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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh · Maria Popova on Turning Matter Into Meaning · 12 May 2026
podcast
And for me, when things don't leave me, I know I have to go to them.
And so I would think of, you know, there were a couple of letters of hers that I just they wouldn't let me go because they were so poignant.
And also, I started seriously writing Traversal a few months before the pandemic.
And I had just reread, she has a novel called The Last Man, which is about a 21st century plague that incrementally kills off all of humanity except the protagonist, who is left wandering amidst the statues and museums of Rome, wondering about the point of it all.
Why art?
How do we make life bearable?
And I had just finished reading that when the pandemic happened, and I thought, this woman's a prophet.
Mm-hmm.
Far beyond Frankenstein.
And also, I wanted to save her from her own limiting reputation.
I mean, she is held to an image of who she was when she was 19.
She wrote something that was, yes, extraordinary and full of these eternal questions.
But then she did so much more after that, and people have no sense of her life.
And that poignant line that the creature, she, by the way, never calls him monster.
That's the movie.
She only ever calls him creature.
There's this gutting line where he says, I am malicious because I am miserable.
And that is the history of the world.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I would like to believe that that's why we're here, these things.
Showing 561–580 of 931 · page 29 of 47
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