Traversal

About this book

"In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light."

About the author

Maria Popova

28 July 1984

Author of *The Marginalian* (formerly *Brain Pickings*) Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet, 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. In 2006, she started the blog *Brain Pickings*, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free. The blog, renamed to *The Marginalian* upon its 15th birthday in 2021, features her writing on books, 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, …