Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented guest writers and regular contributors.

Brain Pickings is about curating interestingness — picking culture’s collective brain for tidbits of stuff that inspires, revolutionizes, or simply makes us think. It’s about innovation and authenticity and all those other things that have become fluff phrases but don’t have to be.

Mostly, Brain Pickings is about ideas — revolutionary new ideas that no one has seen or thought of before, and old ideas that most have seen, but no one has thought of in this way before.

Because creativity, after all, is simply our ability to tap into the mental pool of ideas we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways.

Follow Maria on Twitter for more inspired ideas across the many facets of creative culture.