Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984)[not verified in body] is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet,[1] and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.

[12] 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 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.

"[8] She 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.

[12][excessive quote] 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".

I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message.Popova has written for The Atlantic,[12][15] Wired UK,[12] GOOD,[12] The Huffington Post,[16] and NiemanLab.

Krista Tippett in On Being describes it as "[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.

[14] 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.

5 on the New York Times bestseller list upon publication, Popova examines connections between a variety of scientists, writers, and artists, many of them women, and how they created meaning in their lives.

"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.

][27] Additionally, Popova serves as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, run by Noodle.

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?

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?

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.

Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, California, wrote a post on an anonymous Tumblr blog calling Popova out for her actions.

This proposed method is an attempt to codify source attribution on the internet to ensure that the intellectual labor of information discovery is honored.

[32] In that blog post, Marco Arment stated that "codifying 'via' links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem".

[32] Most criticism[weasel words] of The Curator's Code voiced uncertainty about its ability to solve the problems of online attribution.