For 17 years Maria Popova has kept an online literary journal of sorts, a catalogue of what she’s been reading, contemplating and grappling with across multiple disciplines — literature, science, art, philosophy, poetry and what she has called “various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.” She started her site, the Marginalian, under a different name — you may remember it as Brain Pickings — as an email to a few friends and colleagues, a personal record of reckoning with her own search for meaning. Today it consists of hundreds of thousands of entries, cross linking ideas and connecting metaphysical dots. It is fundamentally a personal project, a map of one woman’s quest to understand this weird experience called life. And yet over the years it has proven to have a universal appeal, attracting millions of readers from all over the world who take comfort or pick up wisdom from her lyrical close readings.

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