Brainpickings picks at Leonardo's Brain
One of my favourite websites to scan on a daily basis is this long running curation of book reviews: brainpickings.org. It’s all about interestingness.
Maria Popova is a 34 year old Bulgarian woman, who has been living in New York, mostly, for the past 12 years and gave up her day job to created a website that is in the top 4000s in web traffic, it’s big, she has written more than 20,000 pages in the last eight years. She makes a substantial living from a cut from book sales from Amazon that she references, and donations.
Actually her productivity is frightening, she cranks out book reviews of a similar density to this one three times a day, five days a week, mostly by herself, ie, she finds obscure books, somehow, scans them, ie, speed reading, and writes her own take on it, dictates actually, while also cross referencing to similarly themed books she has reviewed. This essay is almost 5000 words, although that includes the quotes she has picked out and not all are so long. Somehow she sources the illustrations and pops the whole lot up, fully formed, on the internets.
Although English is not her native language I have yet to see a spelling mistake. Strangely she is also a fitness freak and does a lot of reading while riding a exercise bike at the gym.
Of course I don’t always share her particular obsessions, but I do appreciate her observations now and again. Today’s article on Leonardo’s brain is a good place to start.