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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The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh · Maria Popova on Turning Matter Into Meaning · 12 May 2026 podcast

Somebody else lived through it and suffered and survived.

And a beautiful thing you do with that, by the way, that I've noticed is that you meet these other life forms on their own terms, honoring the terms of their actual existence, and then draw the metaphor.

Because something that I see happen a lot is people kind of hijacking the scientific reality just to make a human meaning out of it.

I mean, if I hear one more person using entanglement, I'm just gonna, you know, claw my amygdala out with a wooden spoon.

Yeah.

Unless you're actually explaining what entanglement means in quantum physics and then doing the thing.

But you do this beautifully, this kind of honoring of the otherness of the other and then learning something from it that can be applied to your own lives.

Well, I mean, there's so much to say about this.

First of all, it's a little bit like the why do you write about women in science?

I don't write about women.

Love has always been love in all its many forms.

And partly I like writing about how people lived lives that were in the margins of their permission of their culture.

is to really calibrate our complaints a little bit.

I mean, we are luxuriating in freedoms that these people never had.

And they are very beautiful, but they're also heartbreaking.

I mean, Walt Whitman's entire life was like a struggle to just be himself.

And he wrote all that beautiful poetry out of that pain.

It's not nothing to look back and say, even someone of extraordinary talent, accomplishment, genius...

couldn't be himself in the permissions of his culture.

And so he had to write these like coded poems.

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