The romantic in this blogger (?) likes to imagine that John and Catherine MacArthur either watched a movie in 1932 — "If I Had a Million" — or an episode in the 1950s TV series — "The Millionaire" (1956-1960) — or both, and simultaneously looked at one another and said, "What if...?" Flash forward to the present and, since 1981, nearly a thousand recipients have received grants according to the following three criteria:
1. Exceptional creativity
2. Promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments
3. Potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
If this is a (fair & balanced) account of the genius of the United States of America, so be it.
PS: Even this humble blogger has known a MacArthur Fellow. (Hint: His name rhymes with Hurtin'.)
[x NY Fishwrap]
MacArthur Foundation Announces 25 New "Genius" Fellowships
By Sopan Deb
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
There was laundry to be done for Okwui Okpokwasili, a choreographer and performer, as she walked out of her Brooklyn home early last month toward a laundromat. She was getting ready to fly to Berlin that night and, adding to her irritation, she kept missing calls from an unidentified number.
When Ms. Okpokwasili, 46, returned the call, an automated voice message provided no clarity. Maybe she was getting spammed, she thought. Then her phone rang again showing the same number, and she picked up on the street. A man with a friendly voice asked if she was alone.
When Ms. Okpokwasili, 46, returned the call, an automated voice message provided no clarity. Maybe she was getting spammed, she thought. Then her phone rang again showing the same number, and she picked up on the street. A man with a friendly voice asked if she was alone.
“I was like, ‘This tone doesn’t feel like a spamming tone.’ So I dialed back my aggro-ness,” Ms. Okpokwasili said, and then she found a tree away from prying ears to stand under.
The man had been trying to get in touch to tell her she was receiving one of this year’s 25 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships. Commonly if not officially known as “genius” grants, they recognize “exceptional creativity” in various fields and come with no-strings-attached awards of $625,000 each, distributed over five years. [The annual award-installments of $125,000 are disbursed in monthly installments.]
[See the full list of winners.]
The selection process, and the people who choose the winners, are kept mostly confidential, but 20 to 30 fellows are picked every year, with the hope that the money and recognition will help spur more creative work. There are no applications for the award. Past winners include Lin-Manuel Miranda and David Simon, but most of the recipients are less well known.
Ms. Okpokwasili is a multidisciplinary performance artist whose solo show “Bronx Gothic,” inspired by her Bronx upbringing, won a Bessie, the dance world’s equivalent of the Tonys, in 2014. She said she reacted to the news of her MacArthur fellowship at first with confusion and shock. As she went through a whirlwind of emotions, she proceeded to the laundromat to take her clothes out of the dryer. Ms. Okpokwasili was so worked up that she took out someone else’s clothes.
A new reality was sinking in, she said in an interview last week: “I’m in a whole new tax bracket.”
This year’s winners, announced on Thursday, spanned several professions; they include a journalist, scientists, artists, musicians, writers and a human rights lawyer.
Ken Ward Jr., an investigative journalist who has reported for The Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia ever since he graduated from West Virginia University in 1990, received the call in his newsroom as he was going to the coffee maker. Mr. Ward, 50, has won acclaim for his dogged coverage of the coal industry, including the 2014 Elk River industrial chemical spill that left 300,000 people across nine counties without access to clean drinking water. Given the tumult of local newspapers all over the country — including the sale of The Gazette-Mail this year, causing layoffs — Mr. Ward was thankful and, of course, surprised by the fellowship, which gave him a “great sort of nest egg.”
“It’s a great kind of financial security for my family,” Mr. Ward said. “I hope to keep doing the kind of work I am doing and maybe find some ways to do some experimentation of other ways to do local journalism.”
One hitch for grantees is that they can tell only one person before the winners are announced. Sarah T. Stewart, a planetary scientist at the University of California-Davis, could tell only her husband, she said, even though she found out about the award a month ago, something she called “a form of torture.” Dr. Stewart studies planet formation, with a focus on planetary collisions — a key process in the growth and evolution of planets.
Through her labwork and modeling, Dr. Stewart, 45, has been able to increase understanding about Earth’s origin, and has proposed a new theory on how the moon was formed: It is the result of a synestia, a cloud of vaporized and molten rock produced when two objects collide at high velocity. Under Dr. Stewart’s theory, both the Earth and the Moon formed from the same synestia, which would explain why both share similar characteristics. She wasn’t quite sure what she would do with her $625,000.
“My personal goal is to do something new,” Dr. Stewart said. “I don’t want to do what I’m doing now because other agencies are already funding that. I’m thinking of it as an opportunity to do something creative and exactly what that is, I do not know. There may be some philanthropy involved but it will just not be the same.”
Livia S. Eberlin, who has been an analytical chemist at the University of Texas-Austin for almost three years, was sitting in her office expecting a call from someone else when the foundation called.
“I was in disbelief at first, but it sounded very official,” she said. Dr. Eberlin, 32, moved to the United States a decade ago after completing her undergraduate studies in Brazil, where she grew up.
After completing her PhD at Purdue University and a post-doctorate at Stanford University, she now develops chemical methods and technologies to measure molecules from clinical samples like tissues. This information is used to better detect diseases, including cancer. Her crowning achievement, she said, was the development of the MasSpec Pen, a hand-held device that can detect cancer by touching human tissue.
Although many MacArthur fellows have no political element to their work, many winners align with the foundation’s liberal values and mission (“creating a more just, verdant and peaceful world”). One winner this year is the Reverend Mr. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina pastor who has become a leading civil rights activist. In 2013, when he was still president of the North Carolina NAACP, he rose to prominence with “Moral Monday” protests in Raleigh to combat voting-rights restrictions. He spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and has been a vocal critic of President Trump.
On Thursday, when reached by The News & Observer, a Raleigh-based newspaper, Mr. Barber, 55, was in Chicago leading a demonstration in support of raising the minimum wage. “I’ve just been arrested in Chicago, and I’m waiting on their process,” Mr. Barber told The News & Observer. “For minimum wage, in front of McDonald’s headquarters.”
The foundation, which has long supported refugee and immigration causes and has been critical of Mr. Trump’s policies, also gave a fellowship to Becca Heller, a human rights lawyer who runs the International Refugee Assistance Project, or IRAP.
The organization, with a staff of 51 and 3,000 volunteers, provides legal aid to refugees from roughly 70 countries around the world, in addition to being politically active in immigration matters. When President Trump signed an executive order early in his presidency banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, Ms. Heller’s group organized lawyers to immediately head to airports to help travelers who were blocked from entering the country. IRAP also was one of the groups that challenged the travel ban in court. They ultimately lost before the Supreme Court, though the groups’ earlier court victories forced the president to modify his ban twice.
Ms. Heller, 36, said of her award, “I’m hoping that this allows us to shine a spotlight both on the issues facing refugees and immigrants, and also specifically on the cool and innovative things we’re trying to do to address the issues.”
Oh, and she’d also like to pay off her law school debt. ###
[Sopan Deb is a culture reporter for The New York Times.Prior to joining The Times in 2018, he worked for The Boston Globe, NBC News, Al Jazeera., and CBS News. Deb has also worked as a stand up comedian. He received the Edward R. Morrow Award for best docuemntary in 2011 for "Bill Russell: Larger Than Life." and Deb was named to Politico's 16 Breakout Media Stars of 2016. He received a BS (broadcast journalism) from Boston University (MA).]
Copyright 2018 The New York Times Company
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