Traversal

By: Maria Popova

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026-02-17

<p><b>From the <i>Marginalian </i>creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. <br><br></b>In <i>Traversal</i>, her startling and moving new book, 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? <br><br>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, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads—the world's 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 more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. <br><br>By turns epic and intimate—as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to each other—<i>Traversal </i>explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.</p>