Maria Popova

speaker

931 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Maria Popova · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

But there is a comfort to me to kind of know how their lives turned out.

Well, first of all, I don't believe we can ever figure out what the truth of a person is.

It's often obscure to the person themselves, right?

With biographies, I just always go to the primary source material.

I mean, these biographers took it from somewhere, right?

So I would go and find the surviving notebooks and diaries and letters, which are, of course, incomplete and also self-mythologizing.

I mean, some people...

And a big part of why I chose some of the people in Traversal, particularly Whitman and Frederick Douglass, is that they were tremendous self-mythologizers.

For all the good that they did, they also co-created their own myth, right?

And that comes through even in the diaries and letters of people.

But you go as close to the bone as you can, as the death of the flesh allows, you've

That it continues to exist whether or not we believe in it.

And this is partly why my move with the children's books is that I read, I don't intend to, but I read a lot of science.

And every once in a while, I would come across a piece of science news that would strike me as this profound lens on something very intimate and emotional, part of our kind of human inner universe.

And then I would write a children's book based on the scientific article or fact or whatever.

And I do think there's a kind of...

Reverence for reality.

I mean, children's imagination is actually a response, a deep response to actuality and what can be made with the creative constraint of reality.

So some years ago...

a retired researcher in the UK came upon a snail whose shell coils in the opposite direction.

Showing 201–220 of 931 · page 11 of 47