How Maria Popova keeps print alive on her blog

Brain Pickings is a blog I link to quite often. Probably my favorite blog on the internet. It's also ad-free. It's run by a woman named Maria Popova.

Popova is amazing at what she does. The blog is updated a few times a day and is full of posts about creativity, authors, and inspiration, but not in the corny, self-help way. I probably mail every third post on that blog to someone I know and care about because I want to share it. Some of her material she gets from print books and she posts summaries. Other stuff she'll bring together different or even disagreeing opinions from Ted talks or other presentations.

Here's the description of the blog from the about page:

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are.

She uses that term- "interestingness"- twice in the description. And it's a strange word that really says it all, both in the word in itself and in the fact that it's just this little twist on a word we all know and have gotten used to.

The way she defines and shares that interestingness is amazingly good for an author's brain. It's worked wonders for me, pointing me to lists and tips from famous authors, to talks I never would have found on my own, and to clips from old books I would never have taken the time to flip through.

Have you read Brain Pickings? What did you think?

Image source: Brain Pickings