maria popova
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Learning to Look Closer
Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova talks with cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz about her new book On Looking, which is about the way sensory awareness impacts our perception of reality. The two discuss how “a writer is a professional observer”…
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Grimm Fairy Tales Just Got Grimmer
British art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights a recently reissued collection…
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To Sleep, Perchance to Write
You’ve read about famous authors’ workspaces, writing schedules, and semi-compulsive rituals, but have you read about their sleep habits? Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi and Rumpus illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to create a series of super-charming illustrations of…
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Hear Virginia Woolf’s Voice
Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. In the recording, Woolf reads from an essay on craft (which Popova conveniently reprints in the post): “How can we combine the old words in…
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Advice from Vonnegut
Advice my father gave me: never take liquor into the bedroom. Don’t stick anything in your ears. Be anything but an architect. To celebrate Kurt Vonnegut, Maria Popova posted on her Brain Pickings an interesting list of advices the author…
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Fairy Tales by E. E. Cummings
In the 1920s, while living in Paris, poet E. E. Cummings wrote fairy tales for his only little daughter Nancy, which was an unknown fact until 1965. Only four survived and published in a small booklet accompanied by drawing by Canadian artist…
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Remembering David Foster Wallace
Five years ago today, groundbreaking writer David Foster Wallace took his own life. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings remembers him with a post excerpting Conversations with David Foster Wallace, a “collection of 22 interviews and profiles of the beloved author.” A…
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Ignore This Advice
Policy Mic has a fun post about the four worst things people tell young writers about writing. Perhaps the most important of these to disregard is “Good writers always write well”: Imagine you are someone who has no idea how…
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New York through Jack Kerouac’s Eyes
Maria Popova from Brain Pickings takes a look at a chapter titled “New York Scenes” from Kerouac’s 1960 book, Lonesome Traveler. According to Popova, the chapter is “a kind of narrative emotional cartography of Manhattan, woven of fascinating sketches of Gotham’s vibrant…
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“A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings”
Happy Birthday, Susan Sontag. You would have been 80 today. Here is an entry from her collection of journals and notebooks, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. Also, check out Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton and Maria Popova’s fantastic collaborative illustration,…
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The Wishing Tree
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings got her hands on a copy of William Faulkner’s only children’s book, written for his stepdaughter (and a few other children in his life) and published in a print run of 500. With words like…
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Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts
Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton has teamed up with Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings) to illustrate selected excerpts from Susan Sontag’s diaries. The artwork is available on Etsy as an 11×14 print on heavy cotton rag paper with razored edges in a limited edition of…