Traversal
Maria Popova
Available as Hardback, eBook
12 March 2026
From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life
In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?
Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions – 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. Woven throughout their stories are other threads – the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue – which come together to create a rich tapestry of life’s meaning; exploring what it is that makes life alive and worth living.
By turns epic and intimate, Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
“What a brave and beautiful book. Maria Popova has a great gift for seeing the invisible threads that bind us, science and poetry, across space and time”
James Gleick
See more reviews
“Maria Popova is a national treasure. She combines poetic writing with prodigious historical research, a wide ranging mind, and an extraordinary ability to connect literature and events from different places and times. Traversal is an intellectual feast of discovery and imagination”
Alan Lightman
”Praise for Maria Popova’s Figuring: Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry … To read Figuring is to be immersed in a gloriously ambitious symphony of ideas that segues effortlessly”
guardian
“Ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying”
new York Times
“I can’t pull myself away from Maria Popova’s mesmerising new book Figuring … With glorious writing, storytelling, gems of insight and unique literary range, she tenderly brings to life celebrated scientists and artists we always thought we knew but really didn’t, and illuminates the fine threads that connect us all. I’m diving back in!”
Diane Ackerman
Maria Popova
Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning - sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse - a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry - has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.
themarginalian.org