Michael: Alright Kevin, you’ve had the book for a week. Give it to me. Five-word review. Kevin: Okay, I’m ready. Brilliant, beautiful, but bring coffee. Michael: (Laughs) I'll take it! That’s fair. Mine is: History, love, science, art, connected. Kevin: That’s a lot to pack into one book. What are we talking about today? Michael: We are diving into the magnificent and, yes, very dense world of Figuring by Maria Popova. If you know her work from the beloved website Brain Pickings, you'll immediately recognize the style—it's this incredible, lyrical weave of philosophy, poetry, and history. Kevin: Right, and this is one of those books that gets rave reviews for its sheer brilliance, but a lot of readers also admit it’s a beast to get through. It’s not a light beach read. So I think our job today is to try and unpack this beautiful beast for everyone. Where do we even begin with a book that spans four centuries? Michael: We start with the title itself: Figuring. Popova isn't just telling stories; she's arguing that all of existence is a constant process of "figuring" and "reconfiguring" reality. For her, nothing and no one is isolated. We're all part of what she calls, borrowing from Martin Luther King, Jr., an "inescapable network of mutuality." Kevin: A network of mutuality. That sounds poetic, but what does it actually mean in practice? It feels a bit abstract. Michael: It is, but she makes it concrete with some incredible stories. And that’s our first big idea from the book: this concept of a "Web of Being," and how hidden, often messy, human connections are what truly shape genius and progress.

Kevin: Okay, a "Web of Being." Give me an example, because my brain immediately goes to a spiderweb, and I'm not sure that's what Popova is aiming for. Michael: (Laughs) Not exactly, though maybe there's some accidental beauty in that too. The perfect place to start is with one of the book's central figures: the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. We remember him as this monumental figure, the man who discovered the laws of planetary motion, who saw the cosmos as a great "clockwork" of divine reason. He’s looking up at the stars, figuring out the universe. Kevin: A true titan of science. The epitome of a lone genius, right? Michael: That's the myth Popova wants to dismantle. Because while Kepler is deep in his calculations, mapping the heavens, he gets news that yanks him right back down to Earth. His elderly, illiterate mother, Katharina, has been accused of witchcraft. Kevin: Wait, what? Kepler, the guy who's using math to define the solar system, has to go deal with his mom being accused of being a witch? How did that even happen? Michael: It's a heartbreakingly human story. The accusation came from a neighbor over a petty grudge and a financial dispute. But it gained traction because of local superstition and, get this, a misinterpretation of Kepler's own work. Years earlier, he had written one of the first works of science fiction, a story called Somnium, or The Dream. Kevin: Hold on. Johannes Kepler wrote science fiction? Michael: He did! It was a story about a voyage to the moon, and he used it as a clever way to explain the Copernican model—the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In the story, the narrator's mother is an herb-woman who conjures spirits to help him travel. Well, garbled versions of this story spread to his hometown, and people started whispering. His own mother was an herbalist, you see. They took his fiction and used it as "evidence" in a real-life witch trial. Kevin: That is absolutely insane. The man's imagination, the very thing fueling his scientific vision, gets twisted into a weapon against his own family. What did he do? Michael: He dropped everything. For six years, this great astronomer dedicated his life to defending his mother. He traveled across the country, assembled a legal defense, and wrote petition after petition. He used his brilliant, logical mind not to chart the stars, but to dismantle the absurd, superstitious accusations against Katharina, point by point. He essentially had to use scientific reasoning to fight medieval magical thinking. Kevin: Wow. So the man discovering the laws of the cosmos had to simultaneously fight against a total lack of reason on the ground. What does Popova say this tells us? Michael: This is the core of her argument. You cannot separate the transcendent pursuit of truth from the messy, tragic, deeply personal realities of life. Kepler's cosmic discoveries and his mother's witch trial aren't two separate stories; they are threads in the same web. His genius didn't exist in a vacuum. It was shaped by love, by duty, and by the painful collision of the world of reason with the world of superstition. He had to figure out both the heavens and the human heart. Kevin: So the "Web of Being" isn't just about ideas connecting, it's about our lives—our families, our tragedies—being fundamentally tangled up with our greatest work. Michael: Exactly. And Popova traces this web forward. Kepler’s work on planetary motion directly paved the way for Isaac Newton. And two centuries later, his discoveries inspired a young woman on a tiny island in America to pick up a telescope and look at the sky.

Kevin: And that brings us to the women in the book, who Popova seems to argue are often the most overlooked threads in this web. It’s one thing to be a genius like Kepler, but it seems like it's another thing entirely to be a female genius in a world not built for you. Michael: That’s the second huge idea in Figuring: the price of having a voice, especially for the pioneering women of the 19th century. Let's take that young woman who was inspired by Kepler's legacy: Maria Mitchell. She was born on Nantucket, and in 1847, she became America's first professional woman astronomer. Kevin: How? What did she do? Michael: She discovered a comet. From the roof of her father's workplace, with a small telescope, she spotted a blurry object no one had seen before. Her father, also an amateur astronomer, was ecstatic and insisted they report it. There was a gold medal on offer from the King of Denmark for the first person to discover a comet telescopically. Kevin: So she got the medal and became famous overnight? Michael: Almost not. In a perfect example of how chance and circumstance interfere, a massive storm hit Nantucket, and the mail boat couldn't leave the island for days. By the time her letter reached the Harvard Observatory, an astronomer in Europe had already spotted the same comet and reported it. Kevin: Oh, come on! She was first, but the mail was slow? That’s brutal. Michael: It was. But the American scientific community rallied behind her. They argued her case, and eventually, she was awarded the credit and the medal. The comet became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet." But for Popova, the real story isn't just the discovery; it's what Mitchell represents. She was a woman who, against all odds, carved out a space for herself in a field dominated entirely by men. Kevin: What was the personal cost for her, though? Popova seems really interested in the private lives behind these public achievements. Michael: Immensely. Mitchell reflected later in life that medals were small things "in the light of the stars," and that the only thing of real importance was goodness. She channeled her fame into education, becoming a professor at Vassar and inspiring a generation of young women. But she also navigated a world that didn't know what to do with a woman of her intellect and independence. This is a theme that explodes with the next figure Popova introduces: the writer and social reformer Margaret Fuller. Kevin: I feel like Margaret Fuller is one of those names I should know but don't. Who was she? Michael: She was a force of nature in the Transcendentalist movement, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. She was a brilliant intellectual, a journalist, and a fierce advocate for women's rights. In the 1840s, she published a foundational feminist text, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, arguing that women needed "self-dependence." She said a woman must be taught to find her fulfillment not in a man, but in herself. Kevin: That sounds incredibly modern. But I’m guessing that didn't go over well back then. Michael: Not at all. And this is where Popova’s non-linear style really shines. She shows how Fuller’s radical public ideas were forged in the fire of her private heartbreaks. Fuller had these incredibly intense, passionate relationships, often with women, that were full of unrequited love and intellectual infatuation. She fell deeply for a woman named Anna Barker, only to have Anna marry one of their mutual male friends. It was a devastating betrayal. Kevin: This is where some critics have noted that Popova can get a bit... rapturous. Does she romanticize this suffering, or does she show the raw, ugly side of it? Michael: That's a great question, and I think she does both. She doesn't shy away from the pain. She quotes Fuller's journals, which are filled with anguish. But she frames it as part of the "figuring" process. Fuller's heartbreak, her feeling of being an outsider, is precisely what fueled her public demand for a world where women could define their own lives and loves. Her personal sorrow became the "sinew," as Popova might say, that connected her to a larger cause. She turned her private pain into a public voice for generations of women. Kevin: So the argument is that their struggles weren't just obstacles to their work; in a way, their struggles were the work. Michael: Exactly. For Popova, the lives of these women—Mitchell, Fuller, the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, the poet Emily Dickinson—are not just stories of triumph despite their circumstances. They are stories of triumph because of them. They took the limitations, the heartbreaks, the societal dismissals, and transfigured them into art and science that changed the world.

Kevin: Okay, so when you put it all together—Kepler's witch trial, Maria Mitchell's comet, Margaret Fuller's heartbreaks—what's the big takeaway from Figuring? It’s clearly not just a collection of cool historical stories. Michael: You're right. The core message is that there's no such thing as a lone genius. Every breakthrough, every beautiful poem, every scientific discovery is built on a hidden scaffolding of other lives, other ideas, and often, a great deal of personal pain. Popova is arguing that the search for truth and the search for love are not separate quests. They are the same quest. They are both about "figuring"—figuring out our place in the cosmos and our place in each other's hearts. Kevin: And that process is never neat or linear. It’s messy, it’s contradictory, and it’s full of chance. Michael: Precisely. The book ends with this beautiful meditation on mortality, connecting the stardust that forms our bodies to the stardust we see through telescopes. It’s a reminder that we are all, quite literally, connected. And the lives we live, the love we give, the truths we seek—they all ripple out and become part of that vast, interconnected web. Kevin: That’s a powerful thought. It makes you wonder about the invisible connections in our own lives. Who are the forgotten figures—the mothers, the friends, the heartbroken lovers—who made our world possible? Michael: A perfect question to reflect on. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Who is an unsung hero from your own life or from history that you think deserves more recognition? Let us know on our social channels. We're always curious to see what you're all thinking. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.