The astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell’s supervisor is awarded the Nobel Prize for her discovery of pulsars. The book is a record of extraordinary personal achievements shaped by the “tides of convention that delimit each era’s horizon of possibility”. The inspiring accounts are, of course, shaded by a broader historical reality.

With empathic exegeses of their poetry, prose and private letters, Popova pulls the reader down to within an intimate distance of her historical cast, cutting us windows on the poky room that hid Emily Dickinson from the world for 30 years, the home observatory Maria Mitchell used to find her famous comet, the Maine beach house where Carson composed the books that would start the modern environmental movement. She calls this open-ended process “meaning-making” and it’s what we have to thank for her new book, Figuring.įiguring is a biography of Popova’s intellectual ancestors: a map of the intersecting trajectories of brilliant minds-from Johannes Kepler to Rachel Carson-captured through the wide-angle lens of the last half-millennium and coloured by the deeply human hues of love and rejection, vindication and vilification the polar forces that guide the search for meaning. She’s a born researcher, quarrying quotes and excerpts, joining the dots of insight with inspired lines of speculation, chasing threads and themes across disciplines and reacting in the margins with notes that often exceed the length of their source. These embedded gems are the happy by-product of her daily routine, which consists of close reading and deep thinking. Today she is the sole creative force behind Brain Pickings: a website and newsletter that provides an ongoing “inventory for the good life” to its several million subscribers.Īs its creator puts it, the average Brain Pickings weekly digest can contain links to “anything from an obscure Japanese short film to type design from the 1930s to the latest neuroscience breakthrough”. The sender was Maria Popova, an idealistic start-up employee trying to broaden her colleagues’ imaginative horizons.

Instead of the latest advertising news, it contained five links to interesting things: a menu of creative delights from outside the industry. Sometime around 2005, eight co-workers at a Pennsylvania advertising agency received an unusual email.

Figuring maria popova