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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

First of all, it was the age of alternative facts.

And science was being defunded, devalued.

And I thought, we need a way for people to befriend science that is welcoming and hospitable, you know.

And poetry also, you know, the National Endowment for the Arts was being massively defunded, which is the main funding body for poets.

Poets are the lowest paid artists in our world.

And the NEA was how, you know, a lot of their funding came from.

And

That went away, and I thought maybe there are others like me out there who curl their nose at poetry because they don't understand it.

They're not literate in it.

Maybe we can invite them in.

And so the concept was to get people, friends who are creative people of other walks of life, musicians, actors, artists, to come read poems that I choose and then –

I would talk some science behind the poems that have an element of science.

So for example, Patti Smith reading a Rebecca Elson poem about dark matter.

And then I would talk about Vera Rubin and the discovery and the confirmation of dark matter, that kind of thing.

And as a way of welcoming people both into art and science.

And I used every year, I used the proceeds towards something that was threatened.

So the first three or four years, it was the,

Natural Resources Defense Council, then it was the Academy of American Poets.

So this kind of active resistance and also active support of what was losing support.

I mean, I think Descartes is the most damaging man in the history of our species 400 years later.

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