Maria Popova

Maria Popova (Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet, 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.

Maria Popova was born on 28 July 1984 in Bulgaria.

Popova's parents are ethnic Bulgarians 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".

In interview, Popova states that in childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias.

As recounted in interview to Geoff Wolinetz of Bundle.com, Popova first worked when she was about 8 years old, making the Bulgarian yarn folk art dolls called martenitsas, worn beginning on the first of March where Popova describes selling them on the street as children would sell drinks at a lemonade stand.

Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria, a secondary school, in 2003.

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.

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."

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

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, 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, 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.

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."

It includes several sections and has graphics, photographs, and illustrations in addition to written content.

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." 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". 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.

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.

She relocated to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree in communications, though for years, up to 2012, her grandmother had wanted her to get an MBA.

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.

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.

And now I’m finally in New York, and I’m here to stay." As of 2012, she was living in Brooklyn.

Popova has written for The Atlantic, Wired UK, GOOD, The Huffington Post, and NiemanLab.

As of December 2012, The Guardian was reporting that the blog had "1.2 million readers a month and 3m page views".

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."

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."

Popova also has various partnerships with prominent organizations.

She is co-editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to A Young Reader, published by Enchanted Lion Books in 2018.

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.

Popova is also author of Figuring, published by Random House in 2019., 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.

Figuring won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Science and Technology category.

In addition to running Brain Pickings, Popova has a number of side projects.

She maintains a Twitter account, and a newsletter.