Maria Popova

Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal (as of 2012, 3 million page views and more than 1 million monthly readers), 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.

Maria Popova was born on 28 July 1984, in Bulgaria. Popova's parents are ethnic Bulgarians, who, asnoted by Bruce Feiler for The New York Times, "met as teenage exchange students in Russia... [h]er father... an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman... her mother... studying library science." In interview, Popova states that in childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias. Because of her grandmother's influence, Popova was exposed to a vast amount of knowledge at a young age, which fueled her curiosity about the world. As recounted in interview to Geoff Wolinetz of Bundle.com, Popova first worked when she was about 8 years old, making the Bulgarian yarn folk art dolls called martenitsas, worn beginning on the first of March (Baba Marta Day) where Popova describes selling them on the street as children would sell drinks at a lemonade stand.

Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria in 2003. She relocated to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree in communications, though for years, up to 2012, her grandmother had wanted her to get an MBA. Popova paid for her tuition by working four part-time jobs on top of a full college course load: as an advertising representative for The Daily Pennsylvanian, as an intern for a local writer, as an employee for a work-study job at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and as a staff member for a small start-up advertising agency in Philadelphia.

In 2005, while Popova worked at an advertising agency, she noticed that her co-workers were circulating information within the advertising industry around the office for inspiration. However, Popova thought creativity was better sparked with exposure to information outside of the industry one was familiar with. In an effort to stir creativity, she regularly sent emails to the entire office containing five things that had nothing to do with advertising, but were meaningful, interesting, or important. Because of the popularity of the emails, Popova felt that there was an "intellectual hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning."

Popova told her boss that she would start her own mailing for inspiration, and called this mailing Brain Pickings. She then enrolled in a night class to learn web design, took Brain Pickings online, and let the project grow organically.

Popova describes the period of coming to the U.S. to Hannah Levintova of Mother Jones; in this 2012 interview she states:

I didn’t immigrate. I’m here on a visa, and I’m not an American citizen. I don’t know if you followed the... situation in 2007 and 2008? ... Every year, the government has a visa quota—they will give, say, 65,000 H1-B work visas for foreigners who are going to work in the country for an American company. And so, normally, they would open up the application process, and the quota would run out in the first three weeks... So, after graduation, I had a job [lined up], and we applied for that visa, but that was the year “Visagate” happened: The first day of applications, for the first time in history, the government got three times their quota on the very first day. So, they panicked and thought the only thing to do was to make it a raffle for everyone that applied on the first day, and then automatically reject everyone after that. So, we’d filed for the first day, but I was in the two-thirds that didn’t get it, so the whole envelope got returned unopened. So then I got the OPT [Optional Practical Training]—which entitles you to a year’s worth of work with a company within the scope of your major. We tried again in 2008, and same thing—the whole envelope got returned unopened. So, I had to leave the country! I went back to Bulgaria for a year.

Popova describes returning to Bulgaria in 2008 in interview to the Bulgarian news journal Capital, and how she and a trio of friends organized a conference modeled after the American TED Talks, which they called "TEDxBG". Popova further describes the outcome of the events—her eventual visa receipt—to Mother Jones: "When the application process lightened up... I moved to LA—which I really resented more than anyone’s ever resented a city in the history of resenting cities. And now I’m finally in New York, and I’m here to stay." As of 2012, she was living in Brooklyn.

If something interests me and is both timeless and timely, I write about it. Much of what is published online is content designed to be dead within hours, so I find most of my material offline. I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message.

— Popova in December 2012

Popova has written for The Atlantic, Wired UK, GOOD, The Huffington Post, and NiemanLab. She is most notable for Brain Pickings, a blog that she beganin 2006 as a email sent each week to seven of her friends, and, as described by Krista Tippett in On Being, it is "[n]ow a website, Twitter feed, and weekly digest... cover[ing] a wide variety of cultural topics: history, current events, and images and texts from the past." It includes several sections and has graphics, photographs, and illustrations in addition to written content.

As of December 2012, The Guardian was reporting that the blog had "1.2 million readers a month and 3m page views". Anne-Marie Slaughter describes Popova's blog as "like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour."

Side projects and partnerships

In addition to running Brain Pickings, Popova has a number of side projects. She maintains aTwitter account, and a newsletter. While Google+ was active, she maintained a presence there. In 2012, she created the "Literary Jukebox", a sub-site where she matches quotes from books with songs. "Music, for me, is an enormous trigger of mnemonic associations – of time, place, mood, emotion, the smell of fresh-cut grass behind your best friend’s house when you were 18 and first heard that song."

Popova also has various partnerships with prominent organizations. She is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Additionally, Popova serves as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, run by Noodle. She edits Explore, a partnership site with the Noodle educational search company.

Content selection and output

Popova filters through the large amounts of content she reads each day through a detailed selection process. When choosing content for Brain Pickings, she asks herself three things:

Is it interesting enough to leave the reader with something – a thought, an idea, a question – after the immediate fulfillment of the self-contained reading or viewing experience? Is it evergreen in a way that makes it just as interesting in a month or a year? Am I able to provide enough additional context – historical background, related past articles, complementary reading or viewing material – or build a pattern around it to make it worth for the reader?

When choosing material to publish on Brain Pickings, she aims to "share content that is meaningful. Often, it’s timeless." Popova also seeks out content that has narrative. As she states, "Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view." Popova publishes this information in tweet form when she does not have much to add.On the other hand, she publishes this as blog posts when she feels she can deepen the subject with historical background or additional materials.

Awards and recognitions

Maria Popova has received numerous instances of media recognition for her work. In 2012, she was named number 51 of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine. Popova was featured in 30 under 30 by Forbes as one of the most influential individuals in Media and was listed on “The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2012 List” by Time magazine. Popova’s work has also been spotlighted and profiled in publications such as The New York Times.

Affiliate advertising

Popova has been very vocal about her dislike for traditional advertising, and has repeatedly expressed her pride on being advertising-free:

It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.

In 2013, Popova received criticism on how she championed her site to be "ad-free" and a "labor of love" that requires reader donations to sustain itself, while she covertly received revenue from affiliate advertising from Amazon. Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, California, wrote a post on an anonymous Tumblr blog calling Popova out for her actions. Using his own calculations, Bleymaier extrapolated that Popova could make anywhere between $240,000 and $432,000 a year with these affiliate advertisements.

This received much media attention from sources such as Reuters and PandoDaily.

This incident has sparked a more general debate on the Internet about whether or not affiliate advertisements are "sneaky" or "deceptive". Popova has since updated her donation page on Brain Pickings to acknowledge the fact that she receives income from affiliate advertisements.

Curator's Code

In 2012, Popova created The Curator's Code, a project (now suspended) by Popova with input from designer Kelli Anderson. The Curator’s Code is a code of conduct for curators on the web to use. This proposed method is an attempt to codify source attribution on the internetto ensure that the intellectual labor of information discovery is honored. Under the code, the "via" symbol indicates direct discovery, where the "hat tip" symbol indicates an indirect link of discovery.

The Curator's Code was controversial, and received mixed responses. The announcement of this project elicited feedback from one blogger who "worr[ied] about the meaning of curation". In that blog post, Marco Arment stated that "codifying 'via' links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem". Most criticism of The Curator’s Code voiced uncertainty about its ability to solve the problems of online attribution. A few critics argued that the problems of online attribution are not due to a lack of codified syntax, but rather due to the "economics and realities of online publishing".

Popova has sought to maintain a degree of personal anonymity, with emphasis on her writing rather than on herself.

Popova has participated in amateur bodybuilding. She states in interview that she "fell into" the world of bodybuilding during her freshman year at University of Pennsylvania, when her dormitory's Resident Adviser recommended she compete in a bodybuilding show, although she no longer competes.