I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it, and especially in our culture, where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about, and working on. On this episode, a wide-ranging conversation with

Maria Popova about science and poetry, about how to make meaning in an indifferent universe,

and about the value of dreaming. How incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.

Maria Popova is a writer and reader who was born and raised in Bulgaria during the final

years of communism. At 19, she immigrated alone to the United States, worked multiple jobs

while attending the University of Pennsylvania,

and began sending a weekly email to a handful of friends containing the most interesting things she had discovered that week.

That email eventually became brainpickings, which became the Marginalian,

one of the most beloved and enduring literary

and philosophical projects on the internet. For two decades, Maria has devoted herself

to tracing the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness,

all while building a body of work animated by

wonder and rigor. She is the author of Figuring, Traversal, the Universe and Verse, and Several

Beautiful Children's Books. Threaded through all of her work is a sustained meditation on

attention, wonder, and what it means to be fully alive.

Maria Popova, welcome back to Design Matters.

How wonderful and strange to be back here some 15 years later.

Yes.

Yes, our first interview was back in 2012.

And in that conversation, we talked quite a bit about your origin story. So I want to

...