Maria Popova

An exercise in metadesign: a design book about design books points amateurs and experts alike to beauty and inspiration

Nathalie Miebach crosses disciplinary boundaries to combine data visualization with color, shape, and sound

The Israeli illustrator’s images of everyone from Einstein and Stalin to Bill Murray crackle with humor, smarts, and wit

From a teahouse for geishas-in-training to a hut in the Amazon, a book captures the diversity of kids’-room interior design

A weird and wonderful almanac of the lovable geeks who immortalized passion for science on their living flesh from a celebrated writer

What Richard Dawkins has to do with Hindu deities, from evil stepmothers to Edward Gorey, and a posthumous work from Shel Silverstein

This year’s list of the best food books includes everything from a 48-pound behemoth with over 1,000 recipes to a look at menu design.

Why “information overload” is the wrong lens through which to consider the issue, or what sugar and fat have to do with Hollywood junk.

20 of today’s most exciting artists redesign the childhood staple.

The power of the synthesizing mind and the building blocks of combinatorial creativity

How a British admiral shaped the language

A literature-inspired cookbook reveals how some beloved poets nourished their creativity.

A new book offers a glimpse of the Muppeteer’s early drafts of his now-beloved characters.

A guide from German opera legend Lilli Lehmann

The innate biases that cause us to adjust our perceptions and memories toward the positive give us unique advantages.

The ‘Great Gatsby’ author’s surprisingly blunt advice to would-be writers

Dark matter, according to Lisa Randall, may be responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs and the subsequent rise of mammals.

In “Black Hole Blues,” Janna Levin tells the story of science’s attempt to listen to the cosmos.

There, at the bottom of being, where the water that makes aaathis planet a world aaaaaais the color of spacetime the octopus— with

Maria Popova shines a light on the late astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson with the help of Patti Smith, Ohara Hale, and Zoë Keating.