Maria Popova

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born writer based in the United States, known as the creator of The Marginalian, the long-running website of essays on books, science, art, philosophy and how to live, which she ran for its first fifteen years under the name Brain Pickings. She is also the author of the books Figuring and Traversal and the creator of The Universe in Verse.

Popova grew up in Sofia, where she graduated from the American College of Sofia, and moved to the United States to study communications at the University of Pennsylvania. While working at an advertising agency she began sending colleagues weekly emails of interesting things from outside their industry. In 2006 that habit became Brain Pickings, which started as an email to seven friends. On the site's fifteenth anniversary in October 2021 she renamed it The Marginalian, saying the original name had been chosen by her younger self and no longer fit.

The Marginalian is written entirely by Popova, who says she has no staff, and it carries no advertising; it is funded by reader donations, with affiliate links to booksellers disclosed on the site. Her essays typically draw on letters, diaries and books by earlier writers, scientists and artists and connect them to questions about love, grief, creativity and meaning. She has also written for The Atlantic, Wired UK and The New York Times.

Her first book, Figuring (2019), traces connections among scientists, writers and artists, many of them women, and how they made meaning of their lives; it reached the New York Times bestseller list and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology. Traversal (2026), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, extends that approach through figures such as Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Since 2017 she has hosted The Universe in Verse, an annual celebration of science through poetry that she adapted into a 2024 book, and she co-edited the anthology A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Popova's writing is characterized by elegant prose that connects ideas across disciplines. She excels at finding profound insights in historical works and connecting them to contemporary life. Her style is both intellectual and emotional, with careful attention to language.

Read widely and keep notes on passages that move you, especially from letters, diaries and older books. Popova's essays start from a real human question, such as how to grieve or how to grow old, and then bring in one or two writers who answered it well. Quote them generously, but do the work of a good host: introduce each voice, explain why it matters and show how it connects to the others.

Pay attention to rhythm. Let long, flowing sentences build the mood, then use a short sentence to state the central idea plainly. Aim to leave the reader with one principle they can carry away, and close by pointing them to further reading. Write about ideas rather than yourself, and choose subjects that will still matter in a year.