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

I mean, the shortest version is that I had come to the U.S., sold on the promise of liberal arts education, which I thought was going to teach me how to live.

And, you know, my family cobbled together the fortune, the great fortune of $800 that was supposed to last me through the first year.

And instead I got here, and by the time I had bedsheets and textbooks, it was gone.

So I ended up working all these jobs.

Nice bedsheets.

Well, no, nice textbooks.

I had just touched the military-industrial complex of higher education.

Ah, yes.

Yes, that.

And so...

I ended up instead finding myself in this factory for minds where you were tested on testing, meaning you were taught how to memorize and take tests, not how to live.

So I kind of, not knowing what to do, started scrapping together my own little morsels of meaning.

I would go to the library or, you know, go to a talk in downtown Philly and...

whatever.

And so then one of the jobs I was working to pay for this very unsatisfying education was at this little creative agency.

And at the time, the guys, there were all these young idealists who had, the founder had run the first successful anti-smoking campaign in history and was kind of inspired to try to use the communication arts to do such things.

And I had gone to the U.S.

to study communication because I

lived through the fall of communism and I went from, you know, we had the dictator on TV every night at 8 p.m.

delivering one channel, obviously, delivering the propaganda, the message.

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