Maybe it’s just me. But when I see a headline touting the (24) “genius grants” just given out by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, I think discoveries and inventions. I think of technology breakthroughs and medical cures. Apparently that’s way too narrow a perspective for those awarded those $625,000 “genius grants.”
It’s an eclectic group, to be sure, one that includes a chemist, a computational biologist, a stem cell biologist, a computer scientist, an environmental engineer and a neuroscientist–as well as a sociologist, a choreographer, a poet, a journalist-blogger, a set designer and a puppeteer.
Maybe it’s what happens when anonymous, agenda-driven groups make nominations and recommendations to the foundation’s board of directors. Or maybe it’s what happens when the aim is to recognize and reward talents and accomplishments across the societal spectrum. “Genius” is as unique as the humans it inspires. We need Mark Twain and Meryl Streep as well as Linus Pauling and Steve Jobs. They are as diversely relevant as the human condition is multifaceted.
And for what it’s worth, do we really need a pop-culture updating of Oscar Wilde that gives us a zombie apocalypse adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest? That’s not necessarily a rhetorical question.
It’s just me.