The writer behind the legendary blog “The Marginalian”
May 13, 2026
vMaria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she’s published more than six million words.
All the nights I’ve spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She’s introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it.
00:00:37 Why writers should visit archives
00:04:39 What diaries reveal
00:09:41 Letters vs diaries
00:11:35 Presence over productivity
00:17:18 Why change the blog’s name
00:18:30 How language shapes thought
00:19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry
00:36:46 Why college failed her
00:39:58 Reading to survive
00:41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick
00:43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes
00:47:32 Why AI can never make art
00:53:10 Stop calling it content
David (00:37-00:48)
Before we began, you remarked, “Less time on LinkedIn, more time in archives.” I’m curious to hear what you love about archives.
Maria (00:49-02:19)
There are so many kinds of archives. First, I love the radical reminder that the internet is not all there is. The internet is a surface level of the ocean, a common record of human thought, wisdom, and knowledge. We often believe that if something cannot be found on the internet, it doesn’t exist.
It’s insane to think this, because so much has been thought, felt, written, created, and drawn that still dwells in university basements and libraries. This content has shaped our present more profoundly than the forty-year depth of the internet. Despite some exceptions for public domain materials, so much remains offline.
Consider just one small example, which can be multiplied millions of times across countless institutions worldwide: the 92nd Street Y in New York. It’s one of the most revered literary institutions. They were the first to host many significant events, including Pablo Neruda’s first U.S. appearance and Susan Sontag’s first major lecture. This material exists on reels in their basement, not digitized. Nobody knows it’s there unless they visit and spend time with it. These are real events in the history of the world and the creative universe, yet they are erased from the simulacrum of memory that is the internet.
David (02:20-02:37)
I’ve spent no time in archives, so I’m curious: what should I do if I want to explore them? Should I call the 92nd Street Y, research the best archives in New York City, or visit the New York Public Library? What’s the best approach?
Maria (02:38-04:38)
I don’t simply go to explore; I usually visit archives for research. Many of the things I write are extremely research-heavy. I don’t settle for a surface-level Wikipedia page; I want primary source materials.
For example, I recently published a book that took seven years to complete. For each person featured in it, I devoured all of their existing writings, both public and private. This meant going to the Library of Congress for Walt Whitman’s notebooks and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for Mary Shelley’s journals.
It’s extremely difficult to accurately represent the reality of a person across time and different eras. It’s challenging enough to speak for someone else, but when there’s a 200-year gap, it becomes a significant responsibility to do so honorably and accurately. If you only rely on digitally preserved materials, you will undoubtedly misrepresent a life. This is not a minor point. Much of my time in archives is dedicated to better understanding the people I’m trying to write about.
Regarding your practical question about approaching institutions, there’s a huge range in how they handle their archives. Some truly want them explored. For instance, the New York Public Library had an amazing initiative. I’m unsure if they still do, but until a few years ago, they ran an “After Hours” program. Approximately once a month, different archivists would display items from the archive that are not usually in public view in a small gallery. Visitors could then interact with rare items, such as their Copernicus book – one of only four existing copies of Copernicus’s work on the heliocentric universe – or Lewis Carroll’s diaries. The archivists would be present to discuss these items. More institutions should adopt such programs.
David (04:39-04:45)
You mentioned Lewis Carroll’s diaries. What has made you love reading diaries, and what prompted you to start writing one every day?
Maria (04:47-06:11)
I used to write a nightly journal until several years ago. Recently, I spent several months in very remote nature. When I arrived, I realized I needed a daily practice. I am very regulated by having a consistent daily routine. Besides writing, I do many other things, such as ceramics and woodworking, and I always incorporate a daily activity.
While there, I had a strange thought: the literary form I’ve always most enjoyed is diaries, specifically the kind that starts with observation and ends with contemplation – more like Thoreau than Anais Nin. This was the one form I had never written. I’ve kept introspective personal journals, but never ones that began with observing the external world.
As a practice, I maintained such a daily ritual during my four months in Patagonia. It was incredibly rewarding because it fosters a direct conversation between the mind and the world. You take something external, give it meaning and interpretation, transforming a unit of objective reality into a unit of meaning. To me, that’s a beautiful thing.
David (06:12-06:29)
You’re also writing it just for yourself, which, coincidentally, is what I love about reading other people’s diaries: their sincerity. They’re so authentic because, almost by definition, the performative mask comes off. It’s the one place where it doesn’t exist.
Maria (06:29-07:22)
There’s so much to say about that. Many diarists wrote knowing they would publish their work. Anais Nin, for instance, was probably the most professional diarist in literary history. She published 14 volumes of her diaries, aware of their eventual public consumption.
Furthermore, published diaries are often edited, sometimes by the author if they are still living (though rarely), but usually by their heirs or estate. This means we encounter many layers of filtering before we reach the actual lived experience.
Historical diaries, those more than 200 years old, tend to be more reliable as they typically originate from actual notebooks. People at the time were not engaging in the exhibitionist publication style common in the 20th and 21st centuries, the age of memoir. That simply wasn’t a concept.
David (07:22-07:25)
How would you distinguish between diaries and memoir?
Maria (07:26-08:00)
Memoir is just the Instagram version of the diary. It’s interesting that in the past, up until the end of the 19th century, the term “memoir” meant someone else writing to commemorate a person who had died.
For example, when Margaret Fuller died, Emerson wrote Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, and other people contributed to it. It was a collection of others remembering the person, as opposed to the person self-reporting their life. Then the definition changed.
David (08:01-08:02)
How is that different from a biography?
Maria (08:03-08:22)
Because it’s not a birth-to-death narrative. They are impressions. It includes recounts of meeting them at a dinner party or what it was like to go to school with them.
It’s a composite biography, but not a linear and complete telling of a life history.
David (08:22-08:26)
What diaries have really touched your heart?
Maria (08:31-09:39)
I love Walden, and I love Thoreau’s notebooks, not just Walden. I spent about seven years immersed in Mary Shelley’s world. Her journals and diaries are extraordinary.
In my 20 years of reading, I’ve encountered no one who endured more loss than Mary Shelley. By the end of her twenties, her mother had died from complications giving birth to her. She then lost her only sibling, the love of her life, and three of her own children. Imagine enduring all of that by your late twenties.
What makes a diary so wonderful to me is that it’s a record of how someone pays attention. Her extraordinary discipline of paying attention to beauty wonderfully saved her from such profound grief and loss. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.
David (09:41-09:43)
Diaries versus letters.
Maria (09:44-09:56)
In some ways, they are exactly the same; in other ways, completely different. What’s the difference between a conversation with me and a conversation with yourself in the shower?
David (09:57-09:58)
A lot.
Maria (09:58-10:26)
Well, there you go. But there will be recursive parts that are simply who you are, which come out in both places. You cannot not be yourself, and that self emerges in both diaries and letters.
Depending on the person, some letters can be very performative, where a persona speaks, not the true self. Other letters can be very open-hearted, revealing the same authentic self found in their journal.
David (10:28-10:55)
What strikes me about both diaries and letters is that they’re less polished and refined than other forms of writing. Often, an honesty emerges that is truly enjoyable to read.
This is ironic because when I write for publication, I meticulously focus on polish and refinement, believing that’s what the world needs. Yet, as a consumer, I often crave exactly the opposite.
Maria (10:55-11:34)
I’m drawn to letters that are more consistent with the person’s formal writing. For example, Virginia Woolf’s letters are not unpolished. She thought so deeply about every phrase and every comma, and it feels very much like her.
Perhaps that’s just how her mind worked; maybe it wasn’t polishing as much as she simply thought in complete, extraordinary sentences. Even in her inner monologue or in the shower, I imagine. I love letters that are both intimate, because they’re a conversation with another human being, and beautifully crafted.
David (11:35-11:45)
In all your reading, are there writers whose practices or approach to the craft have made you think, “Wow, I really like the way they do this”?
Maria (11:45-12:25)
It’s so interesting. I’ve been asked many times about routines, but I’m not terribly interested in that. I can’t think of anyone whose methods struck me as particularly cool.
There’s anecdotal stuff people enjoy, like Sitwell writing in a coffin, but I don’t necessarily think there’s a great correlation between how you write and what you write. I believe everyone needs to find how their mind works best and give it the space, time, shape, form, and practice to do its work. The mechanics are not that interesting to me.
David (12:25-12:34)
I like that in your year-end review, one of the points was “presence over routine.”
Maria (12:34-12:36)
It wasn’t, though; it was “presence over productivity.”
David (12:36-12:42)
It was presence over productivity. That’s exactly what it was, and I thought that was a beautiful way to frame it.
Maria (12:42-13:06)
I do have many routines in my life that are routines of presence. I spend a lot of time in nature and walk four hours a day. I like rhythm; I like regularity, and it regulates me.
But these are not in the service of producing. Of course, much comes out of it. I always say I’ve written almost everything on foot, and then what I do at the keyboard is transcription.
David (13:06-13:08)
What do you do on your walks?
Maria (13:08-13:31)
Sometimes I try not to think. This allows things to flow in, doing the silent work of incubation and the combinatorial play that the mind performs without our direct participation — Einstein’s term for it. I started writing to figure out how to live, and I still do it for the same reason 20 years later.
David (13:32-13:56)
Your writing embodies what we’ve lost about the internet. I remember when I would visit “Brain Pickings,” as you called it then, I would follow the hyperlinks, and it was like a world of wonder where I could slip, slide, and even “slap-dash” between topics. You introduced me to so many new worlds.
Maria (13:57-15:18)
It’s just how the mind works, isn’t it? It’s an association machine, and these hyperlinks are how we think. In this conversation, we’re jumping from one thing to another. It’s essentially a hyperlink to another field of ideas, another notion, another concept.
It’s interesting how the internet has failed where encyclopedias succeeded: in discovery, not search. You can only search for what you know you’re looking for. Discovery, however, is that place of self-surprise where you find your own blind spots and delight in them.
I grew up with my grandmother’s library, which contained many encyclopedias. I would pull one out because I wanted to learn about Burundi. I’d open it, and next to that entry, there might be a beetle I’d never heard of. I wouldn’t have known to search for it because I didn’t know it existed, but it would be right there.
The internet is interesting; AI is trying to compensate for this, but still in a predictive way, because algorithms can only ever be predictive. The most exciting things about life, about growth, about intellectual discovery, are the unpredictable parts of us.
David (15:18-15:25)
How much do you aim to insert yourself into your work, versus offering an objective view?
Maria (15:26-15:52)
An objective view of anything does not exist. I write to understand my own life. So, even if it reads impersonally, I am still in it. I am the lens.
It’s very moving to me that other people read it, but that’s not why I write. It’s because I’m grappling with something in my life that I don’t have a better way of metabolizing or comprehending.
David (15:52-16:04)
My sense of your writing process, especially in building The Marginalian over many years, was that there was a degree of planning for the editorial calendar—for what you would read.
Maria (16:04-16:07)
Zero. Absolutely none.
Maria (16:08-16:56)
I’ve never planned a thing. I have a huge backlog of topics I want to write about, especially those that are research-intensive or require more time and thought. I keep a log of what I intend to write about, but it’s not an editorial calendar. I dip into it whenever I have more time or feel like revisiting a topic.
It’s interesting because that file is now 20 years old. I can scroll down and see, for example, that in 2016, I wanted to write about Susan Sontag’s list of likes and dislikes. It’s fascinating to see how certain things fade in salience or interest. Sometimes, resurfacing is even more interesting.
David (16:57-16:58)
Resurfacing your own work.
Maria (16:59-17:18)
Resurfacing things that I had abandoned unexplored. These are ideas I wanted to explore but never got to. Coming back to them 10 years later, I have 10 more years of contextual hyperlinks in my mind to bring to them, allowing me to revisit them in a totally different way.
David (17:18-17:42)
You keep mentioning the hyperlink, and I think it’s the fundamental unit that defines the world you’ve created. It allows us to surf between different ideas and, essentially, to play. I always thought of Brain Pickings as a place of play. It was like Brain Pickings and Wikipedia—the places I would go.
Maria (17:42-17:43)
I hate that name.
David (17:43-17:43)
What?
Maria (17:44-17:45)
The whole name, Brain Pickings.
David (17:45-17:46)
Why?
Maria (17:47-18:29)
I was 21. In Bulgaria, we don’t really have puns or that kind of wordplay. I was excited about American wordplay and chose the name. It’s just so silly.
At the time, one of my studies was cognitive psychology, which focuses heavily on the mind. The more I’ve lived, the more anti-Cartesian I’ve become. I no longer believe our experience is entirely mental or cognitive, or that what we ‘pick’ for the brain defines us. Experience is far more embodied, emotional, and integrated than that.
David (18:30-18:40)
Do you feel that words aren’t able to capture that, or do you believe you capture it through metaphor rather than directly?
Maria (18:41-19:28)
The latter. Language, and the limits of words, is something I think about a lot. Language is a vessel for thought that shapes the contents.
Einstein’s great revelation was that spacetime is the fabric of the universe. Within it, the bend of spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Similarly, language is the fabric of the mind, the fabric of culture. Language tells thought how to move, and thought tells language how to bend. It’s a circular, self-limiting process.
David (19:29-19:35)
Do you agree with Wittgenstein’s idea that the limits of our language are the limits of our world?
Maria (19:35-19:44)
I think the limits of our language are the limits of our description of the world. The great danger is mistaking the description for the reality it describes.
David (19:45-19:47)
The map is not the territory.
Maria (19:47-19:48)
Exactly.
David (19:48-20:19)
Poetry. I’d like to read you a line you wrote: “Unlike the prose of letters pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry, the imagination is allowed to travel between fact and fantasy, to traverse present, past and future, so that the reader, and perhaps even the writer, is never quite sure, nor need ever ask to what extent the images evoked correspond to the intersection of matter and moment we call reality.”
Maria (20:20-22:20)
I don’t remember writing this, but it’s very much what I believe. This goes back to our conversation about language. Clearly, these are things I feel inside. At some point in my life, I gave it that particular form, which I cannot even recall now. Why did I choose those particular words? If I had to express that feeling, thought, or concept today, I would frame it differently, but the substance would remain the same.
I am fascinated by that. Poetry. I am a latecomer to poetry. For many years, I dismissed it the way we dismiss things we aren’t literate in. I have no education in poetry.
Then I met this wonderful person, Emily Levine, a comedian, philosopher of science, and great lover of poetry. We met across the aisle on a transatlantic flight coming back from Europe. Much to the discontent of the entire cabin, we talked the whole way.
She was in her seventies, I was in my twenties, and it became apparent that I didn’t much care for poetry. She loved it. It shaped the way she thought. She had an associative mind, leaping from Hannah Arendt to stoicism, and so on.
One day, she visited me here in New York. We went to a packed Sunday afternoon cafe in Chelsea. We somehow got a table, and she said something that made me roll my eyes about poetry once again. At that point, Emily gripped the edge of the table, rose to her full height of 4’4”, and began reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” starting with the line, “Do I dare to disturb the universe?” She performed with incredible depth; she had studied at the Harvard Theater School.
David (22:20-22:21)
It was a full-on soliloquy.
Maria (22:21-23:43)
She sat down, and I looked around. People had put down their drinks and were applauding. This never happens in New York, especially in a packed cafe. My universe was disturbed. I realized there was something here.
She decided to educate me, sending me a poem every day, one she loved, with a few lines explaining why. Then she suddenly became very ill. In her final months, I started taking her on what we called “poetry retreats.” We would rent a cabin in Northern California, near where she lived, and go with one or two other friends for a weekend to read poetry and talk about the universe.
As a consequence of my relationship with her — and talk about integrating new experiences into an existing framework — I started seeing the parallels between poetry and science, as well as their complementarity in understanding reality and bridging truth and meaning. Because of her, I ended up doing a show for seven years called “The Universe and Verse,” where I brought poetry and science together. Thousands of people would come to listen about the discovery of dark matter while Patti Smith read a poem about it.
David (23:43-23:46)
Tell me more about how you saw the connection between the two.
Maria (23:46-24:10)
Science enables us to meet reality on its own terms. The discipline of science is about meeting reality on its own terms. Poetry helps us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. Between the two — truth and meaning — lies the sum of human experience.
David (24:12-24:53)
As you were saying that, I was thinking about light. The scientific concept of light, in terms of light waves and physics, is so different from how I perceive the spiritual concept of light – as goodness, beauty, or righteousness.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how, in the modern world, we’ve gained a scientific understanding of how things work, but often lost our grasp of their meaning and the wonder within them.
Maria (24:53-25:23)
I don’t think wonder is an antipode to scientific understanding. I believe a greater understanding of how starlight travels, the electromagnetic spectrum, and optics makes the rainbow even more wondrous.
I do not agree with Keats, who accused Newton of “unweaving the rainbow” with his science. I think science deepens, brightens, and magnifies our appreciation of the phenomena around us by adding another layer of understanding.
David (25:24-25:31)
So, with a bird, understanding the aerodynamics of flight gives you a pure sense of it.
Maria (25:31-26:07)
It doesn’t diminish the magic. For me, it makes it all the more astonishing that an anatomical design can prevail over gravity in such a magical way.
However, science will never tell you the meaning of a bird. I also think it’s dangerous to search for a bird’s meaning. There is no “meaning” of a bird. There is only an encounter between us and what is not ourselves—this practice of unselfing. The moment we try to find meaning in something that is not ourselves, that also presents a danger.
David (26:08-26:08)
Unselfing.
Maria (26:09-27:13)
Unselfing. I love that notion. Iris Murdoch, an extraordinary novelist and philosopher, is probably one of my three favorite philosophers, but also a beautiful novelist. She used the word “unselfing” almost as an aside.
She has a book called Existentialists and Mystics that I think you would appreciate, given what you just said about light. She talks about how encounters with art and the natural world are occasions for unselfing.
I read this maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and it has never left me because it immediately resonated as true. When I spend time in Patagonia or in the woods where I live, it is absolutely the work of unselfing. I absorb external reality in a way that changes my internal reality, allowing me to then give it shape in my writing as something beyond just myself.
David (27:13-27:47)
I don’t know if this is what you meant by unselfing, but as you used that word, I thought about how, when you’re in a state of full awe and wonder, there’s a sense of clarity.
I think what happens with awe is that the self is so reduced, so minimized—basically evaporated, if only for a snap of a finger—that for once, you can see the thing clearly. That’s largely what awe is: the purity of perception, because the self isn’t in the way.
Maria (27:48-27:58)
Perception, but also connection—this belonging to something larger than yourself, that it’s all one thing. You’re suddenly transported to this oneness.
David (27:59-28:01)
Do you feel that a lot when you read?
Maria (28:02-28:35)
When I read, no. I feel that a lot in the natural world. I feel very much like I’m just a creature among creatures. I become so much less interested in the stories we call “self.” A self is a story.
Most of our suffering as human beings is a problem of “selfing”—this spiral that burrows inward and inward and inward to the exclusion of the outside world.
David (28:35-28:42)
Do you feel that in writing? People talk about flow, but there might be another word that you feel sometimes.
Maria (28:42-28:54)
Yes, when I disappear into these enormous rabbit holes—spending five days learning about the eye of the scallop, which is amazing, by the way.
David (28:54-28:55)
The eye of a scallop.
Maria (28:55-29:00)
It’s not one eye; the scallop has many eyes, and they’re extraordinary.
David (29:01-29:02)
Like the scallop that we eat?
Maria (29:02-29:37)
Unfortunately, yes. Good luck eating them again, knowing about the eye. It has extraordinary hexagonal crystals that are not known anywhere else in nature. They look like the mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope.
They’re so beautiful; they look like tiny, bright cobalt blue blueberries along the rim of the scallop’s mantle. Wow. I know. I did eat them, but now I can’t. In my past life, I have eaten the James Webb Space Telescope.
David (29:37-29:41)
Can you take me back? What was the woman’s name you met on the airplane?
Maria (29:41-29:42)
Emily Levine.
David (29:42-29:53)
Emily. Can you take me back to what she showed you about poetry that you hadn’t seen before? In what way did she open your eyes?
Maria (29:53-30:30)
That’s a beautiful question. She showed me that poetry opens these back doors of consciousness, giving us access to our own experience, particularly to regions we can’t quite name or comprehend with the analytical mind.
It opens a back door where we can be present in these experiences and, as you say, metabolize them in a different, non-analytical way. It gives shape, voice, and a foothold on our own experience.
David (30:32-30:40)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between looking and seeing. I think much of what poetry does is take us from a place of looking to a place of seeing.
Maria (30:40-30:43)
Oh, yes, absolutely.
David (30:43-31:00)
In doing that, sometimes it will actually open up portals of sight that we didn’t know we had. That’s a big statement, so let me be super concrete.
William Blake has that line: “To see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand.”
Maria (31:00-31:25)
He was a complete shepherd of attention. My favorite line of his comes from a letter to one of his patrons, where he says, “A tree that moves some to tears is to others a green thing that stands in the way as a man is.” He sees. Exactly.
David (31:26-31:33)
Wow. You talk a lot about William Blake. What is it you love about him?
Maria (31:33-32:01)
He was a radical, an absolute radical. He was an entrepreneur and a person who really didn’t care about expectation or convention. He cared about truth as he felt and saw it, giving it shape and voice. It didn’t matter to him that people thought he was a lunatic because he lived in truth.
David (32:03-32:04)
He could paint, too.
Maria (32:04-32:05)
Wasn’t bad.
David (32:07-32:34)
I had this experience at the Brooklyn Museum a few months ago. There was a Monet in Venice exhibit. I’ve always liked Ruskin’s writing; it’s wonderfully visual and vivid. However, I didn’t know how detailed his sketches were.
That kind of bilingual writer-painter is something I see a lot in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Maria (32:34-36:46)
It wasn’t just writers and painters, though. Ruskin wrote beautifully about drawing as a way of seeing. Many scientists also used this approach.
Galileo, for instance, dismantled our past conception of the universe because he had been trained in perspective drawing. When the first telescopes emerged in the 1610s, an Englishman named Thomas—I forget his last name—also drew the moon. He looked through a telescope and mapped it, but he lacked training in perspective. This technique originated in the Arab world, moved to Italy, but had not yet reached England.
Consequently, he drew a two-dimensional, black-and-white sketch that resembled Swiss cheese. That was his moon. Galileo, however, drew that famous image of the moon’s phases, employing perspective and shading. This was profound because the moon suddenly transformed from an ethereal body of immaterial magic out there by the gods to something rugged and material, just like Earth.
This observation was anti-dogma in every way. The moon was not in the heavens, but made of the same matter as the ground we walk on. You could perceive its craters, its dimension, its ruggedness, and its materiality as a celestial body only because Galileo was trained in this particular artistic style.
This is an extreme example of how art caused cultural change. On a day-to-day basis, many botanists, naturalists, ornithologists, and astronomers illustrated their own work up to the end of the 19th century. There wasn’t the specialization and fragmentation of our way of seeing that exists today. Our methods of looking and seeing have become so specialized that we no longer perceive the full picture. We are trained to focus solely on optics, mechanics, aesthetics, or whatever our specific specialty dictates.
Furthermore, the language of science used to be the same as the language of poetry. A few months before my 40th birthday, I decided, as part of my need for a daily practice, to start working with 19th-century ornithological books. Every night, I would look at an image, pick a drawing of a bird from these digitized books, and read its ornithological description.
After sleeping, I would wake up in the morning, and certain words would bubble up. I would then create little poems and cones over the artwork. The delight in this was immense. Audubon and the Goulds, these great 19th-century ornithologists, used such touching language. They would describe birds with words like “bewildering” or “evil.”
I created a hundred of these, which became a deck of cards I called “An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.” This project arose purely from the joy of reconnecting with that earlier era, where people perceived the world more completely. Poets attended scientific lectures, and many scientists read and wrote poetry in their journals. It was a much more integrated experience. There wasn’t this disciplinary boundary forcing a choice between one way of seeing and another, because the world was considered much more unitary.
David (36:46-37:02)
It’s quite striking. When you consider what it means to go to college now, you essentially have to make a fundamental choice. There’s a fork in the road: you either pursue something that makes money but won’t feed your soul, or something that feeds your soul but won’t make money.
Maria (37:03-38:25)
Regardless of the path you choose, you still have to declare a major and specialize. I started my project, which was then called Brain Pickings, when I was in college because I felt so betrayed by the promise of a liberal arts education.
I grew up and attended high school in Bulgaria. I came to the U.S. with great difficulty, let me assure you, drawn by the promise of liberal arts. I believed it would teach me how to live and how to be a person in the world. Instead, I was forced into a factory-model education with 400-person lecture halls and standardized testing. I was being taught how to take tests, not how to live.
I felt trapped with no way back. I worked four jobs to pay for this deeply disappointing experience. I began to keep a record of my attempts to find meaning. I went to the library at night, explored the early 2000s internet, and walked the streets of Philadelphia, wandering into bookstores. I did whatever I could to find some foothold on how to live. I kept a personal record of these discoveries, which became the beginning of my site.
David (38:26-38:38)
If I were to bestow upon you a grand sum of money and a building in New York City for your own liberal arts education, how would you structure it?
Maria (38:39-39:56)
I wouldn’t structure it as a factory model education at all. I believe people need to be in the world, to live, read, exist, connect with each other, and engage with reality. They should constantly test their hypotheses against reality, with guidance from past eras and the lives of those who managed to live somewhat full, honorable lives.
There’s a wonderful Life magazine interview with James Baldwin from May 1963. In it, he says, “You think your pain and suffering are alone in the history of the world. And then you read…” That quote truly resonates. I started reading for that very reason.
I was having a really difficult time in my twenties, on so many levels, and I needed that assurance. Some of the first things I truly devoured were diaries and biographies—many biographies of people I’d never heard of. I would learn a little about them, find them interesting, and then seek out their biographies. It comforted me immensely to read about how they suffered.
David (39:58-40:25)
You used the word “devoured,” and I think that’s such a good word. When you said it, the image that came to mind was hiking in the desert, intensely thirsty, and finally getting water. You drink and gulp, realizing how incredibly good water can taste.
There have been times in my life, whether suffering through something or facing a problem, when you find the right book or the right person for that moment, and you just devour their writing.
Maria (40:25-40:33)
It’s so true, isn’t it? Reading, in the right moment, becomes a relationship between you, the author, and time.
David (40:33-40:35)
Absolutely.
Maria (40:35-41:01)
I’ve looked back on things I wrote passionately about 10 or 15 years ago and now feel indifferent towards them. Conversely, I revisit other things and feel them even more deeply, gaining a new layer of understanding from my present experience. There are certain books I reread often that always give me something new.
David (41:01-41:03)
It speaks to the fluidity of self.
Maria (41:03-41:06)
Absolutely, absolutely.
David (41:06-41:27)
With seasons, years, emotions, hormones—that, more than anything, is the best proof I have for how fluid the self can be. You can be drawn to things you’ve written and worked so hard on in the past, or you can be almost repulsed by them.
Maria (41:28-41:37)
If you’re not a little embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, perhaps the process of growth isn’t quite working.
David (41:41-41:44)
Describe the process of epiphany for me. Is it a sudden…
Maria (41:44-41:45)
I don’t believe in epiphany.
David (41:45-41:46)
Really?
Maria (41:46-41:46)
No.
David (41:46-41:47)
How come?
Maria (41:47-42:15)
I believe in incremental revelation. I have experienced epiphanies; it’s not that they don’t exist, but they don’t stick for me. An epiphany might be a glimpse that excites me for a moment, but it needs to integrate with everything else that predates it to truly stick. Epiphanies are often just shiny little distractions that don’t truly change much for me.
David (42:15-42:17)
They don’t change much? Do you mean they don’t…
Maria (42:17-43:03)
They don’t change much afterwards. They don’t significantly alter your process, life, or mind. They are like a curtain parting to reveal a bright light. But when the light dies down, you see the world as you knew it before.
My most profound transformations—intellectually, creatively, and personally—have only been incremental. For me, it’s never a metamorphosis; it’s always a transformation.
Have you had epiphanies that profoundly changed your subsequent way of doing or thinking about something?
David (43:03-43:09)
I’m trying to think of an example, but the answer is definitely yes.
Maria (43:10-43:56)
My struggle with epiphany is that I’ve often had the experience of suddenly or incrementally seeing a pattern in myself—a revelation where I think, “Oh my God, I do this!” But the gap between recognizing that pattern and changing it, or doing something about it, is wide, slow, and deep. So much effort goes into it.
The revelation itself doesn’t have the effect of an existential epiphany that changes your life or perspective overnight. That’s what I mean about epiphany: I don’t think it happens overnight. You can have the insight, but transformation requires work.
David (43:57-44:18)
I want to go through some quotes I really like, including some you’ve shared, and get your reactions to them. First, an Oscar Wilde quote: “A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public, and the public’s art to him is non-existent.”
Maria (44:20-45:28)
I’m having a very cynical reaction to it right now. I wrote about this in 2012, or even earlier—it was a long time ago. In an ideal world, every artist would like to think they’re creating out of sheer creative vitality, being a channel for a greater force.
Oscar Wilde was a dandy; he dressed up, he performed. His quotes were quotable; his thoughts were aphorisms. The moment you make an aphorism, it’s already for an audience. You don’t make aphorisms for yourself in the shower. I think it’s okay for us to live with ambivalence between our aspirational and actual selves.
Perhaps with the exception of William Blake, no artist is impervious to reception and audience. However, a truly creative person can hold that lightly and still create authentically.
David (45:28-45:32)
Despite that awareness? Despite creating for others?
Maria (45:32-45:47)
Knowing someone else will experience it, knowing the work will be approved or disapproved, lauded or criticized, that there will be a feedback loop. You can be aware of that, but not let it change what and how you make it.
David (45:47-45:57)
Tchaikovsky said, “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”
Maria (45:57-46:41)
Yes, it is. This is from a letter to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck. He was being too slow with a concerto.
He’s almost writing to himself, defending his delay by acknowledging, “I don’t have the right to say the muse isn’t with me and therefore I’m not delivering. I have to just show up for the work.” He’s assuring her he has a strong work ethic, isn’t waiting for inspiration, and is actively working on it. I believe that the whole idea of inspiration is similar.
Of course, there are times when you’re more creatively vibrant and times when you’re not. But simply showing up has its own effect of opening the portal.
David (46:42-46:56)
You realize over time that the fundamental difference in both the quality and quantity of your output comes down to showing up. But on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t feel that way at all.
Maria (46:58-47:31)
In any creative practice, you have to be okay with your own mediocrity or inconsistency. Not everything you create each day will be great.
But the fact that you’re making something counts for your sanity, self-respect, and growth as a writer, a woodworker, or whatever you are. That’s how you become better: by doing more and accepting that not all of it will be great.
David (47:32-47:44)
As you look at the world right now, with the rise of AI and its integration into writing, in what ways does that excite you, and in what ways do you feel averse to it?
Maria (47:45-49:04)
I have no real contact with or experience with AI, so I’m probably not the right person to ask about it. I will say I was horrified when somebody wrote to me about those bird divination cards and said, “I need to know if AI was involved in this.” The moment she asked, I could see how it works.
You could give Audubon’s ornithological writings to AI and instruct it to create a poem in my style, and it would generate something. Nobody but me would truly know, because the artist alone has access to the feeling from which something is created.
AI will never possess genuine feeling; it will only have a simulacrum of it. AI will never write the great American or French poem because it hasn’t suffered. It lacks the capacity to suffer.
Even if you attempt to make it suffer by writing a command to execute failure, it will already be succeeding at executing that failure. It will never understand what it means to collide with its own impossibility. AI can only ever succeed. Without suffering, what true art can exist?
David (49:05-49:07)
That is the essence of art.
Maria (49:07-50:13)
I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. However, I believe that from our suffering comes the restlessness to find meaning, beauty, and wonder; to give voice and shape to feelings that can be so isolating.
It goes back to the question: Why do we read? We read to be moved and to be changed. Intellectual change comes with information, which AI can provide. AI can tell me about the Eye of the Scallop without me spending days poring over scientific journals and papers; it can give me a sufficient overview.
But if I hadn’t spent those days, I wouldn’t have written about it with feeling. For me, all writing that is truly moving is born of feeling and time. AI has neither; it’s an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure information.
David (50:14-50:15)
There’s no soul.
Maria (50:17-50:18)
How do you define soul?
David (50:20-50:25)
It is the anima, the fundamental unit of life.
Maria (50:27-50:28)
And what is it made of?
David (50:29-50:56)
It’s something beyond material that I can’t explain, but I believe it’s the core essence of life. If you keep reducing, the soul is the fundamental thing alive inside a human being.
Above the soul is the spirit. If the soul dies, the spirit dies. But I think you can be dispirited and still have an alive soul.
Maria (50:56-51:28)
I am very ambivalent about the soul because I believe in the laws of physics and that reality is knowable. But I also think the function of what we call the soul is real, whatever its composition.
My concern is that today most people live on the level of the self, not the soul. The self is merely the costume of personality over the soul, and I don’t find that terribly interesting.
David (51:29-51:32)
The costume of personality. That’s a good turn of phrase.
Maria (51:32-52:03)
It’s the performance of personhood, not the essence of personhood — that’s the self.
Today, most people lead with identities and opinions. I find these to be the least interesting, least true parts of people, because they are the most mutable and the least anchored in what you call the soul. Yet our culture is entirely focused on that.
David (52:03-52:17)
Interesting. You are ambivalent, a word I love, meaning to be strong on both sides. You started by saying you’re skeptical of the soul, but then ended by saying it’s the core thing.
Maria (52:17-53:08)
I’m skeptical that it’s immaterial. I fundamentally believe the universe is knowable. I’m not one of those people who believes there will always be mystery beyond the reach of knowability.
The history of our species shows a pattern of mistaking the limits of the known for the limits of the knowable. Over and over, discoveries have surprised us, and the region of the known has continuously expanded. I do think it’s knowable.
We are very far from discovering what that truly real thing is that we live with and perceive as true. But I think it’s a cop-out to say we will never know what it’s made of, that it’s just mystical stuff. We just haven’t gotten there yet.
David (53:10-53:26)
I have one more quote, from Susan Sontag. She wrote: “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”
Maria (53:27-54:11)
I love that because she wrote it long before we started using that horrific word, “content,” to describe cultural material today. This was long before the social web and the internet as we know it.
Yet, we have reduced creative work and cultural matter to what we call “content,” which presumes a container. In a way, it’s an accurate description because the container is advertising. Advertising carries the modern internet, and we’re making everything creative subservient to that.
It’s the “content” of the package that is being sold. I hate that; I’m allergic to the word “content.”
David (54:12-54:22)
So the thing that bothers you most about it is that it’s units of information created to drive attention to…
Maria (54:22-55:00)
To the container, to the ads. The “content” is used to sell the container, which is your attention within the advertising space.
Obviously, I’m at an extreme because I’ve never had advertising on my site, a radical choice on the internet for 20 years. Unfortunately, the web’s course has been toward reducing human beings to eyeballs and writing to “content.”
David (55:01-55:03)
Is this part of the reason that you’ve moved towards books?
Maria (55:04-56:32)
I think it’s a vicious cycle. I don’t want to end on a cynical note.
As an old lady who’s been online for 20 years, I believe content is rewarded in specific ways. Clickbait, for instance, works because it sells pages, and they sell pages to sell ads.
This has led to an increasing shallowing of cultural material as the internet has shifted towards clickbait, listicles, and “10 ways to…” content. I find it unsatisfying.
I’m not moving away from it on moral grounds, though I disagree with many of Silicon Valley’s business choices. I’m simply moving away from it as a human being who no longer finds it compelling.
Every artist’s art is a coping mechanism for whatever they are living through. Thoreau has written beautifully about the love of nature. Anna Eastman has written beautifully about erotic love. Alan Lightman writes beautifully about our love of knowledge, of illumination, and of the universe.
I write a lot about love because I haven’t figured it out. I’ve had and continue to have wonderful relationships, but I still feel that love is the great mystery: how to love each other better. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?
David (56:33-56:33)
Other people.
Maria (56:34-56:36)
Each other. Each other, too.
David (56:36-56:40)
Maria, thank you so much.
Maria (56:40-56:40)
Thank you.
David (56:40-56:41)
It was good to meet you.
Maria (56:41-56:42)
You too.
Discussion about this video
As someone still at the beginning of writing publicly, this conversation reminded me that the real work may not be “creating content.” It may be learning how to pay attention long enough for something real to appear.
I find Maria soooo incredibly inspiring! Please interview her again – I could listen to her all day
She is AMAZING! I’ve been reading her for many years. I love her combo of curiosity, wisdom, intellectuality, ability to connect ideas, and her romantic depth of soul work, poetry, science, and so, so much more. And the stories…
This is so beautiful. Her pure love of discovery, or perspective , and writing is inspiring.
she is wonderful
I loved it when Maria compared the way we think to hyperlinks. Insightful conversation. Thank you!
Thank you for this. I have followed Maria for many years. I’m inspired once again. I appreciate her ability to think and to follow her natural instincts to connect things.
I could listen to this interview 1000 times and each time witness a different facet on how Maria perceives the world. I’ve been a fan for many years (yes, all the way back to Brain Pickings which I didn’t dislike as a name until she presented an alternative view on that) and have always loved how she weaves poetry and science and literature and philosophy and nature together. I have the books. I have the newsletter. I lust after the Almanac. And now there’s this inspiring interview. Thank you. To both of you.
OMG those reels in the basement of the 92nd Street Y in NYC: hello gazillionaires! Someone fund the transfer of info to digital and print.
Thank you so much for this delightful and illuminating interview. I am just getting over a health challenge and groping my way back to engaging with the world. This was just the intellectual and artistic catalyst I needed to reignite my curiosity and creative appetite!
How do I follow Maria’s writing ?
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I love how your podcast introduces me to so many amazing writers that I had never heard of before. Thank you
Love her 🥰
Great episode!
This was excellent. Thank you!
Wonderful conversation. Thank you guys.
Knock nock 
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