Maria Popova's 'The Marginalian'

Wondering if others read her essays?
I love her approach and the depth of thinking.
I read most, not all and always feel inspired.

https://www.themarginalian.org/about/

  Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is my one-woman labor of love — marginalia on our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books — free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human since 2006.
Born an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and eventually included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
 

todays...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/04/24/emily-ogden-bird/?mc_cid=d9423124b8&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/05/trees/?mc_cid=834ddedba8&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

...far beyond the realm of human-wrested metaphor, trees are sovereign marvels of nature, dazzling in the native poetics of their biological and ecological reality.
Their photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light.
Chlorophyll — which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood — allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere.
A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.

I think you'll not be surprised to learn I've gotten her newsletter since it was Brain Pickings!
It's a long read that I usually limit to weekends, when I have time to reflect a bit more, but she is full of treasures.

😊 yes...not surprised at all Tereza!
I've been there since Brain Pickings also!

I end up with a backlog and have several in my email waiting for me to focus on them.

today's....
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/05/14/bertrand-russell-useless-knowledge/?mc_cid=a5d65c7469&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

   Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:

Learn something.

Help someone.

Feel it all.