So I will enjoy a conversation. And using the term ‘dialectical inquiry’ on a Wednesday morning—very delightful. Thank you.
Jason Stern: I read you and find a resonance because I feel like you’re curating and writing material that engages a balance of thinking and feeling, which feels really unusual and special.
Maria Popova: Well, I think, just to correct a possible misapprehension in the first place, I don’t write for a purpose or an audience. I write to process my own life, to reckon with the questions I live with. And I think it is impossible to do that unless you’re both thinking and feeling. So it’s not some creative strategy to engage an audience. It’s just what’s needed in order to learn how to live. The Marginalian is just one person’s record of learning how to do that.
Jason Stern: Why is this coming together of sensing, thinking, and feeling so uncommon? And how did you come to it?
Maria Popova: Well, I think, first of all, we’re all born with it. We just unlearn it and are schooled out of it. Part of it is that I’ve never really fit into the standard way of being. I guess I have the privilege of not having been so easily schooled out of it. I will say René Descartes is the most dangerous man in the history of our species. We are still paying penance for his severance of the body and the mind. We are creatures that live in our bodies, in the physical world. We are not disembodied intellects. And part of why AI will never really be able to reckon with these deepest questions is that AI cannot suffer. It cannot disappoint itself by executing algorithms. And I think so much of the writing, the music, the poetry that we make is in order to figure out how to suffer better, how to suffer less, how to bear our suffering and also our joys. But these are all things that we experience with the whole creaturely sensorium, not just in the mind.
Jason Stern: So is there a methodology?
Maria Popova: I wouldn’t call it a method, but just a way of being. I spend a lot of time in the natural world, walking in forests. A lot of time. And I grew up that way in the mountains of Bulgaria. I do think place and personhood interleave. Surely it formed my mind. And now it’s a deliberate thing. Or rather, I don’t feel like myself if I don’t move my body in the living world for a certain portion of the day.
Jason Stern: I think of Leonard Cohen as a saint, basically. And you brought so much light to Leonard Cohen early on in Brain Pickings. There was a sense with him that he was giving an ongoing account of the metabolization of his suffering and his life, in a way that made the experience available.
Maria Popova: It’s interesting you say that, because Leonard Cohen thought of saints as, as he called them, ‘the balancing monsters of love,’ which I find so beautiful. I mean, what a way to talk about what to make of one’s suffering, right? And I think this is the aim and the end of our lives: How do we make something of beauty and substance out of our suffering?
Jason Stern: I think the society we live in is a cult of avoidance of suffering.
Maria Popova: First of all, we should calibrate our language a little bit. There are people who are really suffering in the world, and we are suffering internally. I do think it’s a society that has really rejected discomfort, and in doing so cripples itself because, of course, the most creative, the most fertile things come at the friction point between things. The great jazz scholar Albert Murray called it ‘antagonistic cooperation.’ He was talking about how jazz musicians make music together. But it is true of so many things we call creative: this kind of generative friction right at the border of what we know and what we fear. We live in a culture of competitive suffering: My trauma is harder than yours. I don’t subscribe to that. That’s not what I mean.
Jason Stern: You’ve written children’s books. And I’ve found many amazing children’s books on the website that I’ve brought to my children.
Maria Popova: I don’t believe there’s such a thing as children’s books. I really think great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise. I read so-called children’s books—not contemporary ones, because there’s been a very unfortunate change in what’s being published as children’s books today, but older ones.
Jason Stern: How would you characterize that change?
Maria Popova: Oh, it’s just agenda-driven polemics, preachy kinds of things. It used to be that you would read something like Where the Wild Things Are, and it would leave you with a feeling and a question. And now you read a children’s book and it leaves you with a map of right and wrong: the good people, the bad people, here’s how to be a person in the world. And it’s just damaging, actually.
Jason Stern: How?
Maria Popova: An image invites you to participate in completing the intimation of the image. Now they’re downright prescriptive, which is the extreme end of the concrete, more exclusionary of aliveness and complexity and individuality. The human being was supposed to be a participant in the experience of reading a story.
Jason Stern: It’s a language of metaphor. You’re not being told something; you’re given a chance to feel something. It speaks directly to the heart.
Maria Popova: And also, metaphor is how children learn language. There’s a lot of very interesting developmental psychology research that shows that language acquisition is done by metaphor in children’s brains. And so, in a way, writing children’s books in metaphor is writing in their native language. And you’re right. Contemporary children’s books, so-called, hardly have any metaphors. And when they do, they are trite. I really love E. B. White. In one of his letters, he said children are the most demanding readers on earth. Anyone who’s writing down to children is wasting their time. You have to write up to children, not down. And so many books today really write down to children in a completely unfortunate way.
Jason Stern: There’s a result, or a consequence, of attention. A certain kind of attention allows us to come into contact with a deeper meaning and find a place where things are connected.
Maria Popova: I laugh because the moment you said ‘the consequence of attention,’ I’m like, the world is a consequence of attention. Our entire experience of reality is a consequence of attention. It is not inconsequential how we spend and pay and give our attention. It renders the world what it is for us, our lives what they are for us. I meditated daily for 15 years, but I think life is a contemplative practice. And if you’re not paying attention to your own experience, I mean, why live?
Jason Stern: It’s like a plant that shoots up branches out of the ground, and it looks like a bunch of different plants. But once you dig a little deeper, you discover that they’re all branches of the same plant. Specialization is like looking at all these different parts of reality and never looking for the connections—the interconnectedness of meaning.
Maria Popova: Well, which part? I guess the rhizomatic nature of reality, or of creativity? Of course, that is how the mind, the spirit, the organism works left to its own devices. When we go through the world, we aren’t separately doing geometry in order to figure out where to put our foot, separately angling our head a certain way because the view is more beautiful. We’re doing everything all at once. And I do think the overspecialization of the last 200 years has been an unfortunate choice our civilization has made in how it structures its systems of information and education: people being forced to choose a field and a discipline quite early in life, then to specialize in it, and then those fields not really being in communication with each other. I think that’s where reading really helps, because it takes you out of whatever—oh, sorry, hold on one second. I lost a filling, and a dentist is trying to fit me in. Yeah, I think we need to actively resist the biases of our culture at this point, the bias for specialization. And reading is the best way I know to do it, because it gives you access to all these ways of thinking, all these worldviews that no one discipline can contain.
Jason Stern: I want to talk to you about Constellating Wonder, because that’s what’s coming up. Have you done events like this before?
Maria Popova: I have. For seven years, I did a show called “The Universe in Verse,” which was a Trojan horse for bringing serious science into people’s lives through poetry. I would have friends from different disciplines—artists, writers, musicians—read poems I’d chosen that spoke to some aspect of science or its history that I wanted to talk about. And then I would, you know, have someone reading a poem, and I would talk about the discovery of dark matter, the rotation of galaxies, that kind of thing. I will say this is probably the last event I’m ever going to do. I am a writer. I’m also an extreme introvert. These things are really not what brings me joy.
Jason Stern: Constellating Wonder looks amazing.
Maria Popova: This is different from “The Universe in Verse.” These are people who have made my own life much more livable over the past 20 years. I’m really doing it as a way of celebrating them and thanking them.
Jason Stern: Anything else you want to bring to Chronogram readers?
Maria Popova: This is just for you personally, but I will say the only thing I’m really excited about personally is the Museum of Delight. My friend Ryan is an amazing artist who lost everything in that awful fire in Red Hook about a year ago. He’s a very gifted builder of things. I make a lot of things with my hands. I often hear questions about the body and the mind, and I think through things while sanding wood, making pottery, embroidering, a lot of those types of things. And what I make, I give away. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years with my readers: I raffle off things I’ve made to strangers. So we decided to take this 1950s Airstream—it looks like a cross between a Zeppelin and a school bus, decommissioned and totally moldy—and we spent months making it into a kind of mobile art gallery museum where you don’t pay admission; you’re paid admission. You get a button, and inside are these stone spheres surrounded by many things I’ve made, and eventually things Ryan makes, once he makes more stuff, because everything he had burned. And we’re going to have people come and make a museum. Some of the stuff in it can be yours, but you can’t buy anything. You can enter a raffle for any amount you’re comfortable with—equal odds whether you enter for a dollar or $10,000. And then each time, 20 of the things we’re going to give away to strangers. I’m very excited.
Jason Stern: What a beautiful experiment.
Maria Popova: I am going to Woodstock after Saratoga Springs, so I don’t know how far that is from you. [Jason: That’s my neighborhood.] Oh, great. We’ll be there in front of the restaurant on the 25th, which is my grandma’s 92nd birthday, in the afternoon. Please come by, bring friends. I have no idea what to expect. People are going to think we’re weird, but it’s Woodstock, so anything goes.
Jason Stern: You have a license to be weird in Woodstock. I noticed that the event has a novel payment structure.
Maria Popova: It’s pay what you want.
Maria Popova: So they won’t let us do it fully pay-what-you-want. I know people do it in other states, but they can’t do zero-dollar tickets. So we did it so that you can pay what you want starting at, I think, $5. But if you need a free ticket, we made an email address where you can write. And I think the point is anyone should attend and do it to the degree of their ability and delight. And I’m such a believer that—obviously, my entire life is made possible by the generosity of strangers. I offer everything I do for free because I really, really don’t subscribe to this Western capitalist myth that money is somehow a special species of resource. I think it’s just the same as attention and love and time and all the other things we give each other. And so it’s really important to me to leave it that way.
Constellating Wonder takes places on October 23 at 6pm at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
