Oh hello. My name is Maria Popova. I am a reader and writer, and I write about what I read here on Brain Pickings — my one-woman labor of love. It is an inquiry into what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life, and a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.

I have previously thought in words for The New York Times, Wired UK, The Atlantic, and Harvard’s Nieman Reports, among others, and am the author of a very long book titled Figuring.

Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012. Here are some reflections on my most important learnings from the first decade of Brain Pickings.

For more about the ethos and the human behind this labor of love, here are some answers to The New York Times’ “By the Book” questionnaire, and here is my On Being conversation with the wonderful and generous Krista Tippett:

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