Nerdette: Brain Pickings Creator Maria Popova

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Books, Self, Improvement, Pop, Tv, Wbez, Culture, Technology, Society & Culture, Nerds, Nerd, Nerdette

4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2017

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Maria Popova, the creator of the website Brain Pickings, explains how her job is to reflect on everything from literature and physics to astronomy and art. She tells Nerdette hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen about her rigorous daily diet of reading, writing, tweeting, and reflecting, as well as her newest guilty pleasure: Playing bridge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:32.4	A cornucopia of interestingness.
0:33.7	It's not fall.
0:34.9	Is it still okay to?
0:37.0	Oh, you can use cornucopia all year round.
0:40.9	I want that somewhere in the world.
0:48.2	From WBECD Chicago, this is Nerdette. I'm Trisha Bobita. And I'm Greta Johnson. Today we're talking to writer, blogger, philosopher, and self-described interestingness, hunter-gatherer, Maria Popova. Maria is best known for her blog Brain Pickings, which is a series of posts dedicated to, in her own words, what matters most in the world. From science to art and anthropology to design, Brain Pickings is a one-stop shop for basically everything you would ever want to learn or think about.
1:13.4	Brainpinkings started as a weekly email that Maria sent to just a few friends, and it's now read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
1:21.1	A few years ago, it was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, which means that it's internet forever, I guess.
1:28.2	Maria, welcome to Nuredette.
1:29.9	Such a pleasure to be with you, ladies.
1:31.8	So what is an interestingness hunter-gatherer? That's a fun phrase, but what does that mean to you?
1:37.1	It is, I suppose, the act of walking around with a little basket of intellectual hunger and filling it with little bites of satisfying knowledge and insight and curiosity and all of that that makes us human.
1:53.1	And so when that bucket is feeling empty, where do you go to get the things that you need?
1:57.7	What are the ways that you find new material and new things to be fueled by?
2:01.7	New snacks. New mind snacks. For a long time, I've said that literature is the original internet.
2:09.3	And any book you read, whenever there's a footnote, a citation, just a passing illusion,
	...

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