Brain Pickings
Maria Popova. Photograph by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times
Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.
Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012. Here’s a little bit about my 7 most important learnings from the journey so far.
Most of all, Brain Pickings is a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into that grand question of how to live, of what it means to lead a good life.