Maria Popova

Maria Popova is an author, editor, blogger, and curious mind at large who has written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Popova is the author of several books, including 2019's "Figuring," 2012's "Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies," and the 2014 novel "Art de Vivre: Triple Challenge."

She is the creator of "Brainpickings," a blog containing her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects off and on the Internet. 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.

The core ethos behind "Brain Pickings" is that creativity is a combinatorial force: it’s our ability to tap into our mental pool of resources — knowledge, insight, information, inspiration, and all the fragments populating our minds — that 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. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new ideas.