Maria Popova

Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) was an Irish pacifist, prison reformer and crystallographer. She was one of the first two women elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1945, first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography, and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the outgrown name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, editor of A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, and maker of The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.



The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, th privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another.

Consolations

David Whyte

One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet's letters in my friend Wendy's backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality.

Figuring

Maria Popova