Women's History - 8 Maria Popova

Maria Popova, born July 28, 1985 in Bulgaria.

Author and bi-weekly publisher of the Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. There are 3.5 thousand people looking at these interesting mergers of genius from different fields on their similar leanings.

Wikipedia says: "In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. Since 2010, she has resided in Brooklyn, New York.

One can subscribe for the free newsletter-styled Sunday Marginalian:

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality.

Then there's the Wednesday issue, of which Maria says:

Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. 

The Universe in Verse has been a springtime project that gathers even more talented people since 2017 (as Maria says:)

"...as part celebration of the wonder of life and the splendor of reality, and part protest against the assault on science and nature — that is, on life and reality — in the era of “alternative facts” and vanishing environmental protections. An act of resistance and an act of persistence. Fierce insistence on the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.

Her way of molding a topic from science or poetry together is exemplified in the following:

To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.

Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.

For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, (in April 2022 Maria) joined forces with her astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha ...to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.

In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season ... who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie). 

Having seen the free show The Universe in Verse 2022: What is life?  which was available for a while through her link I wanted to offer her as one of the outstanding women for March history (did anyone say they had to be dead?) I really believe she has something happening that nobody else has. And I found under the title Universe in Verse, her site offers the editions that were done in 2017, 18, and 19. Something more to entertain me soon...

Maria was born and raised in Bulgaria, and was able to attend the University of Pennsylvania by working 4 jobs concurrently. In the one focused on advertising, the creativity was spurred by employees sharing what other ads were doing. Maria thought to bring together more diverse topics and started emailing them around. That was the basis of Brain Pickings, which she put on the internet in 2006.

She shares how she comes up with what she presents on the Marginalian:

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?

This articulate petite young woman has no Bulgarian accent when presenting some of the leading poets and musicians on her live programs. She has an incredible memory of bits and pieces that can be woven together. (Or she may have an excellent filing system, or both!!) Her degree in Communication was just icing on the cake of what her grandmother and parents had taught her of the world. 

 

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SOURCES:

Donnelly, Kate (October 11, 2011). "Maria Popova" From Your Desks.

Wikipedia: Maria Popova

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.