Maria Popova
Choosing is a creative act, and what you choose is a moral question

Glossary

A strange thing: a four-minute promise, six million pages

On October 23, 2006, a young Bulgarian woman, then living in Philadelphia and working four jobs to pay for college, sent an email to a few friends at one of those jobs. The subject line was "brain pickings," and the email laid out a plan: every week, five stimulating things to learn about, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless poem. She promised:

It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read.quoted by her in 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years, 2013-10-23

Fifteen years later she did the arithmetic: paginate and print everything she had published on the site and it would run past six million pages. Her own verdict was "a smile-inducing failure on the four-minute promise."

Stranger than the length is the voice. Go back to her 2007 and 2008 posts and you would think you had the wrong website. Back then she wrote as "we," and one section was headed FOOD FOR ABSOLUTELY NO THOUGHT. It recommended an animation of little blue balls rolling through a machine, which you could watch while you "somberly reflect on your own destiny as a tiny blue ball in the well-oiled machine that is society," or you could "stare blankly at the screen for 4 underslept, hung-over hours." In December 2007 she enthusiastically recommended a British mobile carrier called Blyk, available only to 16-to-24-year-olds and funded entirely by advertising: you filled out an interest profile, brands sent you "dialogue ads," and the service learned more about you the more you used it. Her verdict: good for the user, and good for advertisers, who got "direct access to willing members of the most elusive market."

At the top of her 2008 year-end list was iTunes Genius. Recommendation algorithms, she wrote, "seem to know your music taste better than your bff," and Genius's recommendations were "immaculate," its playlists able to rival "the most meticulously compiled mixtape that your 8th-grade sweetheart spent 3 weeks crafting." As for the controversial swimsuit, she thought the moral fuss was absurd:

Progress has to start somewhere, and the laggards better suck it up and learn to keep up.Best Ideas of 2008, 2008-12-24

Now look at the sidebar on every page of the same site today: "For an act of resistance to the tyranny of algorithms … free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human since 2006."

Same person, same website. She went from praising algorithms that know your music better than your best friend to calling for resistance to "the tyranny of algorithms." This isn't ordinary growing up. The arc itself is her most important argument.

Who she is

Maria Popova grew up in communist Bulgaria, the daughter of an engineer father and a librarian mother who later moved into software. She says she wasn't much of an early reader. Her happiest early memories are of her grandmother reading her Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She never met her great-grandfather and knows him only through her grandmother's stories. He was an astronomer and mathematician who, under the dictatorship, listened to the jammed BBC World Service and read smuggled copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Dickens. He underlined words in red ink and wrote their Bulgarian translations in the margins, and he was fluent in English by fifty. When she renamed her site in 2021 after people who write in margins, she didn't connect the two, but it's hard for a reader not to. She still runs the site alone, with no staff and no assistant, and lives on readers' donations of a few dollars a month. She has written several books; the biggest is Figuring (2019), close to six hundred pages. Her RSS feed still shows new items every day.

What she wrestles with

Her About page reduces the whole site to one question: "What is all this?" That is too big to be a skeleton. The question she has actually refused to put down for well over a decade is narrower: when information is drowning you, how do you decide where to put your attention, and what does that decision turn you into?

She ran into it because she was standing at the mouth of the flood. Brain Pickings got going just as blogs, RSS, Twitter and the "viral video" all took off together. Her daily job was fishing things out of the flood: a TED talk, an out-of-print picture book, an interview with a designer. Before 2010 her criterion was stated at the start of that 2008 year-end list: ideas that are "truly, tangibly, future-changingly innovative." Good meant new, clever, fun.

The trouble was that the more she fished, the less clearly she could say what she was doing. She didn't produce content; she paraphrased, excerpted, juxtaposed. Yet the time and thought it took were plainly no smaller than for original writing. If this was labor, what kind of labor? If it wasn't, what were the hundreds of hours a month she poured into it? That was her first question: does choosing have any value?

The second question came more slowly. Once choosing counts as labor, you can't avoid asking: by what standard? "Interesting" is one standard. iTunes Genius uses it too, guessing what you'll want next from what you've played before. She gradually realized that if she chose only by "interesting," there was no essential difference between her and an algorithm. She was just slower and more expensive.

Everything she wrote afterward is an answer to those two questions. In the order she found them, there are three answers.

Her ideas, told as how she found them

1. New things are made of old pieces, so whoever finds the pieces is creating too

In November 2010 she shared a short film about the graphic designer Paula Scher, who describes sketching the Citi logo on a napkin in a matter of seconds. How can it be done in a second? Scher answers herself:

it’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience, and every movie, and every thing in my life that’s in my head.Scher, quoted in Paula Scher on Combinatorial Creativity, 2010-11-19

In that short post Popova named, for the first time in print, what she called the site's "founding beliefs": combinatorial creativity. Ideas are born from the myriad fragments in our memory and knowledge, and creativity is simply the capacity to put them together in new ways.

Half a year later, at a New York breakfast lecture series called Creative Mornings, she built the idea into a full argument. She didn't open with Picasso but with a fourteenth-century book: the florilegium compiled by Thomas of Ireland. Medieval florilegia lifted passages from other books and rearranged them by theme, which makes them, by today's standards, early remix culture. She dwelt on one detail: in the Middle Ages, florilegia were the most lavish and expensive books to produce. Selecting and arranging were priced as top-tier labor.

Only then came Picasso: a woman in a park asks for her portrait, gets it five minutes later, asks the price. "$5,000, madam." She's outraged; it took five minutes. "No, madam, it took me my whole life."

She set Picasso and Scher side by side and then lined up a string of others: the designer Alvin Lustig in 1952; the neuropsychologist Roger Sperry in 1964 ("Ideas cause ideas"); the molecular biologist Jacques Monod in 1970, for whom ideas breed, fuse and recombine like organisms; Dawkins and the "meme" in 1976. The string of quotations is itself her method of argument. If the same idea is rediscovered every decade or so by someone in a different field, that is evidence that ideas are combinatorial. Along the way she bent an old saying:

it seems imitation might well be the sincerest form of ideation.Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, 2011-08-01

Up to this point it's a familiar line about how to be creative. Her real move was to turn it around. If creation depends on having enough fragments, and varied enough ones, where do the fragments come from? Two things, she said: curiosity and choice. Curiosity makes you want to know; choice decides what you look at. And in an age of overload, the people who make choices on others' behalf, "curiosity sherpas," become a link in the supply chain of creativity:

So if information discovery plays such a central role in how we fuel our creativity and thus in our creative output, then information discovery is a form of creative labor in and of itself.Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, 2011-08-01

That sentence promoted her own work from reposting to labor, and labor should be acknowledged. She pointed out a gap: we have thorough rules for crediting creative products, from citation formats to image rights, but none for crediting discovery. Find something on someone's blog, pass it on without naming the blog, and in her view you are "perpetrating another form of piracy." She pushed one step deeper: people care about credit not for traffic but because of "the desire to matter in the world, to be seen."

In March 2012 she turned the argument into a campaign: the Curator's Code. With the designer Kelli Anderson she proposed two Unicode symbols, ᔥ for "via" (a direct repost) and ↬ for "hat tip" (indirect inspiration). Each symbol linked back to the Code's site, so a curious reader could find out why credit matters. She was explicit that the form didn't matter and plain old "via" was fine:

the message here is not about how to credit but simply to credit.Introducing The Curator’s Code, 2012-03-09

The reaction surprised her. Marco Arment's response, as quoted by Nick Heer, was blunt: "The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing." Matt Langer at Gizmodo was less polite still: "Curation" is something people with PhDs in art history do; tossing links around online is just "sharing." Ten days later she added an update at the top of the original post, linking to a new piece: a long passage from Einstein on kindness, introduced with the remark that it had been "a challenging week."

That setback mattered. It showed her that calling choosing "labor" convinces nobody. If choosing is to carry weight, it won't be through attribution rules but through what the chosen things stand for. Her next idea grew from there.

2. Information is not wisdom; the missing rung is moral

In March 2013 Nieman Reports ran an issue on the state of criticism and asked her to contribute. What she handed in amounts to a new definition of her own work.

She first conceded the ailments of traditional criticism: Susan Sontag calling it "cultural cholesterol," Zadie Smith lamenting "the essential hubris of criticism." Then she proposed another kind of criticism. Don't say what's bad; just put the good in front of people, often enough and to a consistent enough standard, and readers will see the bad in the negative space.

I write about books, but I don’t write reviews. I write recommendations, based on my own taste. I have no interest in putting in front of my readers books that I myself have found lacking in merit.Select, Shape, Celebrate, Nieman Reports, 2013-03-12

This is the "celebration of the good by systematic omission of the bad." Note the shift. Two years earlier she had said choosing was labor; now she was saying choosing is a statement of values. What you pick and what you leave out are themselves a claim about what is good.

In 2014 she turned the idea into a ladder, in a short animated film that she wrote and narrated and Drew Christie animated. It opens:

We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two.Wisdom in the Age of Information, 2014-09-09

The ladder has three rungs. At the bottom is information, a basic fact about the world. In the middle is knowledge, which fits bits of information together to reveal some truth; it depends on correlation and interpretation, what she had earlier called combination. At the top is wisdom, and here she added something the lower rungs lack: a moral component. Wisdom means understanding not only how the world works but how it should work. Her analogy: information is a library of books on shipbuilding; knowledge is using them to build a ship; wisdom is sailing it through a storm in the dead of night without sinking; moral wisdom is knowing which direction to steer.

Once the ladder was up, "choosing" meant something different. In 2011 she had said choosing restocks other people's pool of fragments, the second rung. Now she located its real value on the third: judging, on the reader's behalf, what is worthy. An algorithm can assemble information into knowledge; it knows what you like and what you'll click. What it can't do is tell you what you ought to like.

A year later, an op-ed pushed this stance into the open. In early 2015 Arianna Huffington announced that, while still reporting on what's broken, her site would give more space to stories of "perseverance, creativity, and grace." A critic wrote indignantly that "to privilege happy stories over ‘unhappy’ ones is to present a false view of the world." Popova described her reaction as a "seething cauldron of deep disappointment" and wrote a rebuttal.

It ran in three steps. First, the news was never "true" to begin with: for a century the media systematically favored catastrophe, so we came to think the twentieth century was humanity's worst, when Steven Pinker, she wrote, had made a convincing case that it wasn't. Second, she proposed a symmetrical demand:

We don’t get to decry the alleged distortion of our worldview until we’ve lived through at least a century of good news to even the playing field so ravaged by the previous century’s extreme negativity bias.Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, 2015-02-09

The third step matters most, because it sidesteps the true/false dispute. The stories we tell ourselves, true or false, are always real, because we act on them. So a storyteller's duty isn't only accurate reporting but mediating between the ideal and the real, mixing critical thinking and hope in the right proportion. She gave it a neat formula:

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, 2015-02-09

She compared it to watering a plant: too little and it dries out, too much and it rots. From here on the whole site had a clear direction: active opposition to cynicism. In her tenth-anniversary list she made it a life principle: don't just resist cynicism, "fight it actively." Another principle on that list drew the line between her and the algorithm for good. The commercial logic says give the people cat GIFs, because cat GIFs are what the people want. Her answer:

Supply creates its own demand.18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian, 2024-10-22 (no. 9)

Only by consistently supplying substance can a culture come to demand it. In 2008 she praised an algorithm that knew your taste better than your best friend. Here she stood in exactly the opposite place: a good chooser shouldn't cater to the appetite you already have but raise it.

3. History is what survives the shipwreck, so go salvage the margins

The third idea is where the first two lead. If choosing is a moral act, then history itself is one enormous act of choosing, and the choosers are often not moral at all.

Figuring, she wrote, "only took twelve years," along with the most beautiful and difficult experience of her personal life. The book begins with Kepler and ends with Rachel Carson. In between are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, the critic Margaret Fuller and the poet Emily Dickinson: "mostly women, mostly queer," whose public contributions rose out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships. In 2018 she posted the prelude on the site, and in my sample it was among the three most-linked pieces. It contains this line:

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.Figuring (prelude, 2018-11-01)

That sentence repositions her work. In 2011 she was fishing interesting fragments out of the information flood. Now she was salvaging forgotten lives from the wreckage of history. It's the same motion, turned from the horizontal (the present glut) to the vertical (centuries of selective memory). When she renamed the site in 2021 she said it had often been about people "marginalized by culture, erased by the collective selective memory we call history," because they were too other, too ahead of their time, or saw too clearly.

How does she tell these lives? Take Kepler. The long 2019 essay, which is the book's first chapter, doesn't begin with planetary laws. It begins with a carriage. In January 1617 a spindly mathematician with a sunken heart and bad skin is racing through the frozen German countryside, because his elderly, illiterate mother has been charged with witchcraft and he holds himself responsible. He had written the first work of science fiction, The Dream, about a young astronomer who travels to the Moon; seen from there, the Earth appears to move, a hint that our own sense of standing still might be wrong. The manuscript escaped, garbled versions spread through barbershop gossip, and they eventually reached his home duchy.

In Kepler she sees her own ladder. He had the best data of his age, Tycho Brahe's observations, and spent a decade and more than seventy failed trials calculating the elliptical orbit of Mars. Yet he realized his proofs were too complex and abstract to persuade even his peers, let alone the public:

it wasn’t data that would dismantle their celestial parochialism, but storytelling.How Kepler Invented Science Fiction…, 2019-12-26

This is why she puts scientists, poets and children's books on the same site. To her they do the same job: they carry information up the ladder. In 2021 she published a children's book of her own, about a snail whose shell coils left and whose heart sits on the right. The introduction says:

children’s books are miniature works of philosophyThe Snail with the Right Heart, 2021-01-02

The snail, Jeremy, was a mirror image inside, with every organ reversed, and could mate only with another reversed snail. A scientist appealed on the radio to the whole world, and two were found. She uses the true story to talk about genes, about chance, about not mistaking difference for defect. She'd held this view since 2010, when she called The Little Prince "one of the most important handbooks to being a thoughtful, introspective adult, disguised as a children’s book."

Compressed, the argument of Figuring is the sentence that stands as its own paragraph in the prelude, quoted in the Essentials above: there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. In her eighteenth-anniversary piece she called the 576-page book a footnote to it. Put together, the three ideas form one line. Creativity is combinatorial, so choosing is labor. Choosing is a value judgment, so the chooser has a moral responsibility. History is an amoral act of choosing, so someone has to go to the margins and bring back the people it dropped, to show that good lives come in more than a few shapes.

In 2021, renaming the site, she stated the end of that line plainly:

More and more, the curatorial aspect — the “picking” part of Brain Pickings — subsided, as did the purely cerebral aspect — the “brain” part — giving way to the editorial, the contemplative, the full integration of thought and feeling that pulsates beneath all things creative and alive.Becoming the Marginalian, 2021-10-22

The old name, she wrote, had been "chosen by a twenty-two-year-old immigrant in whose ear the tired puns and idioms of a non-native language rang fresh and full of wonder." It had come to feel like "an ill-fitting corset."

How she thinks

She lets others speak, then takes the last word. This is the first thing you notice. In a rough count over 220 posts sampled at random from 2011 onward, quotation blocks made up roughly half the words of a typical post from 2012 to 2018 (each year contributes only a dozen or two posts, so the figure is approximate). Her typical move: a paragraph of her own, a long quoted passage, a paragraph linking it to someone else, another long passage. Her originality isn't in any one sentence but in which two passages end up side by side. That is her own 2011 theory of combinatorial creativity, applied to herself.

Every post is a junction. In the same sample, posts averaged more than eight links to older posts on the site, and the number climbs over time, from a median of 1 in 2011 to around 10 in 2015–2018. Nearly every piece ends with "Complement with…", sending readers back to three or four older ones. Her six thousand-plus posts are therefore less a timeline than a web. In 2011 she quoted Kevin Kelly: "all good, true and beautiful things are networks." She built her site to match.

Names come with full birth and death dates. "John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968)": almost everyone she quotes gets tagged like this. The habit says a lot. Every person she invites into a piece is first someone who lived and died, and only second a source of quotations.

She turns a quarrel into a meditation. Anyone else would have written the Huffington episode as a polemic. Halfway through she leaves the particular critic behind for the twentieth century, Faulkner's Nobel speech, William James's "My experience is what I agree to attend to." She rarely names anyone to rebut. It's the same instinct as omitting the bad.

Her anniversary list only grows. In 2013 she wrote "7 things I learned in 7 years" and has added one item each year since. The 2024 piece reprints all eighteen as originally written, newest first, and number one ("Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind") matches the 2013 text word for word. Someone who keeps urging us to change our minds records herself in a list she never revises. That is very her: don't overwrite the old self; annotate beside it.

She argues with a life rather than a claim. With Kepler, Carson, Dickinson, she isn't using their words to prove a thesis; she lays out an entire life and lets you look. That makes her hard to rebut, because she never puts a point in a form that could be falsified.

Where she might be wrong

The most direct criticism came out of the Curator's Code fight. As Nick Heer quotes him, Marco Arment wrote:

The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.Marco Arment, quoted in Nick Heer, I’m Not a “Curator”, 2012-03-13

That hits a habit of hers: treating a structural problem as a problem of attitude. The response I found on her site was the Einstein-on-kindness post, not an economic argument. As far as I can tell, the two Unicode symbols never caught on. I could not read Arment's original post in full (his site was returning errors that day), so this relies on Heer's quotation.

She wrote down the sharpest version of the second problem herself. "A celebration of the good by systematic omission of the bad" means readers never see what was omitted, so they can't check her judgment. A person who writes only recommendations and never criticism can be trusted, but not audited. In 2015 she defended TED, describing it as an entity that had "done nothing more nor less than to insist, over and over, that despite our many imperfections, we are inherently kind and capable and full of goodness," and calling criticism of it "petty and cynical." But much of the criticism of TED was aimed precisely at how smoothly it packages complicated problems. Her framework has no room for that kind of objection: you are either on the side of hope or you are a cynic.

Third, collage flattens disagreement. She shelves Steinbeck's "The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is" (anti-teleology: stop asking why) next to her own "wisdom knows how the world should work" (moral judgment built in), and treats both as luminous quotations. There's real tension between them: one asks you to set judgment down, the other to pick it up. She rarely lets the people she quotes argue with each other, so the reader often gets a warm harmony rather than an actual collision of ideas. When she cites Pinker's "convincing case" that the twentieth century wasn't so bad, she doesn't mention the serious objections that case has drawn.

Fourth, an irony about memory. She says history is what survives the shipwreck, yet her own archive is being quietly reshaped. The prelude to Figuring, published in 2018, now reads "It only took twelve years of The Marginalian," a name the site did not have until 2021; the text was evidently edited later. Her About page lists "But We Had Music" at a 2024 address, but following the link lands on a new address dated October 6, 2026, and the page shows 2026 as its publication date. Resurfacing old pieces in her Wednesday newsletter is perfectly reasonable. Changing their dates, though, means readers can no longer tell which year's Popova wrote a given piece. For someone who, in the very post announcing the rename, quoted Joan Didion on keeping "on nodding terms with the people we used to be," it's a blind spot worth naming.

I didn't find a sustained critical study of her work as a whole; the above is what I could actually read.

Sources

• Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity (2011-08-01)Transcript of her Creative Mornings talk: florilegia, Picasso, combinatorial creativity, and the case that information discovery is creative labor.
• Select, Shape, Celebrate (Nieman Reports, 2013-03-12)"I don't write reviews, I write recommendations": the critic as celebrator, and the systematic omission of the bad.
• Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (2015-02-09)The balance of critical thinking and hope, prompted by the Huffington episode, and why the stories we tell ourselves are always real.
• Figuring (2018-11-01)The book announcement and full prelude, from the Big Bang to a red leaf caught in a spider's thread; "history is what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance."
• Becoming the Marginalian (2021-10-22)The renaming: why, after fifteen years, both the "picking" and the "brain" receded.

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