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Maria Popova
Popova in 2014
Born	July 28, 1984 (age 39) Bulgaria[where?]
Nationality	Bulgarian
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation(s)	Writer, blogger, and critic
Website	themarginalian.org

Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984)^{[not verified in body]} is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet,^[1] and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.^[2]

In 2006, she started the blog Brain Pickings, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free. The blog, renamed to The Marginalian upon its 15th birthday in 2021,^[3] features her writing on books, the arts, philosophy, culture, and other subjects.

In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow,^[when?] as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore,^[when?] and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. Since 2010, she has resided in Brooklyn, New York. She is the creator of “The Universe in Verse”, a large-scale annual celebration of science and the natural world through poetry.

Early life[edit]

Maria Popova was born on 28 July 1984^[4] in Bulgaria.^[where?][5] Popova’s parents are ethnic Bulgarians^{[citation needed]} who, as noted by Bruce Feiler for The New York Times, “met as teenage exchange students in Russia … [h]er father … an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman … her mother … studying library science”.^[6] In interview, Popova states that in childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias.^[7] As recounted in interview to Geoff Wolinetz of Bundle.com, Popova first worked when she was about 8 years old,^[8] making the Bulgarian yarn folk art dolls called martenitsas,^[9] worn beginning on the first of March where Popova describes selling them on the street as children would sell drinks at a lemonade stand.^[8]

Undergraduate education and early work[edit]

Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria, a secondary school, in 2003.^[10] She relocated to attend the University of Pennsylvania,^[5][11] where she earned a degree in communications, though for years, up to 2012, her grandmother had wanted her to get an MBA.^[11] Popova paid for her tuition by working four part-time jobs on top of a full college course load: as an advertising representative for The Daily Pennsylvanian, as an intern for a local writer, as an employee for a work-study job at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and as a staff member for a small start-up advertising agency in Philadelphia.^[8]

In 2005, while Popova worked at an advertising agency, she noticed that her co-workers were circulating information within the advertising industry around the office for inspiration. However, Popova thought creativity was better sparked with exposure to information outside of the industry one was familiar with. In an effort to stir creativity, she regularly sent emails to the entire office containing five things that had nothing to do with advertising, but were meaningful, interesting, or important.^[2] Because of the popularity of the emails, Popova felt that there was an “intellectual hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning.”^[7]

She enrolled in a night class to learn web design, took Brain Pickings online, and let the project grow organically.^[7]

Relocation to the United States[edit]

Popova describes the period of coming to the U.S. to Hannah Levintova of Mother Jones; in this 2012 interview she states:

I didn’t immigrate. I’m here on a visa, and I’m not an American citizen. I don’t know if you followed the … situation in 2007 and 2008? … Every year, the government has a visa quota—they will give, say, 65,000 H1-B work visas for foreigners who are going to work in the country for an American company. And so, normally, they would open up the application process, and the quota would run out in the first three weeks… So, after graduation, I had a job [lined up], and we applied for that visa, but that was the year “Visagate” happened: The first day of applications, for the first time in history, the government got three times their quota on the very first day. So, they panicked and thought the only thing to do was to make it a raffle for everyone that applied on the first day, and then automatically reject everyone after that. So, we’d filed for the first day, but I was in the two-thirds that didn’t get it, so the whole envelope got returned unopened. So then I got the OPT [Optional Practical Training]—which entitles you to a year’s worth of work with a company within the scope of your major. We tried again in 2008, and same thing—the whole envelope got returned unopened. So, I had to leave the country! I went back to Bulgaria for a year.^{[11][excessive quote]}

Popova describes returning to Bulgaria in 2008 in interview to the Bulgarian news journal Capital, and how she and a trio of friends organized a conference modeled after the American TED Talks, which they called “TEDxBG”.^[12] Popova further describes the outcome of the events—her eventual visa receipt—to Mother Jones: “When the application process lightened up… I moved to LA—which I really resented more than anyone’s ever resented a city in the history of resenting cities. And now I’m finally in New York, and I’m here to stay.”^[11] As of 2012, she was living in Brooklyn.^{[11][needs update]}

Work as a writer[edit]

If something interests me and is both timeless and timely, I write about it. Much of what is published online is content designed to be dead within hours, so I find most of my material offline. I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message.

— Popova in December 2012^{[13][excessive quote]}

Popova has written for The Atlantic,^[11][14] Wired UK,^[11] GOOD,^[11] The Huffington Post,^[15] and NiemanLab.^[11][16]

In 2006, she began the blog Brain Pickings as an email sent each week to seven of her friends. Krista Tippett in On Being describes it as “[n]ow a website, Twitter feed, and weekly digest… cover[ing] a wide variety of cultural topics: history, current events, and images and texts from the past.”^[5] It includes several sections and has graphics, photographs, and illustrations in addition to written content.^[2] As of December 2012, The Guardian was reporting that the blog had “1.2 million readers a month and 3m page views”.^[13] Anne-Marie Slaughter describes Popova’s blog as “like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”^[2]

Popova is also author of Figuring, published by Random House in 2019.,^[17] and The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story, published by Enchanted Lion Books in 2021, which is a story about science, the poetry of existence, and is “inspired by a beloved young human” in Popova’s own life.^[18]She is co-editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to A Young Reader, published by Enchanted Lion Books in 2018.^[19]

In Figuring, which appeared at No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list upon publication, Popova examines connections between a variety of scientists, writers, and artists, many of them women, and how they created meaning in their lives.^[20][21] Figuring won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Science and Technology category.^[22]

Side projects and partnerships[edit]

In addition to running Brain Pickings, Popova has a number of side projects. She maintains a Twitter account,^[23] and a newsletter.^{[citation needed]} In 2012, she created the “Literary Jukebox”, a sub-site where she matches quotes from books with songs. “Music, for me, is an enormous trigger of mnemonic associations – of time, place, mood, emotion, the smell of fresh-cut grass behind your best friend’s house when you were 18 and first heard that song.”^[24]

Popova also has various partnerships with prominent organizations. She is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.^[when?][25] Additionally, Popova serves as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, run by Noodle.^[26] She edits Explore, a partnership site with the Noodle educational search company.^[27]

Content selection and output[edit]

Popova filters through the large amounts of content she reads each day through a detailed selection process. When choosing content for Brain Pickings, she asks herself three things:

Is it interesting enough to leave the reader with something – a thought, an idea, a question – after the immediate fulfillment of the self-contained reading or viewing experience? Is it evergreen in a way that makes it just as interesting in a month or a year? Am I able to provide enough additional context – historical background, related past articles, complementary reading or viewing material – or build a pattern around it to make it worth for the reader?^[28]

When choosing material to publish on Brain Pickings, she aims to “share content that is meaningful. Often, it’s timeless.”^[29] Popova also seeks out content that has narrative. As she states, “Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.”^[30] Popova publishes this information in tweet form when she does not have much to add. On the other hand, she publishes this as blog posts when she feels she can deepen the subject with historical background or additional materials.^[30]

Awards and recognitions[edit]

Maria Popova has received numerous instances of media recognition for her work. In 2012, she was named number 51 of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine.^[29] Popova was featured in 30 under 30 by Forbes as one of the most influential individuals in Media and was listed on “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2012 List” by Time magazine.^[31][32] Popova’s work has also been spotlighted and profiled in publications such as The New York Times.^[2]

Criticism[edit]

Affiliate advertising[edit]

Popova has been very vocal about her dislike for traditional advertising, and has repeatedly expressed her pride on being advertising-free:

It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.^{[33][excessive quote]}

In 2013, Popova received criticism on how she championed her site to be “ad-free” and a “labor of love” that requires reader donations to sustain itself, while she covertly received revenue from affiliate advertising from Amazon. Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, California, wrote a post on an anonymous Tumblr blog calling Popova out for her actions. Using his own calculations, Bleymaier extrapolated that Popova could make anywhere between $240,000 and $432,000 a year with these affiliate advertisements.^[34]

This received much media attention from sources such as Reuters and PandoDaily.^[34][35]

This incident has sparked a more general debate on the Internet about whether or not affiliate advertisements are “sneaky” or “deceptive”. Popova has since updated her donation page on Brain Pickings to acknowledge the fact that she receives income from affiliate advertisements.^[35]

Curator’s Code[edit]

The second paragraph of this section, stating “mixed responses” and “Most criticism…” relies entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: “Maria Popova” – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2019)

In 2012, Popova created The Curator’s Code, a project (now suspended) by Popova with input from designer Kelli Anderson. The Curator’s Code is a code of conduct for curators on the web to use. This proposed method is an attempt to codify source attribution on the internet to ensure that the intellectual labor of information discovery is honored.^[36] Under the code, the “via” symbol indicates direct discovery, where the “hat tip” symbol indicates an indirect link of discovery.

The Curator’s Code was controversial, and received mixed responses.^{[weasel words]} The announcement of this project elicited feedback from one blogger who “worr[ied] about the meaning of curation”.^[30] In that blog post, Marco Arment stated that “codifying ‘via’ links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem”.^[30] Most criticism^{[weasel words]} of The Curator’s Code voiced uncertainty about its ability to solve the problems of online attribution. Some critics argued that the problems of online attribution are not due to a lack of codified syntax, but rather due to the “economics and realities of online publishing”.^[30]

Personal life[edit]

Popova has sought to maintain a degree of personal anonymity, with emphasis on her writing rather than on herself.^{[2][needs update]}

Popova has participated in amateur bodybuilding.^{[citation needed]} She states in an interview that she “fell into” the world of bodybuilding during her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania when her dormitory’s resident adviser recommended that she compete in a bodybuilding show, although she no longer competes.^{[37][full citation needed]}

References[edit]

1. ^ Popova, Maria (Summer 2022). “The Age of the Possible”. Orion.
2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Feiler, Bruce (30 November 2012). “Fashion & Style: She’s Got Some Big Ideas”. The New York Times.
3. ^ Popova, Maria (2021-10-23). “Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn”. The Marginalian. Retrieved 2021-11-09.
4. ^ Feiler, Bruce (November 30, 2012). “Fashion & Style: She’s Got Some Big Ideas”. The New York Times. Retrieved March 9, 2024.From the article date of 2012 saying Popva was 28 we can roughly confirm her birth year in 1984.
5. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Tippett, Krista & Popova, Maria (February 7, 2019) [May 14, 2015]. Maria Popova: Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age [interview] (audio transcript). OnBeing.org. Minneapolis, MN: The On Being Project. Retrieved 20 December 2019. Ms. Tippett:… From a weekly email to seven friends in 2006, Brain Pickings became a website, a Twitter feed, a weekly digest, and much more, and has been included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive since 2012. Maria Popova was born in Communist Bulgaria, and she came to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She started Brain Pickings as an internal office experiment while she was working one of multiple jobs to pay for her studies.
6. ^ Feiler, Bruce (November 30, 2012). “Fashion & Style: She’s Got Some Big Ideas”. The New York Times. Retrieved December 20, 2019. Her parents met as teenage exchange students in Russia and had her almost immediately. Her father was an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman; her mother was studying library science.
7. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Essmaker, Tina; Popova, Maria (November 27, 2012). “Maria Popova”. The Great Discontent (Interview). Sioux Falls, SD: TGD™/Institute of Possibility. Archived from the original on 2019-06-17. Retrieved December 20, 2019.
8. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Wolinetz, Geoff & Popova, Maria (June 24, 2010). “Brain Pickings blogger Maria Popova: ‘I’m not a big believer in saving’ [interview]”. Bundle (online). Archived from the original on October 28, 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2013.
9. ^ “Cultural practices associated to the 1st of March Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Republic of Moldova and Romania”. UNESCO. 2017. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
10. ^ Бонева-Благоева, Йорданка (16 December 2015). “Как блогърката Мария Попова от Brain Pickings избира Американския колеж за свое училище” (in Bulgarian).
11. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i} Levintova, Hannah & Popova, Maria (2012). “Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind”. Mother Jones (interview) (January/February). San Francisco, CA: Foundation for National Progress. Retrieved 20 January 2019. For years, Maria Popova’s septuagenarian grandmother in Bulgaria wished her granddaughter would just do the sensible thing and get an MBA. Instead, the 27-year-old Brooklynite has spent the past six years developing BrainPickings.org… A transplant from Bulgaria, Popova moved to the states to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated with a communications degree..>
12. ^ Рудникова, Ива & Попова, Мария [Rudnikova, Iva & Popova, Maria] (May 20, 2010). “Предай нататък: Българската звезда в Twitter Мария Попова за любопитството, креативността и медиите на бъдещето [Pass it on: Bulgarian Twitter Star Maria Popova on Curiosity, Creativity and the Media of the Future ]”. КАПИТАΛ [CAPITAL] (online). Sophia, BG: Economedia. Retrieved December 20, 2019. (IR:) Мария Попова е на 26 години и от няколко месеца живее в Лос Анджелис… / (MP:) В края на 2008 г. се върнах в България за известно време, където с трима приятели организирах TEDxBG, конференция по модела на ТЕD, този януари. / На 26 съм… / През 2003 г. се преместих във Филаделфия, където завърших University of Pennsylvania. Буквално следващата седмица се преместих в LA – тук съм от края на януари и въпреки, че градът не е по мой вкус (аз съм морално против колите по екологични съображения, от години се придвижвам на колело, а велосипедирането в LA e пчти непосилно), има си и своите предимства. [(IR:) Maria Popova is 26 years old and has lived in Los Angeles for several months. / (MP:) At the end of 2008, I returned to Bulgaria for a while, where I and three friends organized a TEDxBG, a TED model conference, this January. / I’m 26… / In 2003, I moved to Philadelphia, where I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Just next week, I moved to LA – I’ve been here since the end of January and even though the city is not to my taste (I am morally against cars for environmental reasons, I’ve been cycling for years and cycling in LA is almost impossible), it has its advantages as well.]
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b Sweeney, Kathy (December 29, 2012). “Maria Popova: why we need an antidote to the culture of Google”. The Observer. Retrieved 2013-01-09.
14. ^ “Maria Popova”. The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
15. ^ Popova, Maria (2010-06-03). “Abstracting Atlantis: Scientists Find Evidence of Mayan Underwater City”. HuffPost. Retrieved 2020-01-12.
16. ^ “Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism”.
17. ^ Popova, Maria (2020). Figuring. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. ISBN 978-0-525-56542-0. OCLC 1199010370.
18. ^ “Review: The Snail with the Right Heart”. Retrieved 2024-03-03.
19. ^ Popova, Maria (2019). Velocity of Being: Letter to a Young Reader. Enchanted Lion Books, LLC. ISBN 978-1-59270-228-2. OCLC 1080916158.
20. ^ Smith, P. D. (2020-02-07). “Figuring by Maria Popova review – distillation of a lifetime’s reading”. The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-10-28.
21. ^ Sternburg, Janet (22 May 2019). “The Mind Has a Mind of Its Own: On Maria Popova’s “Figuring””. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-10-28.
22. ^ “Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Winners Announced”. Los Angeles Times. 2020-07-13. Retrieved 2020-10-28.
23. ^ Maria Popova. “Maria Popova (brainpicker) on Twitter”. Twitter, Inc. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
24. ^ Klose, Stephanie (August 9, 2013). “Q&A: Maria Popova on Literary Jukebox”. Library Journal. Retrieved October 5, 2013.
25. ^ “Futures of Entertainment: People”. http://www.convergenceculture.org. Retrieved 2020-01-12.
26. ^ Miller, Tessa (September 12, 2012). “I’m Maria Popova and this is how I work”. Lifehacker.com. Gawker Media. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
27. ^ “Explore”. Noodle.org. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
28. ^ Donnelly, Kate (October 11, 2011). “Maria Popova”. From Your Desks. Retrieved October 5, 2013.
29. ^ Jump up to:^a b Kaganskiy, Julia. “How to make the Internet more personal”. FastCompany.com. Mansueto Ventures LLC. Archived from the original on November 19, 2012. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
30. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Arment, Marco (March 12, 2012). “I’m not a curator”. Marco.org. Marco Arment. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
31. ^ Bercovici, Jeff (December 17, 2012). “30 Under 30, Media”. Forbes. Archived from the original on December 31, 2012. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
32. ^ Townsend, Allie (March 15, 2012). “Maria Popova”. Time.com. Time Inc. Archived from the original on October 12, 2013. Retrieved October 5, 2013.
33. ^ Ingram, Mathew (February 14, 2013). “The Brainpickings brouhaha and the problem with affiliate links”. paidContent. Retrieved October 5, 2013.
34. ^ Jump up to:^a b Salmon, Felix (February 14, 2013). “Blogonomics, Maria Popova edition”. Reuters.com. Thomson Reuters. Archived from the original on February 14, 2013. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
35. ^ Jump up to:^a b Mckenzie, Hamish (February 14, 2013). “Dear Jonah Lehrer and Maria Popova: Just own up and apologize”. pandodaily.com. PandoDaily. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
36. ^ Carr, David (March 11, 2012). “A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators”. The New York Times. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
37. ^ Lazarus, Catie & Popova, Maria (7 January 2014). Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova [interview] (streaming video). New York, NY: Employee of the Month. Retrieved 20 December 2019.^{[full citation needed]}

Further reading[edit]

• Kenneally, Christine (March 13, 2019). “Maria Popova Weaves Together Stories of Human Ingenuity”. The New York Times.
• “Maria Popova: By the Book”. The New York Times. February 7, 2019.
• Nomes, Christopher (December 10, 2012). “Maria Popova – Editor of Brain Pickings”. Who & Whom. Archived from the original on August 27, 2015. Retrieved October 1, 2013. Earlier used citation whose content appears to have been plagiarised from The New York Times and other sources.
• Pievatolo, Maria Chiara (June 22, 2011). Maria Popova, In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship (in Italian). University of Pisa, Nieman Journalism Lab. OCLC 820599979. Archived from the original on 2019-09-05 – via archive.is. (under Creative Commons license)

External links[edit]

• Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Maria Popova.

• The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)
• Popova’s Twitter account
• Curator’s Code, now suspended
• Explore (the original Lore collaboration)

Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind

The creator of Brain Pickings on how to think outside the corporate box.

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Maryana Ferguson/Maria Popova

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For years, Maria Popova’s septuagenarian grandmother in Bulgaria wished her granddaughter would just do the sensible thing and get an MBA.Instead, the 27-year-old Brooklynite has spent the past six years developing BrainPickings.org—her wildly popular culture blog where one might find cheeky maps of European stereotypes, a visual history of bicycle design, even a Finnish choir that sets people’s complaints to song.Sometimes, she ties her morsels of “interestingness” to the current of the times—as with a recent series of Occupy-themed posts or her posthumous tribute to Steve Jobs. But often her pickings aim to transcend the times, rather than harping on them, pushing us beyond the thought parameters of our daily routines.

A transplant from Bulgaria, Popova moved to the states to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated with a communications degree, but her current reading proclivities—she consumes 12 to 15 books a week—and her prolific Twitter word-smithing—she tweets, without fail, every 15 minutes—are a dead giveaway to the one-time English major that lies within. (Never one to make curiosity compromises, Popova ditched the major. Read on to learn why.) Since Brain Pickings‘ launch in 2006, the site has earned millions of page views, as well as side gigs for Popova as a culture writer for The Atlantic, Wired UK, GOOD, and Nieman Lab. So while there’s no MBA in sight, grandma is jiving with Popova’s unconventional brand of business savvy. I caught up with the one-woman discovery engine to learn about the internet’s hidden treasures, curation as authorship, and her occasional run-ins withimmigration services.

Mother Jones: So on top of your prodigious Twitter presence, you blog three times a day. And each item you blog about is a stunning hidden gem that would take the average netizen hours to track down. How do you do it? Can you run me through your typical day?

Maria Popova: The Atlantic actually asked me that for their media diet thing. The writer basically told me he was terrified of me! So, besides Brain Pickings I also have a day job, which enables me to be here, you know, to have a paycheck. Half of the time, I work out of Studiomates, which is a wonderful coworking space that my friend Tina runs. Then the other half of the time I’m at TBWA [an advertising company]. So depending on the day, my schedule is different. But, generally speaking, I get up in the morning, I do a 30 to 45 minute prescheduling of tweets and just seeing if there’s anything urgent—do-or-die emails or server outages, stuff like that. Then after that I go to the gym, where I do all my long-form reading—so Instapaper, and all the Kindle books. I go through an embarrassing amount of books per week.

MJ: How many?

MP: To be fair some of them are art, design, or photography books that you don’t really read so much as look at. But most weeks I’ve gone through 12 books, maybe even 15 some weeks, depending on the length. So I go through my long form, and then my day begins. I usually try to do most of my writing earlier in the day because I sort of lump out later on. So everyday I publish three pieces on Brain Pickings, so I try to write two of them before the early afternoon. And then I do all the prescheduling of tweets for the rest of the day. And then, I do yoga in the evening—or if I have to go to some event. Then when I get home I write the third piece on Brain Pickings, I do some reading of news sources, and I preschedule the tweets for the first half of the following day. And then I do some more book reading before I go to bed.

MJ: You’re so embedded in multiple technologies. What would you say is a technological void that needs filling?

MP: Universal WiFi. Without a doubt. I am done with being on the train, not having internet. Or having spotty coverage. It’s a fundamental need at this point. It’s the frickin’ information age! It should be like air! And it doesn’t have to be free. I’m a believer in paying for value. Just having it as an option.

MJ: Have you always been so committed to information consumption?

MP: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I didn’t really—at least intellectually and creatively—have a particularly compelling experience in college. But during my junior year, they made the TED talks public. So I started listening to them. They were producing one per day, and I was listening to one per day, every day, at the gym. And then I discovered PopTech and other kind of intellectualish, online portals for curiosity. Very quickly, I just got so much more out of those than from so-called “Ivy League” education that I knew it was on me to keep myself stimulated, and to keep learning, more than anything. And, because I paid my way through college, I was working at Penn, two to four jobs at a time to pay for school.

MJ: And in the middle of all this, you also found time to start Brain Pickings?!

MP: [Laughs.] It was crazy, crazy times. Well, one of my jobs was at a start-up ad agency. They were trying to do things differently, work with socially conscious clients, and to really be a more creative take on advertising than the industry itself. But I noticed that what the guys at the office were circulating for inspiration still came from within the ad industry. I thought that was really counterintuitive—to only borrow inspiration from within your own industry. So I started Brain Pickings as just a Friday email newsletter going out to my colleagues there, with five links to five really different things that had nothing to do with advertising—from a vintage train map of Europe to a Japanese short film from 1920 to the latest technology. Eventually I saw that these guys were forwarding these emails to friends of theirs that were in really different disciplines, not just creative ones—but writers, lawyers, students, whatever. So, I decided on top of all the jobs and school, to take a night class and teach myself web design and coding, just enough to get by. That’s how it started. And in the process, I was still digging into the things I was featuring, and in that process, you learn so much more than you do in a lecture. The whole lifelong-learner thing—this just became my way of doing that.

“I thought that was really counterintuitive—to only borrow inspiration from within your own industry.”

MJ: So when you’re wading through the interwebs looking for content, what’s the thing you sense that tells you “Done. This works for Brain Pickings?”

MP: What I pick for my blog and what I pick for Twitter are different things. One thing that is true for both, by and large, is that it has to feel like something that leaves you with more than just a moment of gawking. There are really cool or funny videos, or visually stunning photos, and that’s fine, but none of them really give you more when you close that tab, you know? I try to find stuff that a little bit, in a tiny way changes how you see something about the world. With Brain Pickings, especially, whenever I look at a piece of content. I think “Can I add something to it? Can I add some depth and context and background to really make it worth featuring?” Or do I just do what Jeff Jarvis calls “do-what-you-do-best-and-link-to-the-rest,” and just tweet it instead? That’s always the litmus test. Is there something that I can say. If I can pull in pieces of older content or something else that connects different disciplines or different ideologies, then I will write an article about it.

MJ: How does your family feel about what you’re doing?

MP: I was actually just talking to my 75-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria on Skype yesterday. I just taught a class at Columbia, at their MBA school—they asked me to be a guest speaker. My grandmother has always had a real problem with the fact that I never went and got an MBA, and I’ve been trying all this time to explain to her that I have learned so much more in the past six years doing this. So finally, the other day, when I was telling her about Columbia, it really dawned on her that because of how I’ve structured my intellectual curiosity, they’re asking me to go and talk to MBAs. I think she really began to understand alternative ways of learning and growing.

MJ: If your 75-year-old grandma is into it, you’re doing something right!

MP: Well, also—she discovered the internet a year and a half ago. And she’s obsessed! Now she keeps track of things I don’t keep track of! Like the Brain Pickings Facebook fan page; she keeps score of fans. And my followers on Twitter; every time she’s like, “Oh, you’re up to so-and-so now!” And then she has all these Google Alerts that I helped her set up with Google Translate to see what people are saying about Brain Pickings and me, in the major media or whatever. She is so cute. She knows more about what I do than my parents.

MJ: Are your parents more understanding on the career front?

MP: They’re supportive. To this day, I’m not quite sure how understanding they are. I know they try. My dad, definitely, from a technical perspective, understands everything about the social web, and all of that. From a conceptual standpoint, I wonder if he still thinks what I do isn’t quite real, in the way that getting a job as a bioengineer might be, you know? And my mom, I know she tries to understand. She can sense that I’m happy with what I do, really fulfilled and scintillated, and I think that’s enough for her.

MJ: So, did you officially immigrate?

MP: Well, actually, funny you should ask. I didn’t immigrate. I’m here on a visa, and I’m not an American citizen.I don’t know if you followed the whole Visagate situation in 2007 and 2008?

MJ: I didn’t. What happened?

MP: Every year, the government has a visa quota—they will give, say, 65,000 H1-B work visas for foreigners who are going to work in the country for an American company. And so, normally, they would open up the application process, and the quota would run out in the first three weeks or so, and then people would not get them. So, after graduation, I had a job, and we applied for that visa, but that was the year “Visagate” happened: The first day of applications, for the first time in history, the government got three times their quota on the very first day. So, they panicked and thought the only thing to do was to make it a raffle for everyone that applied on the first day, and then automatically reject everyone after that. So, we’d filed for the first day, but I was in the two-thirds that didn’t get it, so the whole envelope got returned unopened. So then I got the OPT—which entitles you to a year’s worth of work with a company within the scope of your major. We tried again in 2008, and same thing—the whole envelope got returned unopened. So, I had to leave the country! I went back to Bulgaria for a year. When the application process lightened up, I came back. I moved to LA—which I really resented more than anyone’s ever resented a city in the history of resenting cities. And now I’m finally in New York, and I’m here to stay.

MJ: How did you develop your writing style?

MP: I was, like I believe everyone under the sun, an English major for a while. I had a creative nonfiction concentration. Then, my senior year, there was one class that was required to get the major, and it was something like “Italian Literature 1546-1646.” Something superspecific. I got so annoyed, and I was like “Screw it! I don’t care for the title—I’m just gonna turn it into a minor.” So I never took that damn class! But my major was communications, with a focus on communication and commerce. But I don’t see a correlation between my formal academic background and the way I have built my own curiosity and intellectual interests. It’s just something on paper.

“These Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle.”

MJ: So if not your academic background, what did inspire Brain Pickings?

MP: Now, I have a term for it, and it’s not even my own—the idea of “combinatorial creativity.” But even before I knew what that was, I always believed that creativity is just, sort of, our ability to take these interesting pieces of stuff that we carry and accumulate over the course of our lives—knowledge and insight and inspiration and other work and other skills—and then recombine them into new things. That’s how innovation happens, and that’s how ideas are born. So, when I started Brain Pickings, the idea of five diverse, multidisciplinary items in one email, that was the fundamental vision for it: that you enrich people with creative resources, and over time, these Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle.* And I don’t think that’s an original idea at all—it’s something a lot of people intuitively understand, and a lot of curatorial projects are born out that vision.

MJ: But if it’s not an original idea…why do you think Brain Pickings has received so much acclaim?

MP: I honestly have no idea! [Laughs.] I really don’t. I never had a business strategy or a growth plan behind it. And to this day, a lot of days I wake up and I still think I’m writing for the eight people that were on my email newsletter in 2005. Part of what is interesting to me about journalism online and content curation, is the intersection of the editorial and the curatorial. I think often that’s what makes the difference and sets certain voices apart. For me, I have the purely curatorial presence on Twitter, but there’s also the editorial part which a lot of Brain Pickings is, but also other places that I write that cover different fringes of culture—Wired UK, Design Observer, Nieman Lab. I think this cross-pollination pulls people in. Opinion is one platform of expression, but opinion channeled through curation is another. The intersection of the two has more traction, in a way, than simply coining.

MJ: Do you get tired? How do you push yourself to sustain your routine on a bad day?

MP: Hah!Beats me! I just do it. That’s how I am. I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they’re able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention—that’s stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus—you don’t get to ruminate. In a way, it’s a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It’s my comfort food.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misquoted Popova as saying capsule instead of castle.

Below, check out 10 sample tweets from @brainpicker:

MOTHER JONES NEEDS YOUR HELP

Straight to the point: Donations have been concerningly slow for our hugely important First $500,000 fundraising campaign. We urgently need your help, and a lot of help, over the next few weeks so we can pay for the one-of-a-kind journalism you get from us.

Learn more in “Less Dreading, More Doing,” where we lay out this wild moment and how we can keep charging hard for you. And please help if you can: $5, $50, or $500—every gift from every person truly matters right now. Donate

 This article is more than 11 years old

Interview

Maria Popova: why we need an antidote to the culture of Google

This article is more than 11 years old

Kathy Sweeney

The ‘curator of interestingness’ on why she won’t give advertisers access to her 1.2 million online readers

Sun 30 Dec 2012 00.04 GMTShare28

You describe yourself as a “curator of interestingness” and run a website from New York called Brain Pickings, which covers all things curious and inspiring – books, art, science, photographs etc. What’s the common denominator for publishing something?

If something interests me and is both timeless and timely, I write about it. Much of what is published online is content designed to be dead within hours, so I find most of my material offline. I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message. We really need an antidote to this culture of “if it’s not Google-able, it doesn’t exist”. There’s a wealth of knowledge and inspiration offline, ideas still very relevant and interesting.

With 1.2 million readers a month and 3m page views, your site would be a good place to advertise, but, instead, you ask readers for voluntary contributions. What have you got against advertising?

https://b3d80fc1a58e79a79363af6a26dc8334.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html

There’s a really beautiful letter that a newspaper journalist named Bruce Bliven wrote in 1923 to his editor. It was about how the circulation manager had taken over the newspaper, deciding what went on the front page. Today, search engine optimisation is the “circulation management” of the internet. It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.

Why do people pay for what they can get for free?

Part of it is that people form an emotional relationship with the site and have a sense of belonging and take pride in being able to support something they enjoy. It’s the same reason people have been donating to public libraries for centuries. But the question of altruism is probably the oldest debate in the history of philosophy – whether we do something because it makes us feel good, or because we want to genuinely and selflessly contribute to something. I think it’s always a combination of the two.

Contribution-based podcasts and websites are becoming more common. Any ideas for how to increase donations?

I’ve not been very strategic about it: I come from eastern Europe, where we don’t really talk about money. I have an enormous aversion to asking for it; the whole notion of making a living based on other people’s contributions is still very uncomfortable for me. A friend of mine suggested recently that I should highlight more the recurring subscriptions I have; I started doing that two months ago, and the results have been heartening. I also have an email newsletter, which has grown a lot. The newsletter subscribers are by far the most generous donors – perhaps something to do with email being such an intimate means of engagement.

As someone making their living online, what changes do you see ahead for people like you?

It’s always hard to separate predictions from hopefulness. I’m hopeful that the model of micro-patronage will grow, and will help more people who are passionate about some subject to deliver it to an audience without having to be reliant on advertisers. Even today, for instance, Radiolab [a podcast produced by WNYC, a public radio station in New York City] is supported by audience contribution, and Longreads, which curates the best free long-form reading online, has paid memberships. In that case, the value people find is in the packaging of free content at the intersection of the editorial and the curatorial – that is the offering people are increasingly willing to pay for, and I’m hoping to see more of that.

What does your business model tell industries that have been hit hard by the internet – the music industry, for example, or newspapers?

The model of most media today is a replica of the golden age of newspapers – selling ad pages – which cannot transfer on to the internet without making any accommodation for the profound difference of that medium as a tool of engagement. It would be naive to say the fix is simply to replace the commercial motive with some sort of social-good motive, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. Still, many things need to change about how we fund media today before we can have a more organic convergence of the two – of something being both an industry and serving the public good, or the audience’s best interest.

The UN failed in their bid to have the internet regulated this month. Is their failure welcome?

I don’t believe complete anarchy is the solution to anything, but what troubles me about regulating the web – or, for that matter, regulating other aspects of society, like immigration – is the assumption that, if there were no rules, a greater number of people would perpetrate evil than would do good. That is a tragic assumption by which to govern humanity.

What are the best and worst things the internet has brought out in us?

I worry about the temporal bias of the web – everything online is based around vertical chronology. The latest stuff floats at the top, and the older stuff sinks towards the bottom. It suggests that just because something is more recent, it’s more relevant; yet, in culture, the best ideas are timeless, they have no expiration date. This makes the internet a tricky medium for organising information and prioritising knowledge. The best thing is the obvious thing – the remarkable access to nearly infinite information. It is my hope that, as we find better ways to transmute that information into knowledge and wisdom, we’ll be better able to ameliorate the former with the latter.

What magazines and websites do you read?

I used to read magazines more, but now I get the equivalent of that content online, including on the sites of traditional magazines and newspapers. But I spend the greatest deal of time reading books, often old, out-of-print ones. I do like Longreads, and I listen to podcasts a lot. Design Matters by Debbie Millman, and Radiolab for science, and Philosophy Bites by Nigel Warburton. I have lost faith in magazines, though. Part of it is that they’re struggling and have to sell ad pages, and the content suffers because of that.

What were you like as a child? Were you one of those precocious kids who could beat their parents at chess at the age of 4?

I always went to very competitive schools, and I was an incredible perfectionist. I remember in the fourth grade, I got an A- in history, and I went up to the teacher and asked how I could make a correction to get it up to an A. I’m still mortified! Over the years I’ve learned to mediate that senseless perfectionism.

https://b3d80fc1a58e79a79363af6a26dc8334.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html

Describe a typical day.

I get up, schedule some of my tweets and head to the gym, where I do a lot of my longform reading, on the elliptical machine. It helps me concentrate. For a long time I thought I was eccentric, but then I came across this 1942 book called An Anatomy Of Inspiration by Rosamund Harding. She goes through the diaries of famous writers, scientists and musicians, and looks at how good ideas come to them. A lot of them describe this connection between motion and creativity.

So you do believe mental and physical exercise are related?

I do. Not in the obvious sense of fit mind equals a fit body. I’m less able to sit still and read because my mind goes elsewhere, but, as soon as my body is occupied – and I work out pretty intensely – when I’m really on the brink of my physical endurance, I find my mind can’t get away from itself so much, and I’m better able to focus on the reading.

You spend 450 hours a month keeping your website alive: that’s a 15-hour day. How do you relax? What do you do for kicks?

People always talk about work/life balance, but I find that a tragic concept. I have no separation between work and my life. I don’t see what I do as work. There’s no greater joy than, as Richard Feynman put it, the pleasure of finding things out.

17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

BY MARIA POPOVA

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.) 

Seven years into this labor of love, which had by then become my life and livelihood, I decided to set down some of the most important things I learned about living in the course of writing this personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning. Every year in the decade since, I have added one new learning and changed none of the previous. (It can only be so — a person is less like a star, whose very chemistry, the source of its light, changes profoundly over its life-cycle, and more like a planet, like this planet, whose landscape changes over the ages but is always shaped by the geologic strata layered beneath, encoding everything the planet has been since its birth.)

Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Here, layered in chronological order, are the seventeen learnings upon this seventeenth birthday:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.”We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion. 

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass. 

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”: 

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)