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 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

And on top of that, I was writing about their lives and the kind of margins of the books I was reading.

Everything I write is my own marginalia on this search for what it means to be alive.

I think perhaps the same three things that make it motivating to continue being alive, which is to learn something, to help someone, and to just feel it all.

Well, I never changed my mind about writing the kind of book that I was being offered a lot.

I mean, publishers were approaching me all the time with the very surely marketable idea of doing a kind of best of brain pickings or, you know, a compilation on a specific theme that I often write about.

I mean, it could be anything, you know, diaries of great writers, daily routines.

I mean, whatever, very kind of superficial, self-healthy kind of thing.

And those do have the shelf life of a banana.

Books are just a vehicle for thought and feeling and ideas.

And the only thoughts and feelings and ideas worth putting into the world are the ones that have the shelf life of a shelf.

And those are certainly the books I read and love.

And I thought if I were to put in the time, I mean, these things take years to write these, you know, 600 page books that I ended up writing.

Writing, if I were to put in the time, it should be for something I would enjoy as a reader, the kind of thing I want to exist.

I think that says more about our culture than about the book.

I think people were excited about the first book of the site they read.

I would be very interested in how many of those people finished the book.

My own mother recently informed me that she never finished figuring.

There you have it, which was translated beautifully into Bulgarian.

I think we spend our lives changing our relationship to mortality, trying to befriend it, right?

Yes.

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