Maria Popova
Photograph by Allan Amato
Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, and has spent ample happy hours making An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and two very short books (The Coziest Place on the Moon and The Snail with the Right Heart), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.