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Maria Popovabook recommendations

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for its writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it. She is most widely known for her blog, Brain Pickings, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free, which features her writing on books, and ideas from the arts, philosophy, culture, and other subjects. In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. As of 2012, she resided in Brooklyn, New York.

Quotes & Sources

Maria Popova on Desert Solitaire
"So powerful, so enduring, so fiercely necessary today."

Maria Popova on The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert
"Lovely, and profound, and challenge our existing ideas about sensory experience."

Maria Popova on Still Writing
"[The author's] magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing."

Maria Popova on Gathering Moss
"An extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life."

Maria Popova on Stumbling on Happiness
"Explores the sometimes subtle, sometimes radical changes we can make in our everyday cognitive strategies in order to avoid ending up unhappy and disappointed."

Maria Popova on A Rap on Race
"Spectacular and pause-giving in its entirety — the kind of perspective-normalizing read that reminds us both how far we’ve come and how much further we have yet to go."

Maria Popova on On the Shortness of Life
"A poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice."

Maria Popova on The Republic
"I’m actually gobsmacked that this isn’t required in order to be sworn into office, like the Constitution is required for us American immigrants when it comes time to gain American citizenship."

Maria Popova on On the Move
"An uncommonly moving autobiography."

Maria Popova on On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God
"You will find yourself at once infinitely gladdened by [the author]'s enduring ideas and infinitely saddened by the self-fulfilling prophecy embedded in this particular one."

Maria Popova on Man's Search for Meaning
"A meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught [the author] about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived."

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