The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Maria Popova
February 17, 2026 at 03:30PM
For two decades, Maria Popova has carefully tended a singular corner of the internet: The Marginalian. It feels inadequate to call it a blog or a website. Through her luminous writing and unmatched curation, Popova has created a truly unique space for readers.
She describes The Marginalian as “a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning.” Since its earliest days as Brain Pickings, the site has evolved while continuing to set an exceptionally high standard for what a creative, passionate, and rigorously curious life online can look like. On an ever-shifting web of walled gardens, algorithms, and AI slop, The Marginalian remains deeply thoughtful and human.
Popova’s new book, Traversal, extends that lifelong inquiry. She asks: “What makes life alive and worth living?” The book weaves together stories of artists, scientists, and thinkers who have sought knowledge and meaning across time.
This week, we’re launching something new: The Longreads Questionnaire—25 questions about writing, reading, and creativity. Through this series, we hope to offer readers a glimpse into the inner lives of our favorite authors. We can’t imagine a more fitting writer to inaugurate it than Maria Popova.
Thanks for reading—and don’t miss Traversal, out today.
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Where did you grow up?
Bulgaria. I was born in Sofia, the capital, but spent much of my early childhood in the remote mountains, where my grandparents were stationed as state elementary schoolteachers in largely illiterate villages. I sat in the back of the classroom—I loved the mischief of learning even though I was too young for school, loved the smell of books and wet chalk, loved looking in from the margins.
What places feel like home?
Anywhere with trees and lichen.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
My heartbreaks.
What is your favorite time of day?
The gloaming hour between sundown and nightfall.
What are you really good at?
Pouring liquid from a large-mouthed vessel into a smaller-mouthed vessel without spilling. Including with my non-dominant hand. Including in motion. In the apocalypse, when everyone is rationing water, you want me around.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
Tie between a set of vintage Little Prince porcelain plates and a pair of hiking shoes with fanged treads modeled on early 20th-century polar explorer boots.
Describe your favorite meal.
Grilled miso-glazed salmon with roasted fennel.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Silence, always. I used to be able to write to music when I was younger, then it became only instrumental music, and now it is silence.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Afoot in a forest.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
These months I have been living in Patagonia, writing and mending a heart, testing the limits of the body, touching the unexplored substrates of the mind.
Where do you like to read?
I have been working out every day since I was 15—a bit compulsive perhaps, but the rhythm steadies me, the physicality regulates me. For some reason, I find it much easier to read on the stair-master or the elliptical—something about my body discharging all that kinetic energy allows my mind to focus much more intently than in stillness. My wavy underlining and barely legible marginalia are a small price to pay for the superior clarity and receptivity.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
James Gleick’s New York Review of Books reviews (which are really extraordinary wide-ranging essays using a book as a prompt), George Saunders’s Substack, and the Cloud Appreciation Society’s Cloud-a-Day newsletter.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” made me want to be a writer.
What was the last book you read?
Fernando Pessoa’s strange and wondrous posthumous masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, and I am currently deep in the galley of The Traveler—Andrea Wulf’s riveting more-than-biography of the polymathic German scientist and revolutionary George Forster.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
At 600 pages, Traversal might be too large to be considered a “piece,” in which case this essay about the story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Walking. I find the rhythm revitalizes the mind and the inevitable act of noticing offers what is most needed when we find ourselves imprisoned in our thoughts—an instrument of unselfing.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Loren Eiseley.
What words do you overuse?
Portal, tender, reckoning.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Searching for green stones on an unpeopled beach.
What superpower would you like to have?
Complete self-knowledge.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Ceramics. Though the notion of a “free” hour is tricky for a writer—one is always essentially writing. Many ideas, many specific sentences, have come to me at the wheel.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
I wouldn’t. Our only gift to the future is giving everything we have to the present—our lives, lived.
What does your writing space look like?
Always a standing desk. In my primary living space, it is a vertical bookshelf pressed against a window facing a paperback birch often visited by a bright red cardinal. But I travel a lot, so it is often an upside-down trash can on a stranger’s table.
Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian and author of Figuring, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, and The Universe in Verse. Her new book, Traversal, is available now.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/17/questionnaire-maria-popova/
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