The Genius Chronicles

Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before?

Version 7 with updates: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

A Working Paper • October 2018
William L. Benzon
 The Genius Chronicles:
Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before?
Version 7 with updates: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

William L. Benzon
October 2018

Abstract: The MacArthur Fellows Program would be more effective in supporting creatives if it
simply stopped giving fellowships to people with secure jobs at elite institutions; they don’t need
help in order to function. This paper elaborates that argument; considers three fellows gifted in the
first year; examines the problems involved in evaluating talent; and evaluates three elite schools. It
concludes by looking at the careers of Louis Armstrong, John von Neumann, and Richard
Feynman.

The MacArthur Fellows: Why Look for Geniuses? ....................................................................... 3

MacArthur Fellowships: Let the Geniuses Be Free ...................................................................... 6
The Hunt for Genius, Part 2: The Big Sort ................................................................................. 18
The Hunt for Genius, Part 3: Cultural Factors ............................................................................ 25
The Hunt for Genius, Part 4: Gestalt Version ............................................................................ 27
The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools ....................................................................... 28
MacArthur Fellowship Update 2014: Still favoring elite institutions ......................................... 36
Big Macs for 2015: Same Old Same Old .................................................................................... 38
23 Big Macs for 2016: More special sauce for the elite few ....................................................... 43
2017: More pennies from heaven, once again the MacArthur Foundation waffles in its
distribution of Big Macs ........................................................................................................... 46
2018: Extra catsup & double cheese! MacArthur Foundation slathers 25 with that BIG MAC
$pecial $auce ........................................................................................................................... 49
Louis Armstrong and the Snake-Charmin’ Hoochie-Coochie Meme ........................................... 54
From Two Geniuses to the Rest of Us ....................................................................................... 57
Four Extraordinarily Creative Communities, But Maybe Five .................................................... 60

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bbenzon@mindspring.com

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The MacArthur Fellows: Why Look for Geniuses?

As examples of the kinds of people I mean by the word “genius”, consider the following list:
Voltaire, John von Neumann, Pāṇini, St. Augustine, Sappho, Cervantes, Florence Nightingale,
Sequoia, Murasaki Shikibu, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Goethe and
Mozart. Those are people of such an exalted nature that we wouldn’t expect more than one per
class of MacArthur Fellows (Big Macs if you will), if that. If that’s the standard, then perhaps the
real question is whether or not the program has identified any geniuses at all. And it’s likely we’re
not going to know for awhile, as it takes time for individual contributions to work their way into
and through the culture.
Of course, the foundation itself has never said it was on the prowl for geniuses:
Journalists and others sometimes use “genius grant” as a shorthand reference for the
MacArthur Fellowship. We avoid using the term “genius” to describe MacArthur Fellows
because it connotes a singular characteristic of intellectual prowess. The people we seek to
support express many other important qualities: ability to transcend traditional boundaries,
willingness to take risks, persistence in the face of personal and conceptual obstacles,
capacity to synthesize disparate ideas and approaches. 1
But I wonder what would have happened if the “genius” label hadn't been stuck to the MacArthur
Fellows Program. Would the it have taken hold in the public imagination – to the extent that it has,
which isn't up there with the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammies, but it’s pretty high – without that
label?
That seems unlikely. The term “genius” has an immediate impact. The phrase
“exceptionally capable individual,” for example, does not, and it just gets worse if you add further
qualifications, such as that these individuals are pursuing ideas and projects off the beaten track.
No, if the program was to get any traction in the public mind, then “genius” it had to be.
That the term got stuck on the Fellows Program by journalists rather than by the foundation
is a public relations bonus. And as long as the term sticks, the program can distance itself from the
term all it wants to without, in fact, threatening the publicity.
For that, as Waldemar Nielsen noted in 1997 (see page 12 below), is what the program is.
It’s public relations not simply for the MacArthur Foundation, but for the world of elite
foundations. The genius grants put a meritocratic sheen on a system that is permeated by cronyism.
What is more disturbing – for cronyism, after all, is an old story – is that we live in a world
undergoing massive and potentially cataclysmic change, not only intellectually and artistically, but
in social, cultural, and political systems, and in our relationship to the environment. In such a world
we desperately need new ideas, not further assurances that the old institutions have things well in
hand.
People need hope for the future. They need to believe that the world is somehow on their
side. The possibility that a genius can be picked out of the cornfield or the alleyway and do great
things, that is a comforting belief. It says that the world CAN change for the better.
But the MacArthur Foundation isn’t looking for the most gifted people in America, they’re
looking for the best ones in a certain very diffuse social network. And that social network is biased
toward an institutional world rooted in the 19th Century. By awarding a high percentage of their
fellowships – a two-thirds majority in 2013, 55% for 2013-2018 – to people who have jobs at elite
institutions the MacArthur Fellows Program reinforces the network of institutions that are failing
us. They could do better, but they won’t.

1
See more at: http://www.macfound.org/fellows-faq/#sthash.9PqkjNhw.dpuf

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 *****

When I set out to write the first piece in this series, which I posted under the title “MacArthur
Fellowships: Let the Geniuses Be Free”, I had in mind a modest post of, say, a 1000 or 1500 words.
I figured that I’d make the long-standing complaint, that the foundation’s too conservative in its
choices, cite an article or two to that effect – I had in mind a particular article in The New York
Times Magazine from some years back, which I did find and cite – and offer the simple suggestion
that they exclude people with elite jobs from the awards.
While I do believe that elite institutions – such as Harvard, or the Scripps Research
Institute – are inherently conservative, that wasn’t at the core of my thinking. No, my core idea was
much simpler: people at those institutions have an income; therefore they can function. Give the
money to someone who doesn’t have a stable income, or must work a “day job” in order to
survive. That’s a better use of these “genius” funds.
But then I read Nielsen’s remark, thought about it, and that short post just grew and grew.
Yes, it’s PR, for the foundation world. And if my suggestion were adopted, the Fellows Program
would break from that world, if only in a small way, and perhaps loosen things up a bit. That one
1500 word post grew to over 6000 words. Even then, when I’d posted it, I thought I was done. But
I wasn’t.
I started thinking about just what’s involved in judging talent. What’s the difference
between identifying the best sprinter in the world, which is about something that can be determined
objectively and identifying the best gymnast, which is a matter of judgment? How do you spot up
and comers of either kind when they’re only ten years old? But whether it’s sprinting or
gymnastics, the sport is not so deeply conditioned by cultural factors, as is physics or dance. That
became my second post, The Hunt for Genius, Part 2: The Big Sort. In the third post – The Hunt
for Genius, Part 3: Cultural Factors – I looked specifically at culture. The forth post – Gestalt
Version – was a quickie, a visual aid.
I rounded out the series with an autobiographical post in which I looked at my experience
with three elite institutions, The Johns Hopkins University, where I went to undergraduate school,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I held my first and only faculty job, and the English
Department at SUNY Buffalo. First, I was reminded of how many very accomplished people it has
been my privilege to work with in the first half of my life – and I certainly didn’t mention all of
them. THAT’s what you get when you attend an elite institution, access to some superb people,
even if there’s a lot of high-class deadwood around also.
Second, I was reminded that, for a decade or so, the English Department at the State
University of New York at Buffalo was the kind of institution that the MacArthur Fellowship
Program pretends to be. No, there weren’t geniuses falling out the windows, though the best people
there were very good indeed, and there was more than a handful of them. It was the institution
itself that was special. The Department respected creativity and managed to foster it despite being
part of a large state university. That Department knew that the world was changing and worked to
help the change along. For what it’s worth, that post has been by far the most popular one in the
series. It has gotten more “hits” than the other posts combined.
Finally, I’ve appended three pieces that aren’t about the MacArthur Fellows program. One
of them is about Louis Armstrong or, rather, it’s about the cultural milieu in which he became
great. In the context of this series, it’s about the intimate relation between culture and society, on
the one hand, and, well, genius. Then I’ve got a double book review that examines biographies of
two scientific geniuses, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. But in locating them in the
transition from slide rules and mental calculation to electronic calculators and PCs, it too speaks to
the importance of cultural context.

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 Finally, I added a piece about creative communities, which complements the material in
The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite School (pp. 28 ff.). There I point out that while, e.g.,
Shakespeare was a genius of the highest order, he didn’t work alone. He was always associated
with a theatrical company and he always wrote specifically for the players in the company. Alas,
we aren’t privy to the inner workings of the companies, we have no records, but isn’t it reasonable
to think that he took suggestions from the members of the company, or that they improvised a bit
on stage when they forgot a line? That’s what happened with Duke Ellington, and we’ve got
testimony on that.
If there is a message to this series, that’s it. Genius, the real phenomenon of individuals
who change the world, is as much about the world they change as it is about them. They cannot
be separated. Genius isn’t a mystic elixir that a few have but most of us do not. It is more elusive
even than that.

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MacArthur Fellowships: Let the Geniuses Be Free

I’ve been following the MacArthur Fellowship program from the beginning. Like many, I’ve
thought it too conservative in its pick of fellows. I long ago decided that the foundation could
improve matters by adopting a simple rule: don’t award fellowships to anyone who has stable
employment at an elite institution.
My reasoning was simple: if they’ve got an elite job, they can eat and they can work.
Depending on the job, they may not have as much time for creative work as they’d like to have.
But they’ve got more time than they’d have if they had to wait tables, do temp word-processing, or
teach five adjunct courses a term spread across three different schools. They can function
creatively.
That puts them ahead those who are so busy scratching for a living that they cannot
function creatively at all.
When I set out to write this post, that’s all I had in mind. I’d reiterate the standard
complaint about MacArthur’s programmatic constipation, with appropriate links here and there,
and then offer up my one simple suggestion. I figured it for a thousand or maybe fifteen hundred
words.
But then things started getting interesting, and more complex. So I’ve had to write a much
longer post. I’ve not given up on that simple idea, nor have I augmented it. But I have a richer and
more interesting rationale for it. That’s what this post has become.

The Genius Grants

I don’t know when I first heard that the newly formed Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation would
“be looking for gifted but impecunious poets, promising young composers, research scientists in
midcareer and other ‘exceptionally talented people’”, as The New York Times2 put it in 1980, but,
like many creative people, I thought to myself: At last, a foundation that’s looking for (people like)
me. The article went on to say:
Many foundation programs have sought to assist scholars and artists...but most have
required that the would-be fellows already have achieved some public recognition. Unlike
most others, the new fellowships will permit the recipients to choose entirely new fields of
interest, with no requirement that the fellowship lead to the completion of a project,
publication, or even a progress report.
Just what I need, thought I to myself, just what I need. It would allow me to blow this pop stand
and get some real work done.
As Roderick MacArthur, son of the foundation’s benefactor, John D. MacArthur, would
put it in 1981:
“This program,” Mr. MacArthur said, “is probably the best reflection of the rugged
individualism exemplified by my father - the risky betting on individual explorers while
everybody else is playing it safe on another track.”
“If only a handful produce something of importance - whether it be a work of art or a
major breakthrough in the sciences - it will have been worth the risk.”
My name wasn’t on the first list or on any subsequent list.
Nor, I tentatively decided in that first year, was the foundation deeply interested in people
like me, people whose work did not fit into conventional categories and thus would be ineligible

2
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F10815F7395C11728DDDA00A94DB405B8084F1D3

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for conventional foundation largesse. Rather, given the foundation’s actual practice, it is clear that
the MacArthur Fellows Program has been funding pretty much the same people funded by every
other foundation and government agency.
The major distinguishing characteristic of a MacArthur Fellowship is that you don’t have
to do anything to justify the funding; nor, for that matter, can you actually apply for support. The
support comes to you, unbidden, and once you start cashing the checks, you are under no obligation
complete a stated project nor submit any reports. This is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would
say, but this goodness is of little comfort to those who don’t get a MacArthur Fellowship.
None of these observations are new. They’ve been made ever since the foundation began
awarding the fellowships. Assuming that the foundation really does want to identify and gift those
who “boldly go where no man has gone before”; identifying those people is extraordinarily
difficult, if not impossible. Those observations, even if accurate, don’t suggest any way to improve
things.
My purpose in this essay, then, is not to come up with rules and procedures so the
MacArthur Foundation can go about THAT task the right way. I don’t think there is a right way.
The task is impossible.
Rather, I want to do two things. First, I argue that the MacArthur Fellows Program
functions to provide the foundation world with a cosmetic device whereby it can pat itself
vigorously on the back for going boldly where none have gone before while continuing to fund the
same suspects. Second, I argue that the best thing the Foundation could do at this point is simply to
stop awarding fellowships to people who have secure employment at elite institutions. That’s a
simple, but in view of my larger argument, no longer a simple-minded, suggestion.

What’s a Genius and How Do You Spot One?

The MacArthur Fellows program has been associated with the word “genius” almost since its
inception, though the word is not part of the foundation’s official branding. But what’s a genius?
In perhaps its most pedestrian meaning, a genius is one of the people staffing the Genius
Bar in an Apple retail store. Moving up a rung in pertinence, a genius is anyone who scores above a
certain level on any of a number of standardized tests. In this sense “genius” is tied in with the
measurement of intelligence (IQ), which implies the question: what is intelligence? This is a
controversial, messy, and interesting business, but not quite relevant to the MacArthur
Foundation’s quest to hunt the wild genius.
The sense of genius I’m after is the ordinary sense, the original sense if you will, the sense
that in fact drives the others. Let’s consult the wisdom of the crowd on this, that is, the Wikipedia:
A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality,
typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight.
There is no scientifically precise definition of genius, and the question of whether the
notion itself has any real meaning has long been a subject of debate.3
That seems more or less right, with no precise rightness in sight.
These geniuses, informally defined, are towering figures of creative invention, for
example, Albert Einstein, Margaret Sanger, Pablo Picasso, the Marx Brothers, Josephine Baker,
Walt Disney, Igor Stravinsky, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Wolfe, and so forth (confining the list to
the 20th Century). These geniuses plant the seeds from which subsequent artistic, intellectual, and
social practices grow.
Presumably those are the people the MacArthur Foundation was seeking to gift, and it was
set on identifying them before their seeds had born much, if any, fruit. And that’s the problem.
How do you judge?

3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius

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 If you’re looking for the world’s fastest sprinter, you run a race and see who wins. The
criterion for judging is straightforward. That is not the case in physics, poetry, community
organizing, or any other pursuit for which MacArthurs have been or should be awarded. You judge
a person’s accomplishment in such matters by examining their work in relation to existing relevant
work. If it’s like some of that work, then they’re not a genius. Though their work might be very
excellent indeed, they aren’t breaking new ground.
If, however, their work is obviously different, now we’ve got something to think about.
And what we’ve got to think about is whether or not the work will prove to be solid, lasting, and
seminal, or whether it will prove to be the unsubstantial contraption of a crank. How do you make
THAT call?
It’s difficult enough to make such a judgment in a field you know through your own direct
participation in it. But how do you make such a judgment in a field to which you are a stranger?
For that, in the end, is how the call is made.
According to the foundation4, the nominees are “evaluated by an independent Selection
Committee composed of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities professions, and
for-profit and nonprofit communities.” The committee members cannot possibly expert in all the
areas covered by the nominees. They have to trust the assorted judgments of a rather large funnel
of people who make the original nominations, supply information, evaluate, winnow, and so forth.
At the large end of the funnel the original nominators (over 100 in any year) nominate 2000
candidates.5 At the small end of the funnel we have that selection committee of “about a dozen
leaders”. In between, a plethora of judgments by staff and others.
Think again, then, about how this goes. The best, but rare, situation faced by anyone in this
funnel is that they are evaluating non-standard work in a field they know well. Most of the time,
however, any given winnower will be faced with work in a field they don’t know well enough even
to judge whether or not the work is standard or innovative. How can such a process possibly work?
I further note that whole process is based on the premise that, whatever genius IS, it is
lodged in certain people, and only certain people, as an essence. I question that. I think there IS a
genius phenomenon, but that it lies in the relationship between a gifted individuals and the world.
When an individual’s gifts meet a need in the world, magic can happen. We need to facilitate the
matching process. We can’t do that by selecting the same kinds of people to fit the same kinds of
holes.
An engineer whose gifts fit well with the needs of an emerging world moving toward
internal combustion engines is not going to be selected by a committee whose members commute
to work by horse and buggy. You can monkey with the committee’s rules and procedures all you
want, but as long as they live in a horse and buggy world they’re not going to see genius in any
internal combustion engineer.
That, in effect, is the situation we face. The world is changing, but the elites of the
foundation world are looking to the past, not the future.

Three Examples from the First Class

Let’s look at three somewhat different examples from the Fellowship Program’s first year. Twenty-
one fellows were announced in May of 1981 and twenty more were announced in November. In
discussing these cases I have the advantage of hindsight that the original selection committee could
not have had.
Let’s start with an easy call, Robert Penn Warren.6 FAIL.

4
http://www.macfound.org/pages/about-macarthur-fellows-program/
5
http://www.macfound.org/media/files/MacArthur_Fellows_Program_Review_final_1.pdf
6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Penn_Warren

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 At 76 he was the oldest member of that first class and something of a flagship. He’d won
pretty near every literary prize except the Nobel, including three Pulitzers, one for fiction and two
for poetry, making him the only person ever to win for both fiction and poetry. He was cofounder
of The Southern Review, had written textbooks that had seen decades of use in undergraduate
literature courses, and had one of his novels, All the King’s Men, made into a major Hollywood
movie. It won an Oscar back in 1949. In 1986 he became the first Poet Laureate of the United
States.
It’s hard to imagine a more thoroughly established man of letters than Robert Penn Warren.
Maybe he was bleeding edge and interdisciplinary in 1935, but not in 1981. By then his pioneering
days were long gone. No, the committee who gave this distinguished man a MacArthur either didn't
have a clue about creativity or knew it well enough and didn't approve of it.
Henry Louis Gates (aka Skip)7 is a tougher call. In 1981 he was a rising star in African-
American studies and an assistant professor at Yale. He’s now Alphonse Fletcher University
Professor at Harvard University, director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African
American Research, and his CV is 29 pages long8, including over a page of honorary degrees. It’s
hard to imagine a more distinguished member of the academy.
But is he, has he proven to be, a “genius”?
He’s written a lot, and I’d guess that his non-academic page count exceeds his academic
page count, though I’ve not actually attempted the count. The page count, in whatever category, is
at best secondary. It’s the idea count, and the depth of those ideas, that matters.
I’ve read a number of his articles, and I’ve read his major scholarly work, The Signifying
Monkey (1989). It is of course excellent work. But it is also thoroughly of its time and ethos, and
that ethos is fading. It does not change how we think about literature in any deep way; it does not
lay the foundations of new methods of analysis and explanation. If we had to justify that
MacArthur on the basis of Gates’ ideas, then I’d say it hasn’t been proved out.
But that’s not all he’s done. He used the MacArthur money in part to go digging through
the archives, where he discovered a heretofore-unrecognized African-American novel, Our Nig
(1859), by Harriet E. Wilson. I’ve read, though can offer no citation, that Gates regards that
discovery as justification for his MacArthur.
Perhaps so. If he’d discovered that on a Guggenheim I’d say, sure, no problem; the
money’s justified. But Guggenheims have been around since 1925 and exist in the world of
conventional and established philanthropy. The MacArthur Fellowships were supposed to be more
venturesome. So again, and alas, thumbs down.
There’s still more. Gates has done quite a bit of popular work, essays, books, op-eds, TV
and film, and is an institution builder. In and of itself I’d say it’s not enough. We’ve seen this
before.
What happens when you put all of this together, the ideas, the archival work, and the
entrepreneurship? Does it add up to “genius”? My right hand wants to say “no” but my left hand
hesitates. But I’ve also just read a post by Lester Spence, Gates’ Coup and the Search for a Public
Black Studies9, in which he points out that Gates’s institution-building is in service of institutions
grounded in the 19th Century. We’ve got to get beyond those institutions.
So, on that score, I’m going to have to say that Gates’s institution-building counts against
him. It’s a tougher call than Robert Penn Warren, but I’m afraid it’s the same call: FAIL.
Will the third time be a charm? No one’s ever accused Steve Wolfram10 of being charming.
Arrogant and abrasive, yes, charming, no. But is he brilliant and creative?

7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_Gates
8
http://www.aaas.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/faculty/curricula_vitae/henry_louis_gates_jr._cv.pdf
9
http://www.lesterspence.com/2013/10/10/gates-coup-and-the-search-for-a-public-black-studies/
10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram

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 At 21, he was the youngest member of that MacArthur class. He also had a doctorate in
physics and was on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. He’s best known for two
things, his work in complexity, including his controversial door-stopper, A New Kind of Science
(2002, full text online11), and Mathematica12, a computer program for sophisticated mathematical
manipulation that is in wide use.
I own and have read much of A New Kind of Science, but am not in a position to have a
serious opinion on whether or not this is indeed a new kind of science. I find it interesting and
provocative in various ways (e.g. the idea of computational irreducibility); but it doesn’t come
close enough to my core interests (culture, its description, and its neural implementation) for me to
get a handle on it. I admire the scope of his vision. Yes, it’s hubristic. But someone, sometime, has
got to take a crack at it, no? On the whole I’m inclined to think that someone who kicks up that
much dust of that kind, that person is doing something right even if I don’t understand it.
As for Mathematica, it’s a practical tool that’s proven useful to enough people to have
made Wolfram a wealthy man. It’s the income from that software that’s given Wolfram the leisure
and resources to do the research he stuffed into that book.
So yes, between his ideas about mathematics and physics and his software, I think
Wolfram’s proved out his MacArthur. PASS.
Robert Penn Warren was a no-go from the start, a blast from the horse-and-buggy past.
While Skip Gates has two or more decades ahead of him (he’s not yet 65), I think he’s pretty much
done what he can do. Still, it’s possible that he’ll pull a rabbit out of the hat and enter
unambiguously into the world of internal combustion engines and lighter than air travel. As for
Wolfram, rumor has it that he thinks we can land a person on the moon within the decade.

What the “Paper of Record” Says

In 1983 The New York Times published a long article13 that was generally about the Foundation,
mostly about financial matters, but that also included some remarks about the fellows program:
The program has been praised but also criticized, partly because many awards went to
individuals with records of accomplishment rather than to undiscovered young talent.
Gerald Freund, a former Rockefeller Foundation official, joined the Chicago philanthropy
as vice president to organize and carry out the program but gave up its direction in June
1982, “because my vision of it seemed beyond realization.”
Some excellent results were achieved in the first years, he said. But the selections
included few artists, women or young people, and “most genuine mavericks lost out,” he
added. “Sources of candidacies were overly narrow and in-depth research by staff was
thwarted,” he asserted.
Dr. Corbally [president of the foundation] said the idea of risking large sums on a
young and untested candidate had troubled some officials but added, “It doesn't bother me
at all.” He said the foundation might consider another range of smaller awards to meet this
need.
That’s the crux of the matter, does the foundation risk money on people who may not pan out, but
who may also succeed in spectacular and unexpected ways, or does it go with people is most likely
will pan out in predictable ways?
In 1992 Anne Matthews published a full-dress review of the program in the New York
Times Magazine, The MacArthur Truffle Hunt.14 One of the topics: what do the fellows DO with
the money? In many cases, not much:

11
http://www.wolframscience.com
12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica
13
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/17/us/macarthur-trust-a-philanthropic-maverick-faces-divestiture-and-
discord.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all

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 Asking for a list of major literary works, musical achievements, crusading policy reports or
scientific breakthroughs achieved with MacArthur-bought freedom is a fast way to start
many fellows hyperventilating. In fact, most winners simply hire a crack investment
counselor.... For winners already equipped with healthy incomes as well as access to grant
funds larger than any MacArthur, the MacArthur means status, not survival. “Oh, 20 years
ago I might have gone to Paris to write,” admits one scholar, wistfully, “but now I have a
cat and a dog and kids in school and a wife who works. This windfall is going for college
tuitions and high-return CD's.” He thinks a moment. “All right, maybe a patio.”
The verdict on the fellows themselves is, predictably, mixed:
ASKED TO ANALYZE THE MacArthur roster of talented individuals, some observers of
the nonprofit realm leap to praise. “Thrilling.” “Enormously important.” “Lots more diverse
and progressive lately.” “Finally getting away from academics.”
Others savage. “Constipated.” “Safe.” “Revoltingly chichi.” “Survival of the
blandest.” “Kafkaesque.” “A godlike search for geniuses under rocks.” “The usual suspects,
plus the very famous and the very weird.”
Here’s a comment from the within Foundation that we’ll return to:
Overall, MacArthurs seem to favor creative people from the Northeast (of the 350 fellows,
121 live in the Northeast or New England). Questioned about this, Ken Hope, the program
director, sighs. “We’re trying for a redefinition of creativity here, a fracturing of national
perceptions of value. It takes a while. But we’ve also been trying hard for nominators and
selectors very definitely from nonelite institutions, or from outside the academic world
altogether, representing the U.S. better in terms of race, place and gender.”
That was two decades ago. Has the fellows program since managed to get outside the world of elite
academic institutions?

To Break the Wild Genius

What’s going on? In thinking about the Fellows program we have to move beyond thinking about a
small group of people making decisions about grants to benefit another small group of people.
Each person in these two small groups is at the center of a social network that extends through 10s
and 100s of other individuals in many different institutions, with these institutions also acting
among one another as institutions. The annual list of Fellows is the net product of tens of thousands
of interactions in these interlinked networks and those interactions extending back in time for years
and decades.
For lack of a better term I’ll call this network The Elito-Meritocracy, capital “T”, capital
“E”, capital “M”. I suppose I can abbreviate that as ThEM.
I suggest that the institutions that dominate ThEM – other philanthropies, colleges and
universities, research institutes, media (the newspapers, magazines, and TV and radio shows that
report and comment on the program), and corporations – have collectively decided that the Fellows
program is to be in the genius business, and so have tasked staffers in ThEM institutions to figure
out what genius is and how to harness and control it. Think about it: if it were really possible to
spot geniuses before their innovations have been accepted, wouldn’t that be grand? Yes, it would,
but, as far as I can tell, that’s not possible.
What IS possible is to spin a story around that quest that allows this institutional world to
come out smelling like a rose.
That 1992 New York Times “truffle hunt” article tells us that “officials at other
foundations”, that is, other individuals in ThEM, these officials “note the MacArthur fellows
program has never really decided if its job is to reward creativity or to stimulate it, if it wants to be

14
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/07/magazine/the-macarthur-truffle-hunt.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Page 11
an American Nobel Prize or a fairy godmother to talents unappreciated by mainstream society.”
Just WHAT is the genius business anyhow?
That article also points out that
MacArthur is the youngest of the country's top foundations – the Rockefeller, Ford and
Mellon foundations, the Getty Trust, the Pew Memorial Trust – and, in its early days, the
brashest.
John D. MacArthur (1897-1978), son of a Pennsylvania hellfire preacher, was an
eighth-grade dropout who created the mail-order insurance firm of Bankers Life and
Casualty during the Depression and built a Florida real estate empire. At the time of his
death, he was one of two billionaires in the United States.
Puckish and aggressively eccentric, MacArthur lived for years in a Palm Beach
Shores hotel, running his business from its coffee shop and reputedly saying, at the close of
each deal, “Pay for your coffee on the way out.” Largely to confound the Internal Revenue
Service, he endowed his foundation with five million shares of Bankers Life stock but left
the board of trustees no instructions. He had made the money; now they could figure out
how to spend it – thus making the MacArthur the only top-rank foundation to be created
without a focused giving agenda.
So, this brash young foundation comes swashbuckling its way into ThEM‘s walnut paneled
clubroom and has to be brought to heel. It must be tamed. Well, why not let it have its way with
that Fellows program and see if it can in fact tame the wild genius? But, be careful about the
packaging.
Let’s turn, once again, to one of the prime ThEM institutions, its paper of record. A 1997
New York Times article15 offers a most interesting observation:
There are at least a few observers who question the very concept of the fellows program.
Some of them, including Waldemar Nielsen, a consultant to foundations and a former
foundation official, maintain that its primary job is to generate publicity for the foundation.
The late Waldemar Nielsen16 (he died in 2005) had directed major programs for the Ford
Foundation, had been president of the African-American Institute, had written extensively about
foundations, and “deemed them generally timid, inert and unimaginative”.
I don’t know what Nielsen was thinking that he made that remark, what his reasoning was,
but I find it interesting and plausible. First, we need to remember that the MacArthur Foundation is
a large foundation and that the fellows program is only one of its many programs, a relatively small
one. In 2012 the foundation’s total budget was $212.2 million17 of which the fellows program was
$11.8 million, or just under 6%. The program is small enough that the foundation can treat it as an
overhead expense, as publicity if you will.
Note that Nielsen’s reading is plausible even if no one at the MacArthur Foundation
asserts, believes, or even thinks that publicity is the point. It does generate publicity, lots of it. I’d
guess the foundation gets more publicity for that program than for all of its other programs
combined. How many people who know about the fellows program can name even one of the other
programs? And, I would argue, it’s the publicity that keeps the process going. That publicity is the
latent goal of the program, not its manifest goal, which is to fund exceptional individuals, to fund
“geniuses”.
Now, let’s move beyond thinking of the program simply as publicity for the MacArthur
Foundation itself. Surely some of that public relations glow accrues to The Elito-Meritocracy in
general, to the whole network of individuals and institutions that coughs up this list once a year.

15
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/09/giving/macarthur-genius-grants-get-some-heat-and-a-new-
head.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm
16
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/nyregion/04nielsen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
17
http://www.macfound.org/about/financials/

Page 12
The list is produced in the name of The Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, but it validates the
philanthropic activities of ThEM as a whole simply because it’s the single most visible foundation
program in the country. In rhetorical terms, it’s a synecdoche, a part that stands for the whole.
Think of the MacArthur Fellows Program as a tax imposed on this brash young foundation
by the older and more established members of ThEM. But the tax isn’t so much the money the
Foundation puts into the program, but how it distributes that money.

Putting Lipstick on the Pig

With that in mind, let’s look at some current public relations generated by the foundation and then
at the current class of fellows.
Consider this passage from the foundation’s review of its fellows program18:
From the outset, the founders of the Program saw the potential for broader impact, beyond
the recipient Fellows, including:
• Providing inspiration for those who aspire to contribute something new and
valuable to the larger society
• Capturing the public’s imagination by shining the spotlight on exemplars who
collectively demonstrate that creativity can be found everywhere among us,
often in unexpected or unrecognized places
Note that this broader impact doesn’t depend on the abilities and actual accomplishments of the
fellows. All that matters is the people believe in those abilities and accomplishments.
I am not suggesting that the foundation is engaged in a deliberate deception. I assume that
the staff of the foundation works hard and honestly and that everyone associated with the fellows
Program does the best they can. But I also believe that the job they’ve set themselves, finding
geniuses, is somewhere between very difficult and impossible.
Their belief in the program is thus unwarranted, as is ours. Hence much of the negative
criticism the program has attracted over the years. So, how can the foundation defuse, or at least
diffuse, that criticism?
Let’s look at a recent piece by, Cecilia A. Conrad, the current director of the Fellows
Program. In Five Myths About the MacArthur ‘Genius Grants’19 she says:
Fellows come from every field of human endeavor, from theoretical physics to urban
farming.
Many Fellows, like sports-medicine researcher Kevin Guskiewicz (2011), are
engaged in highly practical work. Guskiewiczis making advances in the diagnosis,
treatment and prevention of concussions....Some Fellows, like Rosanne Haggerty (2001),
address pressing social issues — in her case, providing housing for homeless individuals
and families.
So, the fellows do good things that benefit you and me. And they don’t all come from elite
institutions:
Also, the success of the program cannot be measured solely by individual outcomes. We
bring attention to many overlooked fields, such as blacksmithing (Tom Joyce, 2003) and
bowmaking for stringed instruments (Benoît Rolland, 2012), typography (Matthew Carter,
2010) and ornithology (Richard Prum, 2009), language preservation (Jessie Little Doe
Baird, 2010) and elder rights (Marie-Therese Connolly, 2011).
Now, how does The New York Times spin its story20 of the most recent class? Two-thirds of the
fellows, 15 out of 24, are on staff at elite institutions:

18
http://www.macfound.org/media/files/MacArthur_Fellows_Program_Review_final_1.pdf
19
http://www.macfound.org/press/commentary/five-myths-about-macarthur-genius-grants/

Page 13
 • Columbia University (Donald Antrim)
• Bard College (Jeremy Denk)
• Mannes College (Jeremy Denk)
• University of Pennsylvania (Angela Duckworth)
• Stanford University (Kevin Boyce, David Lobell)
• Scripps Research Institute (Phil Baran)
• California Institute of Technology (Colin Camerer)
• Cornell University (Craig Fennie)
• Boston College (Robin Fleming)
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Carl Haber)
• Massachusetts Institutes of Technology (Dina Katabi, Sara Seager,)
• Rutgers University (Julie Livingston)
• University of Michigan (Susan Murphy)
• Weill Cornell Medical College (Sheila Nirenberg)
• University of Colorado (Maria Rey)
The article was written in such a way, however, as to deemphasize those elite connections. Thirteen
of those sixteen were simply listed in two paragraphs at the end of the article: name, occupation,
institution; name, occupation, institution; repeat until done. The article devoted three opening
paragraphs to “dancer-choreographer Kyle Abraham, who recalled relying on food stamps just
three years ago”. A bit later it gave a paragraph to Vijay Iyer, a jazz pianist and composer (who,
according to The Chronicle of Higher Education,21 will be joining the Harvard faculty in 2014),
and two paragraphs to Karen Russell, a fiction writer.
The article is thus written to give more space to and more information about “outsiders” to
the world of elite institutions. That is a more interesting story than one about elite institutions once
again getting most of the marbles. The latter story is routine business and genius is NOT supposed
to be routine. Genius is about the exceptional. So emphasize the exceptions rather than then norm.
But what’s exceptional about these particular fellows is that they are NOT on staff at an
elite institution, at ThEM. They appear to have come out of nowhere. Hence, they must be
geniuses, no?
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. No one really knows, not about them, or about the majority of
fellows who do come from elite institutions. All we know is that it looks good; it looks innovative.
It smells like genius. And that’s all that matters for PR purposes.

Throw Caution to the Winds

What can we do about this game? Probably nothing, but if we had the power to change it, how
should we go about it?
As I said at the beginning, I’d suggest simple rule: no fellowships will be awarded to
people with stable jobs at elite institutions.
Let me explain.
I am familiar with elite institutions. I did my undergraduate work at The Johns Hopkins
University and my graduate work in the English Department at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. At the time I was there, the mid-1970s, the SUNY Buffalo department was one of the best
in the nation. I was on the faculty of The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

20
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/arts/macarthur-genius-award-winners-
named.html?pagewanted=print
21
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/24-exceptionally-creative-individuals-are-named-as-macarthur-
fellows-of-2013/66523

Page 14
 Faculty members at these institutions are all good, for the standards ARE high. In practice
that means that there is a fair amount of high-class dead wood among the live wires. Some of the
MacArthur Fellows at such places probably deserve an award intended to promote exceptional and
paradigm-breaking ability. Others do not.
And while some of the best people at these places are quite happy there, others are not, and
it’s not because they’re inherently unhappy people. It’s because these institutions are not uniformly
conducive to boldly going off into the unknown. They are more likely to prefer that you dot your
i’s and cross your t’s on fundable grant proposals.
Thus some of the MacArthurs going to these people are going where they should be going;
some are going to those who need the respite that money can bring. I’m also sure that some of the
recipients don’t deserve it. But I don’t want to try to sort this out.
My simple rule follows from a very simple bottom line consideration: the bottom line. If
you’ve got a job at an elite institution, then you’ve got an income. You don’t need a MacArthur to
survive and to do your work. You may not be able to do your work in the style you’d like, but you
CAN do the work. You don’t have to scrabble for a living at a job that’s unrelated to your interests.
That’s one factor behind the rule.
And, yes, I know that some important work cannot be done without the kinds of facilities
and staff you have at major research institutions. You aren’t going to find any particle physicists
doing their research on their own time while working as a bike messenger or more comfortably as a
quant at a hedge fund. This simple rule will be biased in its effects. But then, a MacArthur
wouldn’t be all that useful to a particle physicist anyhow. It would buy a MacBook Air to take to
conferences and it would pay for printer cartridges and page charges. But it won’t build a new
instrument to put into whatever atom smasher you’ve bought time on.
So be it. The current system is also biased in its effect, and not in the right direction, not in
favor of boldness. Boldness is merely a convenient and desirable by-product. It’s not the goal.
Let’s recall Waldemar Nielsen’s observation the goal of the MacArthur Fellows program is
publicity. The aim of my simple rule is to change the valence of that publicity. How will it do that?
First of all, once the decision is announced, I would expect a series of articles about that
decision. That is, more publicity. Just what those articles would say, I cannot predict. What will the
elite institutions say? What will MacArthur Fellows at those institutions say? I assume that some
will lodge complaints, but just how those complaints will be framed, I cannot say.
Nor can I imagine how the first full class of outsiders will be greeted. Sure, there’s going to
be some praise, and some vilification. How will that be divided between the foundation and the
individual fellows?
To the extent that the fellows program has evolved into a device the philanthropic system
uses to validate its basic integrity – we’re not just gifting our friends and neighbors here; we’re
going for real quality – I’d expect the criticism to be loud and bitter: What’s the world coming to?
The sky is falling and MacArthur’s lost its way looking for four-leaf clovers! Now the system’s
cover is blown and the players are naked to the world, like that old emperor without any clothes.
This rule change will not, however, interfere with Harvard’s ability to tout all the
MacArthur Fellows on its faculty, or with the ability of those faculty members to proudly strut their
MacArthur stuff. But over time the linkage between MacArthur’s and ThEM institutions will
weaken.
That weakening cuts two ways. On the one hand, the MacArthur Foundation depends on
ThEM to validate its selections. In effect, by choosing a minority of outsider Fellows along with a
majority of insiders, it’s using the institutional linkage of those insiders to validate its outsiders
(even as it is using those same outsiders to disguise its basic commitment to insiders). That support
will be gone.
But how much does that moral support, if you will, really matter? If the MacArthur
Foundation were small and the fellows program its only program, or one of only three or four of a

Page 15
similar size, then the loss of support from other foundations would be consequential. But, as I
pointed out above, that’s not at all the case. The fellows program is a relatively small one. And the
foundation as a whole now has a long and, I assume (for, like most who know about the fellows
program, I don’t know much about the foundation’s other work), substantial record of doing good
work.
No, the foundation should be able to support a full slate of “outsider” fellows on its own. If
so, would that then encourage a bit more daring from other foundations or even, Heaven forefend!,
the National Science Foundation? Would it encourage elite institutions to be less elite and more
venturesome?
Who knows?
How would this rule change affect the selection process itself? I assume that some people,
staff, nominators, and evaluators, would abandon the program. They’d have to be replaced by
others happier with the new direction. Everyone would have to think a bit harder and a bit
differently about what they’re doing. Maybe things would loosen up, get more interesting.
Again, who knows?

It’s a New World

In the Medieval West the Catholic Church was the institutional center of intellectual life. Then the
West underwent a massive cultural change, the Renaissance, and new life ways and new
institutions emerged. A new system of colleges and universities supplanted the church as the
central institution of intellectual life. That system served us well up through the end of the 19th
Century and into the early 20th Century.
But the world is once again changing. And this time it’s not the West alone that’s
undergoing a metamorphosis. It’s the whole world, kicking and screaming.
The Elito-Meritocratic system is intertwined with and sits atop institutions grounded in the
19th Century. It’s too tightly wound about those moribund institutions. If we’re going to a New
World, then let’s go for it.
If that old system is to properly serve the emerging worlds, it needs to loosen up. Until that
happens the details of specific procedures for selecting MacArthur Fellows don’t matter. It’s the
overall attitude and goals that count.
The object of my simple rule – no Fellowships for members of elite institutions – is to
loosen things at the top and see what happens.

Addendum
So let’s take this remark from the 1992 NYTimes article: “…MacArthur fellows program has never
really decided if its job is to reward creativity or to stimulate it, if it wants to be an American Nobel
Prize or a fairy godmother to talents unappreciated by mainstream society.”
When they gave fellowships to Robert Penn Warren and Barbara McClintock the first year,
that was certainly the Nobel Prize model. OTOH, gifting Skip Gates and Steve Wolfram was the
fairy godmother model. It would be interesting to track the ratio of Nobel to godmother awards
over the years. Did they pack it with Nobel fellows early on to establish credibility with ThEM?
Has the number of Nobel fellows thus gone down over time?
And how does this interact with giving awards to those on staff at elite institutions?
Wolfram and Gates may have been early in their careers when they were gifted, but both were well
established in the world of elite institutions? So let’s track three things: 1) Nobel fellows, 2)
godmother fellows, and 3) outsider fellows. What’s the relation between 1 & 2 on the one hand,
and 3?
And, just what’s an outsider fellow? Vijay Iyer, from this year’s crop, is an outsider in the
sense that he’s not on staff at an elite institution. But he was trained at elite institutions (Yale and

Page 16
Berkeley) and is joining the Harvard faculty in 2014. Should he count as an outsider? Maybe we
have two classes of outsiders. Those who were trained at elite institutions but are no longer
associated with them, and those who are on staff at such places, regardless of their training.
And so forth.
Questions, questions.

Page 17
The Hunt for Genius, Part 2: The Big Sort

I thought my first essay (above) that would be the end of it. I was wrong.
Now that I’ve gotten my brain revved up thinking about “genius”, whatever that is, I’ve got
to think a bit more. The foundation is making judgments about people, judgments about the
originality of their work, their ability to cross traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries,
their need for support, and their potential for future contributions of an extraordinary kind. The
program has been consistently criticized for picking too many fellows who don’t meet those
criteria.
In that post I argued there is in fact a simple way to improve those judgments relative to
those criteria: don’t give fellowships to people with stable jobs at elite institutions. The purpose of
this post is to clarify my reasoning on that point.
I begin by pointing out that it’s possible for one person to be both a genius and a crackpot.
Then I have a brief note on the Nobel Prize, where the point is that even giving awards for
accomplishment is difficult. In the following two sections I step through athletic and musical
performance as a way of outlining different kinds of judgments, which I’ve called objective,
complex, incommensurable, and predictive. I return to the MacArthur Fellowship Program in the
final section where I once again talk about the importance of cultural context.

Two for One: Genius and Crackpot in a Single Package

First, let’s think about, say, Isaac Newton22, a prototypical scientific genius. We remember him for
his work in physics (optics, mechanics, and gravity) and mathematics. No one cares about his work
in theology and alchemy except historians, yet it meant a great deal to Newton himself. As
Jonathan Rée put it in a review of a recent biography:23
The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is
how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at
the age of 44, astonished the world with a work of natural science that was soon recognised
as one of the greatest books ever written. In the second he was a sleek London gentleman
wallowing in power, wealth and prestige and devoting his intellectual energy to esoteric
studies of the Bible.
Newton’s final piece of scholarship, a chronology synchronizing Greek and Roman history with
the Bible, “had won acceptance as a worthy sequel to the Principia and the Opticks” while, with
the exception of a few intellectual historians, we have forgotten it.
Consider a more recent, and not so extreme example, Albert Einstein.24 Early in the
previous century he was quickly recognized as a genius, mostly for his work on relativity and
photons. He spent the last part of his career looking for a unified field theory. For a long time that
work was considered to be a waste of time. Now that unified theory has made a comeback in
physics I don’t know whether that work has been re-evaluated or not.
Were these guys working on half a brain when they did that misbegotten work? Were they
drunk? I mean, what had happened to the supernal abilities that allowed them to make profound
and permanent contributions to science that they could also produce work that is somewhere
between dubious and nonsense?

22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Mechanics_and_gravitation
23
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n19/jonathan-ree/i-tooke-a-bodkine
24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Unified_field_theory

Page 18
 Nothing happened to those abilities. There’s no reason to think that they weren’t firing on
all cylinders when they did that work. The work just doesn’t fit very well with other knowledge of
the world. Think of ideas as keys. What do we use keys for? To unlock doors. Some of the keys
these geniuses crafted unlocked real doors. Other keys don’t unlock real doors. Whether or not a
key unlocks a door is not a matter of how well the key is crafted. The most exquisitely crafted
square peg is not going to fit into a round hole.
Well, it turns out that some of the locks these guys had in mind when crafting keys weren’t
real. They were figments of their imagination. Just because the lock was imagined by a genius
doesn’t mean it is real.
And so forth.
The point is that ability is not enough. That ability has to be fitted to context.
The search for genius, however, is always conceptualized as a search for ability. This is
most obviously the case when genius is defined in terms of a score on some standardized test, an
IQ test. If you score high enough on the test you’re a genius – as defined by the test. Otherwise, no.
Now, I rather doubt that anyone involved in the MacArthur Fellows program cares about
scores on IQ tests. Whatever it is they’re looking for, it can’t be identified by an IQ test. If it could,
then running the Fellows Program would be trivially easy. If tests did the trick there’d be no need
for the program. The geniuses would be identified by the standard testing programs undertaken in
schools. They aren’t.
So, how do you find a genius?

Nobel Prizes: Even Post Facto Judgments are Difficult

What about Nobel Prizes? They, of course, are awarded for accomplishment, not for promise. And
so the prize is not conceived of as one given for ability, though we all assume that Nobel Laureates
must have extraordinary ability in order to do whatever it is that got them the award.
And yet the fact that these prizes are awarded for accomplishments visible to all doesn’t
insulate them from criticism. I’m sure if I were to dig around in what’s written about Nobels I’d
find lists of people who got them, but shouldn’t (e.g. Obama or Kissinger for the Peace Prize) and
other lists of people who should have gotten them but didn’t. Judging the value of
accomplishments such as these is not easy.
So, let’s start by thinking about some kind of ability where the tests are straightforward.

Looking for the Best Athletes

Let’s say we’re looking for the fastest sprinters in the world. One’s ability at sprinting can judged
in a straightforward way. Get your candidates together and have them run a race. Determining who
crosses the finish line first is easy in principle, though it can be tricky in fact. Still, if we have a
photo finish, then run them again a day later. Award the prize to the test two out of three.
Of course, we CAN make things more complicated if we wish. Maybe you don’t think one
distance (100 yards or 100 meters) is enough. You want to test them on two distances (add in 200
yards, or 200 meters). What if one is best at one distance while another is best at the other distance?
Maybe we simply add the times for the two distances and award the prize for the best combined
distance. And if you don’t like that, well, propose another formula. But once we’ve picked a
formula, the winner’s going to fall out pretty directly.
Maybe you want to add another distance. OK. Do it. Now we’ve got to ponder another set
of formulas.
And so forth.
There are practical problems as well. How do we get all the sprinters together for a race?
We don’t have to do that. We can run a tournament with preliminary rounds here and there and first
round winners advancing to later rounds, and so forth. This will, of course, introduce difficulties.

Page 19
Maybe one of the best sprinters gets knocked out in an early round for any of a number of reasons.
We’ll just have to deal with it.
For that matter, we don’t even have to run the sprinters in head-to-head competition. We
can just take their X best times over the course of some period of time – a year, three years,
whatever – average them, and use that result.
We can play these conceptual games for quite awhile. But the end result isn’t going to
change. Making a determination is relatively straightforward, but only relatively so. It’s not going
to be flawless. And the range of possibilities we play with is relatively constrained.
Things change when we consider disciplines such as gymnastics, diving, or figure skating.
In these disciplines there are no sharp criteria for judgment. Performances are judged on the
difficulty of the skills involved and how well those skills are executed. Multiple judges are used
and the final score is some function of those individual scores, but not necessarily a simple average
(high and low scores may be tossed out).
This is a bit more like the situation facing the MacArthur selection committee. But only a
bit. Gymnasts are judged only against gymnasts, not against divers, skaters, or for that matter,
sprinters and point guards. And the range of variation available to a gymnast is relatively narrow
compared to that available to a novelist, a particle physicist, or a community activist.
Now, let’s open things up: Who’s the best athlete in the world? That’s very different from
looking for the fastest sprinter or the best figure skater.
What counts as athletic activity? Track and field events, sure. But which ones? Swimming
events. Sure. Which events? Basketball, football, soccer, cricket, rugby, volleyball, ice hockey?
What about mountain climbing? Horse racing? Ping pong? Golf? Curling? Skate boarding? Dance
sport (aka competitive dancing)? Arm wrestling? And so forth.
And whatever list of events you include there’s the problem of comparing athletes in
different disciplines. How do you compare an expert in Ping-Pong with a 10-meter diver, or a
golfer, or a kick boxer?
Let’s forget about picking the best athlete and instead go for the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100
best. That allows us to pick more winners, so it takes some of the pressure off of comparing
athletes in different disciplines. But it doesn’t eliminate that problem entirely, unless we pick one
best in each discipline, but there are ways to mess that up too (e.g. do we allow performance
enhancing drugs, physical prosthesis?). Now we’re going for a suite of winners, which means
we’re likely to want to present an interesting array of athletes. We’ll have a swimmer, a runner, a
basketball or volleyball player, and so forth.
Once again we’re moving toward the problem faced by the MacArthur Fellows selection
committee. You have a wide range of people, all of them excellent at something, but these different
kinds of excellence aren’t directly comparable. So how do you judge?
Still, I’d say this is easier than the MacArthur problem in two respects. In the first place,
excellence in individual disciplines is easier to judge. To be sure, excellence in gymnastics or
basketball cannot be judged as directly as excellence in weight lifting or pole vaulting, but it’s not
as open-ended as excellence in physics, or merely particle physics, or excellence in poetry.
In the second place, we’re talking about judging athletes at the top of their ability. But the
MacArthur Fellows Program, at least in theory, is looking to identify geniuses before their genius
has fully flowered.
So, let’s return to sprinters. Now our task is to identify those sprinters between, say, nine
and eleven, who will be the best when they are at their prime, whenever that is (late teens to mid-
20s I’d guess). How do we do that?
Finding the best child sprinters is no more difficult than finding the best adult sprinters, nor
is it any less difficult. But we cannot assume that the best child sprinters will be the best adult
sprinters. Some first-rate child sprinters will taper off as they get older and some second-rate child
sprinters will blossom and become first-rate. We cannot predict which is which.

Page 20
 What do we do? Well, if the problem is to identify those 10 child sprinters who will be the
best adult sprinters 10 years later, then we’re stuck. We might get one or two of them if we’re
lucky, but we certainly won’t get a half-dozen much less all of them. And we might not find any at
all.
Our odds get considerably better if our task is to identify that group of 1000 child sprinters
from which the ten best adult sprinters will emerge a decade later. The odds get even better if we
start a training program to help those 1000. Maybe we work with all 1000 for two years, then cut
the number in half and continue working with those. Then make another cut three years later or so.
And so forth.
And that, more or less, is how organized athletic programs operate. A lot of young children
go into the large end of the funnel so that 10 or 15 years later we have a small trickle of superb
adult athletes coming out the small end.
That’s how the MacArthur Fellows program is supposed to work. Nominees are already
pretty deep into the funnel, but they’ve not yet made it to the output tube. The program’s objective
is to pick the best among the nominees and give them the support they need to make it to the output
tube. No one expects them all to make it.
But none of this involves the kind of contextual problem that we faced with Newton and
Einstein spending a lot of time on fruitless research. Oh I suppose we might compare that to
Michael Jordan’s golf game, but the comparison is not a particularly good one. After all, there
really are good golfers in the world, touring pros are better than Jordan; but no one’s yet made a go
of alchemy or, so far, of a unified theory.

Scorecard: Where Are We?

Let’s recap.
1. We started with the problem of identifying the best sprinter. There the criterion is an
objective one. That’s the easiest case.
It takes relatively little skill to make these judgments. Close finishes may require careful
analysis of photographs, but other than that, there’s little to judge.
2. Then we considered gymnastics, which is more difficult. Let’s call that judgment
complex without, however, worrying too much about just what complex means. This is just a
rough sort we’re doing.
These judgments are trickier. But there’s not reason to think that one well-trained panel
would be different from another. If is, of course, possible for judges to cheat exercising biased
judgments for favorites. But then any system can be gamed somehow.
3. Then we looked at the problem of identifying the best athletes regardless of discipline.
There we’ve disciplines where both objective and complex criteria are in use and this is
compounded by the fact that skills in widely different athletic disciplines are incommensurable
with one another.
Here the judgments are much more difficult. Given the great variety of athletic disciplines,
a panel of judges might well be systematically biased. For example, a panel from the United States
is going to be unfamiliar with athletic disciplines not practiced here, or only practiced in a minor
way. Sumo wrestlers and cricket players are not likely to be given sufficient consideration. That’s
comparable to the kind of bias operating in the MacArthur Fellowship Program.
4. Next up, identifying elite athletes when they’re still young. Call it predictive judgment.
As long as we’re dealing with judgments that are made within specific disciplines, we have
nothing more than objective judgments and complex judgments. But they’re applied to immature
athletes rather than mature ones.
5. Finally we talked about instituting a training program, where we work with young
sprinters to develop their abilities. We’re now deliberately intervening in the development process.
But there’s always a chance that we’ll misallocate our training resources. Some kids who would

Page 21
in fact blossom will be dropped, or never even enter the program, while others in it will not pan
out.
This is the same as with the previous case, predictive judgment, except that we’re now
making judgments about who will be supported in the next tier of the program. Some judgments
need to be made about cut-off points, and those judgments will be a function of resource
availability. Once the cut off points have been set, determining who qualifies and who doesn’t is
fairly straightforward.
Let’s quickly run through the same series of judgment disciplines in a different arena, one I
know fairly well: musical performance on trumpet – I play it well enough to have opened for Dizzy
Gillespie on one occasion, B.B. King on another.
1. Objective judgment: What trumpet player can play the highest note? Believe me, lots
of trumpet players really care about this one, though it’s mostly irrelevant for all but a very small
number of contexts and players. But the call is an easy one to make. Either note X is higher than
note Y or it isn’t. Things get trickier if we worry about tone quality. Does it count if X is higher
than Y, but the tone is thin?
2. Complex judgment: Who’s the most technically skilled trumpet player? I specify
technical skill so as to eliminate the whole range of judgment issues that come into play when we
consider matters of artistic interpretation, a range that gets even larger when we think about
improvisation (in a variety of styles, jazz, Latin, contemporary classical, whatever).
Technical skill on the trumpet involves many things in addition to range. Tone quality
counts, and we need to think about tone quality in all registers, lower, middle, and upper. What
about tone quality for pedal tones? There’s the cleanness and speed of single, double, and triple
tonguing. The ability to play wide intervals cleanly and accurately is important as well. Speed in all
kinds of playing. What about dynamic range? Can a trumpeter keep the tone spinning while
playing very softly in the lower or upper registers?
Trumpet players will vary in their mastery of different technical elements. Jazz players, for
example, are much less likely to have mastered double and triple tonguing than classical players
because those skills aren’t really required in jazz. So how do we assess the technical skills of, say, a
Dizzy Gillespie as against those of, say, a Maurice André?
3. Incommensurate Judgment: Who’s got the best technical skills of any living
musician? How do you compare the skills of trumpeters, tabla players, beatboxers, guzheng
virtuosi, and pianists?
4. Predictive judgment: Which ten-year old trumpeters will mature into stars? While I am
by no means a star, I’m better than any of the kids I started out with back in the fourth grade. In
fact, I fell behind the others in my group after several months of lessons. It took me two years to
catch up and then move ahead of them.
5. Training programs and resource allocation: It’s going to work out the same as it does
for athletes. If you train them, they get better.
But this is all simple stuff compared to the situation the MacArthur Fellowship attempts to
address. All of these judgments take place in cultural contexts that we may consider to be “closed”
in some sense. The skill being judged is well defined in existing terms. That is not the case with the
MacArthurs.

The Context of Genius

The happiest situation is when the supernal capacities of an exceptional individual emerge to
evolve in time and in step with the larger movements of his or her society.
Since I’ve already talked of trumpet players, let’s consider one of the most important
trumpet players of the Twentieth Century, Louis Armstrong. While he had fine technical skills,
they were not outstanding in comparison to the skills of the best classical and concert band
trumpeters and cornetists. But technical skill is not what’s important about him. Armstrong is

Page 22
important for his musical inventiveness. He transformed jazz. He changed the direction of musical
development. But he wasn’t working alone. As I wrote in Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 255-256):
The greatness of an individual musician such as Armstrong is a function, both of his power
to forge compelling performances from the “raw” memes and of the existence of that meme
pool. While Armstrong may have been ahead of his fellows, he couldn’t have been very far
ahead of them, otherwise they could not have performed together. Beyond this, without a
large population of music-lovers familiar with the same meme pool, Armstrong’s
recordings would have had little effect. By the time he went to Chicago, a large population
had been listening and dancing to rags and blues, show tunes, fox trots and Charlestons and
marches, all with a hot pulse and raggy rhythms. Armstrong’s improvisations gave them a
new wild pleasure, and their collective joy made him great.
Such good fortune is not always the case.
Consider the unhappy case of Ignaz Semmelweis,25 a Hungarian physician from the second
half of the 19th Century. In 1847 he proposed to reduce the incidence of fever in hospitals by
having physicians wash their hands. To us this idea seems like common sense. But it was
considered heretical when Semmelweis proposed it. He was beaten to death in an asylum in 1865.
It was to be a decade or more after his death that antisepsis began to gain acceptance in the medical
community. That acceptance was contingent upon promulgation and acceptance of the germ theory
of disease, which was unknown when Semmelweis first made his proposals.
Such stories are common enough in the history of creativity. It took decades before
Wegner’s theory of continental drift26 was accepted in the geological community. Van Gogh27
wasn’t widely hailed until after his death. Ornette Coleman28 was regarded as something of a freak
early in his career, though the MacArthur Foundation finally worked up the courage and
imagination to gift him in 1994,29 long after his groundbreaking recordings of the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Other accolades followed.
These people, and many others, were “ahead of their time”, as the saying goes. The
ostensible purpose of the MacArthur Fellowships is to identify these “geniuses” before the times
catch up with them and to help things along. The recognition conferred by the gift itself may well
bring a fellow’s work to a wider ranger of people, some of whom may understand, appreciate, and
help advance it. The money itself gives the follow a five-year financial cushion, allowing them to
function creatively even without acceptance that’s wide enough to provide a livable income.
In practice, though, too many fellowships have been awarded to people who are reasonably
well established and don’t really need the money or recognition or to those whose
accomplishments, though of a high order, are not particularly creative.
The point I was making in that earlier post is simply that, in effect, a whole new set of
contexts has emerged in the last half-century, a new cultural regime, and the MacArthurs are
simply ignoring them (and it). The world is changing on a massive scale; cultural regimes of all
kinds – religious, artistic, scientific, engineering, organizational, lifeways in whole and in part – are
drifting, colliding, merging, conflicting, and reconfiguring. The MacArthur Foundation’s
commitment to gifting people at elite institutions is, by that fact, a commitment to the old world
order. If the foundation were to no longer hand out awards to those institutions by gifting selected
individuals within them, it would decrease that bias.
That would be a turn toward the 21st Century. Perhaps not a strong turn, but a turn.

25
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
26
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Development_of_the_theory
27
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh
28
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornette_Coleman#Later_career
29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program

Page 23
 If the foundation had done that this year, then those 16 awards that went to people in elite
institutions would be going to those outside the 19th Century institutional network.
Of course I don’t know who those outsiders might have been. I have no reason to think that
they would have been people of greater personal abilities than the 16 insiders who were gifted. But
there’s a better chance that their work be oriented toward the worlds that are struggling to emerge.
To use trumpet playing as an analogy, there is no reason to believe that these 16 outsider
trumpeters would have technical skills superior to those of the gifted insider trumpeters. But their
artistic sensibilities are more likely to be attuned to the future.
And that’s what I’m aiming for, the future. I want to change the bias in the system. No
more, no less.

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The Hunt for Genius, Part 3: Cultural Factors

It does look like this topic has taken over my brain, at least a part of it, for a while. Things are
condensing and compacting. Processing goes on.
My main point remains: The MacArthur Fellows Program is strongly biased by the social
network in which it is situated. The simplest thing it can do to blunt that bias and, thereby name
more interesting and challenging classes of fellows, is to stop giving awards to people on staff at
elite institutions. Those institutions are too deeply rooted in the past to serve the future well.

Our World is Culturally Complex and Changing

First, while the search for genius, as conducted by the MacArthur Fellows Program for example, is
conceptualized as a search for attributes of individuals, even an essence, that’s not how it works out
in fact and in our world. If our world were culturally uniform and static, then, yes, the search for
genius might properly be conceptualized as a search for essence. But that’s only because every
individual would be surrounded by the same culture and thus the possibilities for a ‘fit’ between
individual capabilities and accomplishments would be the same for all.
But that’s not the world we live in. In the first place, it is not culturally uniform. In large-
scale modern societies, culture varies by class, geographical region, and by ethnicity and religion.
In such a world a search for genius will almost inevitably be biased by the interests and
understanding for those conducting the search. In such a world the ONLY way to escape bias is to
recognize the problem and take explicit steps to correct for it.
Just what those steps would be, I don’t know. Two obvious suggestions: 1) Make sure the
selection process includes people from all sectors of society. 2) Conceive each class of awardees as
a sampling of the cultural space.
And in the second place, our world is not culturally static. It’s changing rapidly for various
reasons. Globalization is driving workforce changes that affect educational requirements and
skillset distribution and needs. Computer technology has changed the media world and is itself
making many jobs obsolete while creating new classes of jobs. Ideas in every sphere are changing
and new expressive forms are emerging in the arts. Finally, globalization is moving large numbers
of people from one country to another.
In that kind of situation, which is the situation we face, it is all but impossible to have an
unbiased genius hunt. I argued in my first post (above) that their search is in fact very biased and
that that bias is evident in the number of fellows who are on staff at elite educational and research
institutions. While those institutions are pumping out some of the ideas and technology that’s
driving change, they are themselves conservative. How could these conservative institutions thus
be a force for change?

Conservative Institutions Kick Out Rebels

That’s a very interesting question. For one thing, much of the change takes place outside those
institutions. The colleges and universities train people who then go out into the world and do all
sorts of things. Some of the best and brightest leave before graduation (e.g. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,
Mark Zuckerman). And the ideas of course do not stay within those institutions. They too go out
into the world where people who aren’t so conservative take them up.
We’ve also got to consider the fact that the young people who enter these institutions for
education are not yet mature. The radical innovator of 22 or 26 or 31 is just a bright quirky kid at
17. Not all bright quirky 17-year olds mature into intellectual or artistic rebels. And some of those

Page 25
rebels might actually get jobs in one of those institutions and so be in a position to be discovered by
the MacArthur talent safari.
Things aren’t at all simple in this world of ours.

Zeal’s World Island

But not all the creative rebels make it into one of these elite schools. Take my friend Zeal. When he
graduated from high school he opened a men’s haberdashery. At some point he went into the army,
came out, and continued on in retail. From there he spent time traveling world doing barter deals.
But for the last 15 years or so he’s been pursuing his vision of World Island, a world resource
center and “a permanent world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair”, as he likes to say.
There’s no quick and easy way to sum up that vision. Think of it as a combination of the
best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the
Chicago Board of Trade,30 the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the
1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.31 While Zeal has imagined siting World Island at various places, the
most extensive plans were made for Governors Island in New York Harbor.32 A couple years ago
he spent a month in Sierra Leone to see whether or not World Island could be sited there. He’s now
got a team in Greece that’s interested in the project.
In the course of this work Zeal has put together an extensive network of people, some
closely involved with the project, but most only loosely and tangentially involved. Aside from Zeal
himself, how many MacArthur caliber people are in that network and how many of them are on
staff at the institutions favored by the MacArthur genius hunters? Having been closely involved
with the World Island project for over a half dozen years I’d guess that between ten and a hundred
people in the World Island network are of MacArthur quality, but many or most of those will not
be in MacArthur-favored institutions.
The MacArthur Fellows program is strongly biased by the cultural commitments of the
social network in which it is situated. Any such program is going to be culturally biased. Why not
bias it toward the future?

The Asteroid Has Struck

Remember, when the dinosaurs ruled the earth mammals were pitiful little creatures who had to
live off their leavings. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid struck the earth, changing living
conditions worldwide. The dinosaurs died out and the mammals came to thrive.
Is the current regime of world-wide cultural ferment the social analog to that asteroid of
old?

30
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade#The_Pit
31
http://us-japanesegardens.com/2012/09/26/1893-garden-in-chicago-continues-to-provide-respite-
tranquility-and-beauty/
32
http://www.scribd.com/doc/66044579/World-Island-A-Permanent-World-s-Fair

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The Hunt for Genius, Part 4: Gestalt Version

Think of this well-known image as a visual analog for the genius hunt:

Because the MacArthur Fellowship Program is both grounded in and committed to institutions and
practices dating back to the 19th Century, it yields an old crone. By adopting the simple rule of not
giving awards to people on staff at elite institutions they can turn the program around and orient it
toward the future, the young woman.
Effecting such a gestalt switch is, alas, very difficult. Regardless of how you interpret it,
that drawing consists of the same lines and shadings. Nothing that makes up the drawing changes
from one interpretation to the other. So it is in the socio-cultural domain. The constituent parts and
processes are the same. Thus the MacArthur Foundation thinks their program is a young woman
when, in fact, it’s an old crone.

Image by William Ely Hill [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:My_Wife_and_My_Mother-In-Law

Page 27
The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools

I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a suburb of Johnstown, a small steel-making city. My father

was from Baltimore and he worked with Bethlehem Mines, the mining subsidiary of the now-
defunct Bethlehem Steel Corporation. My mother was a native of Johnstown, had been there for the
1937 flood, and was a full-time housewife and mother. That was typical for the time, the 1950s and
into the 60s.
Mother loved gardening and she was an excellent cook and seamstress. Father was more
intellectual than most engineers. In addition to playing golf, collecting stamps, and woodworking,
he liked to read, both fiction and nonfiction. Both parents played the piano a bit and enjoyed
playing contract bridge.
I spent many hours happily immersed in books from my father’s library (which contained
many books from his father’s library): Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Rider Haggard,
Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain among them. I went to school in Richland Township. The
schools were above average, but not special. They did not regularly send students to elite schools.
I’d applied to three Ivies, Harvard and Yale, which turned me down, and Princeton, which
wait-listed me. I’d also applied to The Johns Hopkins University, my father’s alma mater. They
accepted me. That my father had gone there no doubt weighed in the decision.
A classmate of mine, quarterback of the football team, was accepted to Princeton. I believe
he was the first student from the school to go to an Ivy League school. I don’t think he was very
happy there.
I can’t say that I was happy at Hopkins either. But then I didn’t go there for happiness. I
went there to get an education, which I did.

The Johns Hopkins University

Hopkins is probably the most distinguished of the elite schools I’ve been associated with. I did my
undergraduate work there between 1965 and ’69 and then completed a Master’s degree in
Humanities between 1969 and ’72 while at the same time working in the Chaplain’s Office as an
assistant. This was at the tail end of the Vietnam War era and I was a Conscientious Objector to
military service. I thus had to perform civilian service instead of being drafted into the military.
That’s why I worked in the Chaplain’s Office.
After a so-so high school outside a small city in western Pennsylvania the intellectual life
at Hopkins came as a welcome revelation to me. Ideas seemed important. Well, sorta’.
At the same time it was clear that coursework had its limitations. If a course clicked, then I
tended to lose interest in assigned coursework for the last half or third of the semester. Instead, I’d
immerse myself in whatever had attracted my interest. If a course didn’t click, well, I managed to
stick it out.
What made Hopkins work was finding Dr. Richard A. Macksey,33 a polymath who taught
comparative literature (in English translation for those who couldn’t read French, German, Italian,
or Russian) through the interdisciplinary Humanities Center. I took several courses with him, an
independent study, and subsequently did my Master’s under him. Other individual faculty were
important as well, particularly Mary Ainsworth, Arthur Stinchcombe, Neville Dyson-Hudson, and
Earl Wasserman.
But Macksey was the guy. Without him I’d have had a more difficult time graduating from
Hopkins. He provided relief from the “system” and he knew that. Other students were attracted to

33
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Macksey

Page 28
him and studied with him for the same reason. He was particularly important to students interested
in film since he taught a film workshop thereby enabling them to get academic credit for their
passion. At least two students slightly older than me went on to distinguished careers in Hollywood
(Caleb Deschenel34 and Walter Murch35) and there may well have been others as well.
In terms of sheer brilliance I’ve never worked with anyone superior to Macksey and very
few his equal. For whatever reason, he chose to work with and develop others rather than develop a
large body of his own research. He taught many courses, more than required of him, and always
had a group of students whom he worked with independently.
It would be interesting to compare his record as a talent scout with the record of the
MacArthur Fellows Program. There would, of course, be a calibration problem. Macksey went at it
for six decades or so (he only retired a couple of years ago) whereas the MAP has only been around
for just over three decades. On the other hand the MAP has had more resources at its disposal.
Macksey is most-widely known, however, as the long-term editor of the comparative
literature issue of MLN (Modern Language Notes) and as one of the organizers of the in/famous
structuralism symposium of 1966: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. While
Jacques Derrida is perhaps the best-known figure that spoke at the symposium, he was a relative
unknown at the time. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to be there. He was invited as a last-minute
replacement for Luc de Heusch.36 The paper Derrida delivered, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences,” undercut structuralism as a movement and made him a star.
Though I was on campus at the time I didn’t attend the symposium – it wouldn’t have done
me any good as it was delivered in French. But Macksey distributed an English translation of
Derrida’s paper in one of his classes and I devoured it. It became one of my central texts for a
while, though it didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss.
At the time, of course, no one foresaw the consequences of the intellectual currents that
organized themselves through that conference. For one thing, the conference was organized as a
new beginning, a beginning in the New World, for structuralism as an interdisciplinary mode of
investigation. Instead, it functioned as the beginning of the end.

*****

And then there is Chester Wickwire.37 When I entered Hopkins he was the Executive Secretary of
the Levering Hall YMCA. The YMCA subsequently decided to withdraw from the campus, at
which time the University took over the building and Wickwire became University Chaplain.
Wickwire was an activist. He was central to both the civil rights and anti-war movements
in Baltimore. In the spring of 1966 he brought Bayard Rustin to campus, which inspired the Ku
Klux Klan to burn a cross next to Levering Hall. He also ran a tutorial program in which inner city
(aka ghetto) kids were brought to campus on Saturday mornings where Hopkins undergraduates
helped them with schoolwork. These activities made him suspect among the more conservative
folks at Hopkins.
I volunteered at the coffee shop Wickwire ran in Levering Hall, The Room at the Top, and
in two film series he ran, one for classic American films and the other for foreign films. Dick
Macksey advised Wickwire on films for both series and often held late-night discussions of the
films at his house after the evening showing.

34
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_Deschanel
35
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Murch
36
http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2012/fall/structuralisms-samson
37
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Wickwire

Page 29
 One summer Wickwire decided to book some films into the main campus auditorium,
Shriver Hall, to raise some money. Chet was forever raising money, because, well, his programs
needed it. We picked films that we thought would fill a 1000+ seat auditorium for four shows.
One of those films was John Waters’ Pink Flamingos.38 This was in the early 1970s before
Waters had development much of a national reputation, but he was well-known in the Baltimore
area. As Pink Flamingos had never before been shown in Maryland it had to go before the
Maryland Board of Censors for approval – the only such state-level board in the nation. One scene
in particular was in notorious bad taste, even by Waters’s standards: a small dog defecates in front
of Divine, the film’s transvestite star, and she scoops the feces up so as to deliver a ****-eating
grin.
In order to provide a bit of intellectual cover for this cheapest of cheap tricks, we – I forget
just who – decided that Macksey should sign a brief but edifying essay about the film. Without
ever having seen the film, I drafted the essay, Macksey OKed it, and we included it in the package
that went before the censors. They approved the showing and the film played to a packed house.
Chet made his money and we all had some fun.

*****

Finally, I should mention Lincoln Gordon.39 A former United States Ambassador to Brazil, he
succeeded Milton Eisenhower (Ike’s brother) as university president in 1967. He introduced
coeducation to the undergraduate program in 1970 and was forced out of office by the faculty in
1971. The Wikipedia says that financial problems forced him to cut budgets and that displeased the
faculty. No doubt. What I remember is that for some reason the faculty thought him arrogant.
Whatever.
The point is simply that faculty displeasure did force him to resign. Universities are like
that, at least some of them.
Faculties are by and large intellectually conservative. Academic research and scholarship is
not a “boldly go where no man has gone before” kind of business. Library stacks are finite in
length and someone has always been over every inch of them at one time or another. Thus I’m
pretty sure that intellectual life at Johns Hopkins is still dominated by the walls between
departments that Macksey found so troublesome.
At the same time faculty members tend to be prickly and independent minded. The faculty
at Hopkins forced Lincoln Gordon out; years later the faculty at Harvard would force Lawrence
Summers out.
There is a certain looseness about such institutions that allows interesting people to survive
here and there in little nooks and crannies. Some of them may well be geniuses, but that’s not by
institutional design. It’s merely accidental.

The English Department at SUNY Buffalo

Not so long before I’d arrived there in the fall of 1973 the State University of New York at Buffalo
had been a private university, the University of Buffalo, and it was still known by those initials,
“UB”. The State University of New York (SUNY) system had acquired it with the intention of
transforming it into a Berkeley of the East. Student riots in the early 1970s, however, scared the
local gentry and they put the brakes on any massive upgrading.
But not before the Department of English had been turned into the finest experimental
program in the nation and not before David Hays was able to establish an eclectic Department of
Linguistics. I did most of my coursework in English, as that was the department in which I was

38
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Flamingos
39
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Gordon

Page 30
enrolled but. However, as I’ve explained elsewhere (e.g. in this essay on computational linguistics
and literary study40), I got my real education with David Hays. The English Department was fully
aware of that and had no problems with it.
It was an extraordinary intellectual environment, as Bruce Jackson has explained in this
essay:41
For at least a decade, the UB English department was the most interesting English
department in the country. Other universities had the best English departments for history
or criticism or philology or whatever. But UB was the only place where it all went on at
once: hot-center and cutting-edge scholarship and creative writing, literary and film
criticism, poem and play and novel writing, deep history and magazine journalism. There
was a constant flow of fabulous visitors, some here for a day or week, some for a semester
or year. The department was like a small college: 75 full-time faculty teaching literature
and philosophy and film and art and folklore, writing about stuff and making stuff. Looking
back on it from the end of the century, knowing what I now know about other English
departments in other universities in those years, I can say there was not a better place to be.
I have no reason to contradict that judgment.
It certainly did well by me. And by that I mean to imply more than the latitude afforded by
the nature of the program. Most doctoral programs in English required competence in foreign
languages, generally two, but sometimes three (with one of them being classical Greek or Latin).
The requirements generally weren’t very stringent – you didn’t have to be able to write or converse
fluently – but they were real and they took time. Recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary
work, the SUNY department allowed you to substitute competence in some other (relevant)
discipline for the standard foreign language requirement. The department itself housed three such
programs, literature and philosophy, literature and psychology (mostly psychoanalysis), and
literature and society (e.g. Frankfurt school Marxism). I offered psycholinguistics, which I studied
under David Hays, in linguistics.42
Hays did both his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard and took a job at the
RAND Corporation where he ran their project on machine translation. He left RAND for UB in
1969 to become the founding chair of the Department of Linguistics. I began working with him in
the spring of 1974 and joined his informal research group that fall.
For all practical purposes he guided my graduate education, though he had no formal
affiliation with the English Department. Much of my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary
Theory” (1978), was a technical exercise in knowledge representation. As such it was opaque to
my English Department readers, but apparently they trusted Hays’s judgment.
And they trusted me. No one said as much explicitly, but they awarded me the Ph. D. with
only the mildest of reprimands for stretching the department’s loose requirements beyond the
accustomed limits.
That department, as an institution, had a deep and abiding faith in the human mind and in
the life of the mind. It was a place where knowledge and its advancement mattered. And, yes, post-
modern ideas had taken deep root in that department, but contrary to popular stereotypes about
deconstruction and postmodernism, they didn’t get in the way of a search for the truth. The SUNY
English Department knew that truth and the mind could not be identified with nor hemmed in by
institutional rules.
Thus they awarded me my degree.

*****

40
Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics, MLN 91, 1976, 952-982, URL:
https://www.academia.edu/235111/Cognitive_Networks_and_Literary_Semantics
41
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~bjackson/englishdept.htm
42
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_G._Hays

Page 31
One spring the English Department faculty decided, on the spur of the moment, to throw a party. I
believe it was the spring of 1977, after the terrible snow that winter. At that time the English
Department was housed in two long narrow buildings with corrugated roofs. They’d been built as
temporary structures, but they were cozy enough.
So the faculty opened a bar on the lawn outside one of the buildings. The party was on.
There may have been some music playing somewhere, but mostly there were people talking and
drinking and talking. Talking with people they’d never talked with before. Some people were
pleasantly drunk; I was no more than mildly tipsy.
There was an ease and lightness about that was really quite wonderful. I’m sure I’ve
experienced such scenes before and since, but not often – only two other occasions come to mind,
one before (at Hopkins) and one after (at RPI). If I were to insert this party into a work of fiction
I’d also mention the children that had been conceived after the party, for the party had an air of
fruitfulness and spontaneity that defied lasciviousness.
It was fun.
I took my degree in the winter of 1978 and assumed a faculty job at the Renssalaer
Polytechnic Institute in the fall of that year. Two years later Hays decided that he’d had enough of
academic life, that there was no intellectual adventure to be had in the academy. No one was boldly
going anywhere no matter how much they yammered about it.
He decamped for the Big City (New York) in 1980. I remained in touch with him until his
death in 1995. We worked on a variety of projects and coauthored some papers (which you will
find on the web HERE43). He found his alma mater, Harvard, so disappointing that he stopped
making contributions. But he loved the ballet and spent hours and hours over a course of years not
only attending performances of the New York City Ballet (Balanchine’s company) but observing
classes and talking with teachers and dancers to learn how the dance worked its magic on the
human spirit.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Finally we have the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where I had my first and
only full-time faculty appointment. RPI was at that time and, as far as I know still is, a second-tier
technical and scientific school, with MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie-Mellon being in the first-tier. I
was in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication (LL&C) in the School of
Humanities and Sciences (H&SS).
RPI had just embarked on a plan to move up in the academic world and I was hired in that
spirit. My background in the cognitive sciences made me particularly attractive to a technical
school. The offer the Dean made me at the very end of my day of interviews had been sweetened
by several hundred dollars ($500?) what the department chair had offered me.
I was excited to take the offer. I tried hard, they tried had, but it didn’t work out. I failed to
get tenure and simply dropped out of the academic world in the mid-1980s.
Just why things didn’t work out, that’s not so clear. My major priority was to continue the
research program I’d developed at SUNY Buffalo, cognitive science and literature and whatever
else made sense. But there was little opportunity to teach those ideas at either the graduate or
undergraduate level. So my research life was separate from my teaching life, and it was my
teaching life that paid the bills, though I had to pump out the research as well.
But that was only part of the problem. There was a deeper problem. I never had the sense
that RPI, as an institution, appreciated and respected the life of the mind. Johns Hopkins had, and
so had the English and linguistics departments at SUNY Buffalo (I can’t speak for the school I
general). But RPI felt different. And that, as much as anything, is what did me in.

43
http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/

Page 32
 At RPI research is simply what the faculty did in order to pull in grant money and earn
reputation points for the school. Institutionally the money and the reputation points were more
important than the knowledge gained and created. Knowledge (and education) was simply a means
to an institutional end rather than the institution existing to serve knowledge. That didn’t seem to
be the case at Hopkins or.
That, alas, is rather vague. But it’s the best that I can do.
An illustration might help. The School of H&SS was the weakest of the schools at RPI
(engineering, science, business, and architecture being the other schools). Under the old regime
H&SS had provided services to the rest of the school, a “liberal” component to the education and
instruction in writing, languages, speaking and, shall we say, ‘civics’. As such research and
publication was neither expected nor required of the faculty. Not so under the new regime.
So, to prove that H&SS was moving up in the world the Dean required the faculty to
submit a list of accomplishments at the end of each month. These were then compiled across the
school and forwarded to the Provost. This seemed reasonable enough to me, though it was a bit
annoying. But then I learned that H&SS was the only school that did this. And that made the
activity self-defeating. No matter what accomplishments appeared on the list, by simply producing
that list H&SS said “we are not worthy”.
Well, the whole school seemed like that. I felt as though RPI would allow itself to strive
for first-tier status only so long as there was no danger of actually getting there. Striving was easy.
But getting there – well, then what’s there to strive for? Actual intellectual excellence? What’s
that?

*****

There was more to RPI than the faculty and students. When I joined the faculty in the fall of 1978
Eddie “Ade” Knowles was director of minority affairs. He was also a percussionist who’d been a
founding member of Gil Scott-Heron’s Magic Band,44 and had recorded and performed extensively
with Scott-Heron and with other ensembles. I don’t remember just when I hooked up with him,
probably around 1980 or so, but we started playing together (me on trumpet and flugelhorn),
initially to provide music for African dance classes conducted by Druis, his fiancé and then his
wife.
The three of us then formed a group that performed as the Afro-Eurasian Connection and
then as the New African Music Collective. We were artists-in-residence with a Schenectady middle
school, performed various gigs in upstate New York, and even opened for Dizzy Gillespie in 1989,
several years after I’d left the faculty at RPI. By the time I’d moved from upstate New York to
Jersey City Ade had become Vice President for Student Life at RPI. He resigned from that position
in 2011 and became a full-time Professor of Practice in the Arts at RPI where he teaches percussion
and leads Ensemble Congeros.

*****

MapInfo was founded in 1986 by four RPI students, Laszlo Bardos, Andrew Dressel, John Haller,
and Sean O’Sullivan.45 Their initial financing came by and with the help of Michael Marvin, who
was a manager in RPI’s Center for Manufacturing Productivity. After a year Marvin left RPI and
joined MapInfo full-time. I spent two years with MapInfo in the early 1990s as a technical writer,
reporting initially to O’Sullivan, who was then President.

44
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron
45
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapInfo

Page 33
 O’Sullivan46 left MapInfo after, I believe, seven years, a bit before MapInfo went public.
He’d burned himself out working 365 days a year at the company. He formed a rock band, Janet
Speaks French, and then went off to film school at the University of Southern California. He went
to Iraq to shoot documentary footage and stayed there as founder and head of JumpStart
International, a “leading humanitarian engineering organization based in Baghdad and operating
throughout Iraq during the post-war period of 2003-2006. He spent a few years running JumpStart,
which for a time had a staff of over 3000 [Iraqi citizens], running up to 80 projects at a time in
Fallujah, Najaf and the Baghdad region.”
He got married and left Iraq for Ireland (I’m not sure of the order) where he now lives.47
He does philanthropic work through the O’Sullivan Foundation and entrepreneurial work through
SOSV.48 We exchange emails every two or three years.

And So? Break the Rules

If the MacArthur Foundation ran its Fellowship program in the spirit of the English Department at
SUNY Buffalo, then perhaps it might deserve its reputation. Nothing I’ve read about the program,
however, suggests that the staff and board have even half a clue about that kind of spirit. And that
department only held that spirit for a decade or so.
The people who run the MacArthur Fellows Program have to be very good. But then so are
the people who run The Johns Hopkins University, SUNY Buffalo, and Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. I’ve met some extraordinary people at those places – many whom I’ve not mentioned. But
they’re exceptions to the rules that govern those institutions. When the institution is large enough,
various enough, and a bit loose here and there, exceptions will always come through. Always.
It’s the way of the world.
But how do you engineer an organization that finds only the exceptions? How to you make
exceptions the rule?
I don’t know. And the MacArthur Foundation certainly doesn’t know either. But if they
were to stop awarding fellowships to people on staff at elite institutions, they might catch a few
more of those exceptions in their net. They need to focus on the people who move through those
institutions. Those who stick around don’t need their help.

46
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_O%27Sullivan_(engineer)
47
I wrote that in 2013. Since then he’s moved his family to New Jersey, a state which has better
schools for his autistic son. But Sean still has business interests in Ireland.
48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSV

Page 34


Page 35
MacArthur Fellowship Update 2014: Still favoring elite
institutions

Last year I wrote a series of posts on the MacArthur Fellowship Program (tagged “MacArthurFP”49
on New Savanna) in which I argued that they should stop giving out grants to people with
university gigs. Why? Because those people have an income and can function; they don’t need
MacArthur money to maintain a baseline level of functioning. MacArthur money would foster
more innovation by going to people without that basic financial security.
Well, they’re at it again. They’ve just announced the 2014 fellows. There’s 21 fellows in
all, of which I score 11 at university (or similar) gigs, and 10 non-university. That makes a majority
of university gigs: 52%. Call that the cop-out ratio. The cop-out ratio for was 63%: 24 fellows,
with 15 at university gigs. So the Foundation is moving in the right direction. Who knows, maybe
next year the cop-out ratio will drop below 50%.

*****

Here’s the Foundation’s page for the current class: http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-

2014/

Here’s the NYTimes article: MacArthur Awards Go to 21 Diverse Fellows:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/arts/macarthur-awards-go-to-21-diverse-
fellows.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHeadline&module=second-column-
region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&hp&_r=0

Here’s how I scored the current class (phrases from the NYTimes article):

University Gigs:
• Danielle S. Bassett, 32, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Terrance Hayes, 42, a poet and writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
• Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 49, a social psychologist at Stanford University.
• Sarah Deer, 41, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.
• Tami Bond, 50, an environmental engineer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign.
• Craig Gentry, 41, a computer scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in
Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
• Mark Hersam, 39, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
• Jacob Lurie, 36, a mathematician at Harvard.
• Khaled Mattawa, 50, a translator and poet at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
• Tara Zahra, 38, a historian of modern Europe at the University of Chicago.
• Yitang Zhang, 59, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Non-University Gigs:
• Ai-jen Poo, 40, a labor organizer in Chicago.
• John Henneberger, 59, a housing advocate in Austin, Tex.

49
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/MacArthurFP

Page 36
• Jonathan Rapping, 48, president and founder of Gideon’s Promise in Atlanta, which
teaches public defenders to be more effective.
• Mary L. Bonauto, 53, a civil rights lawyer with the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and
Defenders in Boston.
• Rick Lowe, 53, who was trained as a painter but founded Project Row Houses in Houston.
• Steve Coleman, 57, a composer and alto saxophonist in Allentown, Pa..
• Joshua Oppenheimer, 39, a documentary filmmaker in Copenhagen.
• Samuel D. Hunter, 33, a New Yorker and the author of a widely produced 2012 play, “The
Whale.”
• Alison Bechdel, 54, a cartoonist and graphic memoirist in Bolton, Vt.
• Pamela O. Long, 71, [is] a historian of science and technology in Washington.

Page 37
Big Macs for 2015: Same Old Same Old

The mavens, pundits, and prognosticators at Big Mac Central have once again bestowed their
special sauce on a cohort of worthy recipients. This year 24 people have gotten that whopper phone
call telling them a Big Mac is on the way. And, once again, it’s pretty much same old same old.

*****

Two years ago I wrote a series of posts on the MacArthur Fellowship Program (tagged
“MacArthurFP” on New Savanna50) in which I argued that they should stop giving out grants to
people with university gigs. Why? Because those people have an income and can function; they
don’t need MacArthur money to maintain a baseline level of functioning. MacArthur money would
foster more innovation by going to people without that basic financial security.

I posted an update for the 2014 cohort and now Big Mac Central has announced the class of 2015.
Same old same old. There’s 24 fellows in all, of which I score 13 at university (or similar) gigs,
and 11 non-university. That makes a majority of university gigs: 54%. Call that the cop-out ratio.
The cop-out ratio for 2014 was 52%: 23 university gigs out of 21 fellowships. The 2013 ratio was
63%: 24 fellows, with 15 at university gigs.

I list my scoring judgments in the last section of this post. In the next section I take a look at what a
small number of other people are saying about the Big Macs.

Other Views
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber calls for suggestions of worthy recipients who wouldn’t
ordinarily be gifted by the conservative Big Mac Program.51 He sets up his call this way:
[…] I’ve always thought of them as tottering on a Bourdieuian knife-edge between two different
kinds of legitimation. On the one hand, they are supposed to have consequences, to publicly
recognize people who would otherwise be less well known, and giving them financial and symbolic
support that they can then go on to use to do good and wonderful things. This means that it would be
weird to give one e.g. to someone like Paul Krugman, who already is doing very nicely in terms of
public recognition. On the other, they are supposed to go to people who are creative and brilliant –
but in socially legitimated ways so as to maintain the status of the award. This means that they are
unlikely to go to genuinely unsung geniuses, not simply because the selection process can’t find
brilliance if it isn’t publicly well known, but because the legitimacy of the awards partly depends on
their social validation by a variety of elite networks.
He goes on to suggest a policy more akin to the investment strategy of venture capitalists: Place a
relatively large number of risky bets on the assumption that most will fail but that a small number
will be very successful. I agree, of course.

In the ensuing discussion Spiny Norman observes:

As a biomedical scientist, I suggest that they not give it to biomedical scientists. We already have
a LOT of awards with comparable cachet and money (half a million dollars, giver or take). Pew,
Searle, American Cancer Society, American Heart Ass’n., Packard, etc., etc., etc. There are

50
URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/MacArthurFP
51
URL: http://crookedtimber.org/2015/09/29/alternative-macarthurs/

Page 38
 enough of these awards that they are not that hard to get (even I have one, for chrissakes). And we
have NIH, HHMI, Gates Foundation, etc. Yes, we’re suffering for funding (because the GOP has
contempt for reality) but we need real money — not the kind of tinpot funding that MacArthur
offers. And honestly, the choices for MacArthurs for biomedical scientists have been extremely
conservative. Most have already gotten one or more of the other awards listed above, or
comparables. To good people, yes. But “geniuses”?
If they’re going to give MacArthurs in the life sciences, give them in areas that are
catastrophically under-funded but where spectacular work is being done. Conservation biology.
Evolutionary biology. Restoration ecology. Taxonomy. Areas where a “small” grant by NIH
standards can make a genuinely transformative difference.
Over at The Baffler Thomas Frank cites James English (The Economy of Prestige) as observing that
we are in fact awash in awards.52
In pursuit of that project, all award programs face the same problems. Because the reputation of
the prize must itself be established for the academy in question to set about judging the merits of
others, all prize programs gravitate toward convention. They tend overwhelmingly to reward
people whose reputations are already made. Indeed, as the competition between prizes grows more
intense, English tells us, the pressure to associate a prize with safe and unquestionably prestigious
figures only grows. This is why competing prizes within a field always tend to converge on the
same individuals, virtual prize magnets who are fated to stagger through life under the weight of
their accumulated laurels.
The central thrust of Frank’s article, however, is speculation about just what the Big Macs are for,
if not for the identification of talent before it has ripened. His thinking centers on the mythic life-
transforming phone call that informs a recipient that they’ve been gifted with a Big Mac, noting
that the Foundation itself promotes this mythology:
What I discovered, however, was that it isn’t only the press that pushes this silly narrative. It’s
also the people who hand out the Fellowship themselves; they want you to know how their
philanthropy affects its recipients in the most intimate and immediate way. The MacArthur
website features videotaped interviews with Fellowship winners; in every one I have listened to,
the Genius in question winds up telling about how he or she felt when the call came, and often in
strangely religious language. “When I first got the call from the MacArthur Foundation,” says
playwright Samuel Hunter, “it was sort of like an out-of-body experience.” “You hear about
MacArthur fellows,” relates public defender Jonathan Rapping, “and you sort of think of them as
people who walk on water and do great work. . . . So, it was disbelief.”
In other words, the phone call telling you that you’ve gotten a Big Mac is a Whopper of a phone
call.

Frank notes that there’s no apparent pattern to the awards beyond the fact that most of them go to
the usual suspects.
[…] It seems almost random.
And that, on reflection, appears to be the key to the whole thing. Randomness is the pattern, the
essential quality that defines the Genius Grant. From the selection process itself, which is totally
opaque and closed to outsiders, to the phone call that comes as a complete surprise, what the
MacArthur Fellowship is about is arbitrariness.
Let us recall, one last time, how the procedure unfolds. There’s that call—that “walk on water”
call—in which an unexpected voice from on high informs someone that they have been chosen to
join the elect, the creative. Because the Foundation is omniscient, like the Almighty, the call goes
out to a great and diverse group, to people laboring in fields so varied they have no possible

52
URL: http://thebaffler.com/blog/phone-rings-genius-cult

Page 39
 relationship to one another. Because the cogitations of the Foundation are unknowable, like the
mind of God, the process by which they have all been chosen is completely mysterious.
And so:
Why does the Foundation promote the Parable of the Phone Call? Because that’s all there is. That
is the civic ritual of our time. Here we are, Americans all together, staring at the solitary genius as
she holds the instrument of destiny in her hand, taking the phone call from the billion-dollar
patron. She is Creative. She is a Genius. And if you work hard, you can be too. Someday, that
phone will ring for you.
The Big Mac is the ultimate lottery because you don’t even have to buy a ticket. As the saying
goes, “May the blue bird of happiness smile upon you.”

Scoring for 2015

Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s page for the current class:
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/2015/

By my accounting, these are the awards going to people with secure jobs at prestigious institutions:

Kartik Chandran: Columbia University

Environmental Engineer: transforming wastewater from a pollutant requiring disposal to a resource
for useful products, such as commodity chemicals, energy sources, and fertilizers.

Matthew Desmond, Harvard University

Urban Sociologist: revealing the impact of eviction on poor families and the role of housing policy
in sustaining poverty and racial inequality in large American cities.

William Dichtel, Cornell University

Chemist: pioneering the assembly of molecules into stable, high surface-area networks with
potential applications in electronic, optical, and energy storage devices.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Photographer and Video Artist: capturing the consequences of postindustrial decline for
marginalized communities and illustrating how photography can promote dialogue about historical
change and social responsibility.

Ben Lerner, City University of New York, Brooklyn College

Writer: transcending conventional distinctions of genre and style in works that convey the texture
of our contemporary moment and explore the relevance of art and the artist in modern culture.

Dimitri Nakassis, University of Toronto

Classicist: challenging long-held assumptions about modes of economic exchange and political
authority in prehistoric Greek societies and revealing their connections to the origins of modern
civilization.

John Novembre, University of Chicago

Computational Biologist: shedding new light on the links between geography and genomic
diversity and producing a more finely grained picture of human evolutionary history.

Page 40
Christopher Ré, Stanford University
Computer Scientist: democratizing big data analytics through open source data-processing products
that have the power of machine learning algorithms but can be integrated into existing and applied
database systems.

Marina Rustow, Princeton University

Historian: mining textual materials from the Cairo Geniza to deepen our understanding of medieval
Muslim and Jewish communities.

Beth Stevens, Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School

Neuroscientist: revealing the heretofore unknown role of microglial cells in neuron communication
and prompting a fundamental shift in thinking about brain development in both healthy and
unhealthy states.

Lorenz Studer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

Stem Cell Biologist: pioneering a new method for large-scale generation of dopaminergic neurons
that could provide one of the first treatments for Parkinson’s disease and prove the broader
feasibility of stem cell–based therapies for other neurological disorders.

Heidi Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Economist: unraveling the forces that hinder or spur medical innovation through empirically based
studies that are informing public policy.

Peidong Yang, University of California, Berkeley

Inorganic Chemist: opening new horizons for tackling the global challenge of clean, renewable
energy sources through transformative advances in the science of semiconductor nanowires and
nanowire photonics.

These people are either free-lancers or employed at institutions that don’t have the cachet of top-of-
the-line universities:

Patrick Awuah, Ashesi University College, Accra, Ghana

Education Entrepreneur: creating a new model for higher education in Africa that combines
training in ethical leadership, a liberal arts tradition, and skills for contemporary African needs and
opportunities. (Note: I know nothing about Ashesi University College. It may well be, and
probably is, a fine school. But it’s a long way from Harvard or Stanford in the prestige markets.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, Washington, District of Columbia

Journalist: interpreting complex and challenging issues around race and racism through the lens of
personal experience and nuanced historical analysis.

Gary Cohen, Health Care Without Harm, Reston, Virginia

Environmental Health Advocate: spurring environmental responsibility among health care
providers and repositioning health care institutional practice around the broader challenges of
sustainability, climate change, and community health.

Michelle Dorrance, Dorrance Dance/New York, New York, New York

Tap Dancer and Choreographer: reinvigorating a uniquely American dance form in works that
combine the musicality of tap with the choreographic intricacies of contemporary dance.

Page 41
Nicole Eisenman, New York, New York
Painter: expanding the expressive potential of the figurative tradition in works that engage
contemporary social issues and restore cultural significance to the representation of the human
form.

Mimi Lien, New York, New York

Set Designer: translating a text’s narrative and emotional dynamics onto the stage in bold,
immersive sets that enhance the performance experience for theater makers and viewers alike.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, New York, New York

Playwright, Composer, and Performer: expanding the conventions of musical theater with a
popular culture sensibility and musical styles and voices that reflect the diverse cultural panorama
of the American urban experience.

Juan Salgado, Instituto del Progreso Latino, Chicago, Illinois

Community Leader: creating a model for workforce development and training among immigrant
communities through a holistic approach that addresses language skills, education, and other
barriers to entering the workforce.

Alex Truesdell, Adaptive Design Association, Inc., New York, New York
Adaptive Designer and Fabricator: constructing low-tech, affordable, and customized tools and
furniture that enable children with disabilities to participate actively in their homes, schools, and
communities.

Basil Twist, New York, New York

Puppetry Artist and Director: revitalizing puppetry as a serious and sophisticated art form in
imaginative experiments with its materials, techniques, and uses in both narrative and abstract
works.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Cabot, Vermont

Poet: meditating on will and fate and the life cycles of the natural world through a distinctive
intermingling of lyric and narrative modes and ongoing experimentation with form and technique.

Page 42
23 Big Macs for 2016: More special sauce for the elite few

Back in 2013 I started this series, arguing that the Academy of Big Mac (aka the MacArthur
Foundation) was copping out by giving the majority of its awards to people who don’t really need
them because they had secure employment at prestigious institutions. If they wanted to be true to
their original mandate, to seek out those not normally graced by the award fairies, they should
avoid those institutions entirely. But they don’t listen. How could they? They’ve got to feed the
vanity of the elite institutions on which they depend for advice, personnel, and approval.
Back in 1992 Anne Matthews wrote a full-dress review of the program for The New York
Times Magazine, “The MacArthur Truffle Hunt,”53 in which she observed: “Officials at other
foundations note the MacArthur fellows program has never really decided if its job is to reward
creativity or to stimulate it, if it wants to be an American Nobel Prize or a fairy godmother to
talents unappreciated by mainstream society.” Their solution seems to have been to aim for the
Nobels while appearing to be a fairy godmother. So they favor those firmly entrenched in elite
institutions, spawning ground for Nobels, but who have not yet reached the highest levels in those
institutions, though some of them are pretty high indeed, with named professorships.
They’ve just announced their class of 2016 and they’re following true to form: 23 awards,
of which 13 go to people who have lifetime employment at good universities. That’s 57%. They
may well be fine and innovative people, probably are, but why not give those awards to people who
work temp gigs, fast-food or low to mid-level office gigs, any kind of make-do gig, to support their
creative efforts in the evenings and on weekends? Why not? Because it’s too hard to find them,
requires too much imagination and a taste for risk, that’s why.

Waffle Tallies
Here’s the Big Mac “waffle” tally (awards to people with secure gigs) for the last four years:
2013: 63%
2014: 52%
2015: 54%
2016: 57%

Current Class
I’ve divided them into four classes:
Secure university posts: 13
Pre-tenure university: 2
Other-employed: 3
Self-employed: 5

Secure University Positions (13)

These people have the rank of Associate Professor or above. As that rank normally carries tenure I
assume these people have lifetime employment.
Ahilan Arulanantham, Human Rights Lawyer, Director of Advocacy and Legal Director,
American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, Age 43

53
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/07/magazine/the-macarthur-truffle-
hunt.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Page 43
Daryl Baldwin, Linguist and Cultural Preservationist Director, Myaamia Center, Miami University
of Ohio, Oxford, Ohio, Age: 53
Anne Basting, Theater Artist and Educator, Professor of Theatre, Peck School of the Arts,
University of Wisconsin / Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Age: 51
Kellie Jones, Art Historian and Curator, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and
Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, New York, Age: 57
Subhash Khot, Theoretical Computer Scientist, Silver Professor of Computer Science, Courant
Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, New York, Age: 38
Josh Kun, Cultural Historian, Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication
and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, Age: 45
Maggie Nelson, Writer, Faculty, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts,
Valencia, California, Age: 43
Dianne Newman, Microbiologist, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and
Geobiology, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, California, Age: 44
Victoria Orphan, Geobiologist, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology,
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
California, Age: 44
Claudia Rankine, Poet, Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry, Department of English, Yale
University, New Haven, Connecticut, Age: 53
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Bioengineer, Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Department of
Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, Age: 52
Julia Wolfe, Composer, Associate Professor of Music Composition, Department of Music and
Performing Arts, Steinhardt School, New York University, New York, New York, Age: 57
Jin-Quan Yu, Synthetic Chemist, Frank and Bertha Hupp Professor, Department of Chemistry,
Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, Age: 50

Tenure-track University Positions (2)

These two hold the rank of assistant professor, which is normally pre-tenure. I am assuming that
they are in tenure-track positions, but tenure is not guaranteed. For example, Henry Louis Gates
failed to get tenure at Yale even though he’d won a Big Mac (maybe it didn’t have enough
cheese).54
Lauren Redniss, Artist and Writer, Assistant Professor of Illustration, School of Art, Media, and
Technology, Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, New York, Age: 42
Manu Prakash, Physical Biologist and Inventor, Assistant Professor, Department of
Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Age: 36

Other-Employed (3)
These people work for someone else, but not a university.
José A. Quiñonez, Financial Services Innovator, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mission
Asset Fund, San Francisco, California, Age: 45
Bill Thies, Computer Scientist, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research India, Bangalore, India,
Age: 38
Sarah Stillman, Long-Form Journalist, Staff Writer, The New Yorker, New York, New York, Age:
32

Self-Employed (5)
Vincent Fecteau, Sculptor, San Francisco, California, Age: 47

54
URL: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2009/07/henry-louis-gates-jr/5/

Page 44
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Playwright, New York, New York, Age: 31
Mary Reid Kelley, Video Artist, Olivebridge, New York, Age: 37
Joyce J. Scott, Jewelry Maker and Sculptor, Baltimore, Maryland, Age: 67
Gene Luen Yang, Graphic Novelist, San Jose, California, Age: 43

Page 45
2017: More pennies from heaven, once again the MacArthur
Foundation waffles in its distribution of Big Macs

It’s that time of year, folks. The MacArthur Foundation has announced its latest round of so-called
genius grants – a term they coyly back away from – and the world of elite institutions rejoices in
the largesse it bestows on “the creative class”. In its annual flurry of air kisses to the Foundation’s
Big Mac program, The New York Times quotes Cecilia A. Conrad, leader of the fellows program,
as saying
the goal was to find “people on the precipice,” where the award will make a difference,
but also to inspire creativity more broadly.
“We hope that when people read about the fellows, it makes them think about how they
might be more creative in their own lives,” Ms. Conrad said. “It does something for the
human spirit.”55
Gimme’ a break. What a whopper. The program’s mostly special sauce, with only a little beef on a
nice fluffy bun.
Yes, since the beginning, the program’s nattered on about helping people on the edge,
“where the award will make a difference”, but it has mostly given its awards to people who are safe
and secure, that is, to people like the good folks at the MacArthur Foundation. To be sure, most of
these people are very creative, but most of them have secure gigs as well. They are not on any
precipice. They aren’t making a living waiting tables at Mom’s Miracle Meal, doing temp word-
processing at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, hustling pool at Benny’s Billiard Emporium, or any

55
Jennifer Schuessler, MacArthur Foundation Names 2017 ‘Genius’ Grant Winners, The New York Times,
October 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/arts/macarthur-genius-
grants.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-
region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Page 46
other make-do gig. They don’t have to work day gigs to pay the rent so they can be creative at
nights and on weekends. Their day gig IS their creative gig.
Why doesn’t the Foundation come clean and stop giving awards to people who have secure
jobs? Yeah, I know, that would force them to look outside the circle of elite institutions which they
serve. It would make their work harder. It might even force them to be, you know, creative. What a
novel idea!

Waffle Tallies
Here’s the Big Mac “waffle” tally (percentage of awards to people with secure gigs) for the last
five years, including 2017:
2013: 63%
2014: 52%
2015: 54%
2016: 57%
2017: 50%
The 2017 tally is a first, 50-50, half at secure university gigs, half at other gigs. Note, however, that
two of those other gigs are a tenure-track university posts, and one of them is with The New York
Times. No guarantees there, unlike the secure jobs, but they’re pretty safe. There are no starving
artists in this crowd.

Current Class
I’ve divided them into four groups:
Secure university positions: 12
Tenure-track university positions: 2
Other-employed: 6
Self-employed: 4
Here’s what those categories mean:
Secure University Positions: These people have the rank of Associate Professor or above. As that
rank normally carries tenure I assume these people have lifetime employment. They DO NOT need
this award in order to put a roof over their head, or food on the table. For various reasons, above
and beyond the mere fact that life is tough, these people may not be happy with their secure jobs.
But that’s a different matter.
Tenure-track University Positions: These are assistant professors, which is normally pre-tenure. I
am assuming that they are in salary lines intended for tenure, but tenure is not guaranteed.
Other-Employed: These people work for someone else, but not a university. In a number of cases
they’re working at organizations they’ve founded.
Self-Employed: Just what it says. There people are on their own, though most of them have some
substantial recognition along with high-class track records.

Secure University Jobs – 12

Sunil Amrith, 38, Historian, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Regina Barzilay, 46 Computer scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Mass.
Dawoud Bey, 63 Photographer and Columbia College Chicago, Chicago
educator,

Page 47
Emmanuel Candès, Mathematician and Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.
47 statistician
Jason De Léon, 40 Anthropologist University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Viet Thanh Fiction writer and cultural University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Nguyen, 46 critic
Kate Orff, 45 Landscape architect, Founder and partner, Scape, and associate
professor, Columbia, University, New York
Betsy Levy Paluck, Professor of psychology Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
39 and public affairs
Derek Peterson, 46 Historian University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Stefan Savage, 48 Computer scientist University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif.
Jesmyn Ward, 40 Fiction writer Tulane University, New Orleans
Annie Baker, 36 Playwright New York
Pre-tenure University Jobs - 2
Tyshawn Sorey, 37 Composer and musician Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.
Gabriel Victora, 40 Immunologist Rockefeller University, New York
Other Employed - 6
Greg Asbed, 54 Human rights strategist Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Fair Food
Program, Immokalee, Fla.
Nikole Hannah- Journalist The New York Times Magazine, New York
Jones, 41
Cristina Jiménez Social justice organizer Co-founder and executive director, United We
Moreta, 33 Dream, Washington
Rami Nashashibi, Community leader Inner-City Muslim Action Network, Chicago
45
Damon Rich, 42 Designer and urban planner Co-Founder and partner, Hector, Newark
Yuval Sharon, 37 Opera director and The Industry, founder and artistic director, Los
producer Angeles
Self-Employed - 4
Njideka Akunyili Painter Los Angeles
Crosby, 34
Rhiannon Giddens, Singer, instrumentalist and Greensboro, N.C.
40 songwriter
Taylor Mac, 44 Theater artist New York
Trevor Paglen, 43 Artist and geographer Berlin

Page 48
2018: Extra catsup & double cheese! MacArthur Foundation
slathers 25 with that BIG MAC $pecial $auce
It’s that time of year, time to update my ongoing critique of the MacArthur Fellows Program, The
Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before? I’ve been writing about this
public relations campaign – for that’s what it is (see The Genius Chronicles, Version 6, p. 12) –
since 2013. I was motivated by a simple observation:
The majority of the Fellows have tenured positions at elite universities.
As those are the kind of people who ordinary get prestigious fellowships and awards there’s
nothing surprising about that.

Forget about the academy

Except, except...that’s not what the program was created to do. It was created to help exceptionally
original individuals who, by virtue of that originality, have been overlooked by the standard
institutions and so are likely to be in need of financial help because of that. Well, if you’ve got
tenure at Harvard, Chicago, or Cal Tech, you’ve got a steady income and lifetime employment.
Your academic environment may not be ideal, but you’re not starving, you’re not waiting tables, or
filing insurance claims, or driving a cab. You can function.
I had a simple idea for making a marginal improvement to the program, one that nudges it
closer to the original intent: Don’t give ANY awards to people with tenure at good schools. Easy
peasy, simple as pie. But of course, the foundation didn’t take my advice – and, to tell the truth, I
didn’t make any focused attempt to reach them. I just posted may arguments on the web where
anyone can read them. I figure that if the foundation had the least inclination in that direction,
they’d have found those documents. After all, I’ve been posting one each year since 2013. And if
they’re not actively scouring the web...that question answers itself.
Each year I update the numbers when a new class of fellows is announced. From 2013 to
now, 2018, they’ve given out 141 fellowships. Of those 77 have gone to people with tenure (or on a
tenure track) at elite institutions. That’s 55% of the fellowships, a majority, not a large majority
(and it was only 50-50 last year), but still, a majority.
If they had taken my advice, starting in 2014, how would things be different today? It’s
hard to tell. For one thing, what differences should we be looking for?

Changing times
But I’ve got some thoughts. First, as I’ve already indicated, a MacArthur Fellowship could make a
dramatic difference in the life of someone who has to work a wearisome day job while pursuing
their creative work in the evenings and on weekends, if they can do so at all. Even if the day job
isn’t so bad – yeah, I know about, e.g. Charles Ives, insurance executive – you work better if
you’ve got long uninterrupted blocks of time you can devote to creative work. On the other hand, a
Big Mac fellowship is not going to make much difference to someone who’s got tenure at, say,
Princeton or Stanford. Maybe they can get a new instrument or two for the lab, convert the attic
into a nice library, get on the waiting list for a Tesla, or fund a postdoc, things on that order. Good
things all, but not career or life changing.
At the level of the well-being of a handful of individuals, yes, that one simple change
would make a difference. Elite insiders are not much harmed by the change while the lives of
outsiders are much improved. But, however important it may be, the well-being of a few
individuals is not the point of the program. The goal is to increase the returns to society on the
foundation’s investment in the lives of its fellows.

Page 49
 On that I can do no more than speculate. I know, of course, that finding extremely creative
people is inherently difficult – something I discuss in “The Big Sort”, pp. 18-24. It’s not simply
that finding them is difficult, but how do you tell the difference between a crank and someone who
really is deeply creative? Surely one reason the foundation devotes so much effort to elite academia
is that those institutions have already done a great deal of sorting and choosing. The cranks have
been weeded out. But then, the geniuses may be gone as well – yes, I know the foundation frowns
on that word, “genius”. Behind closed doors, though, don’t they love it?
And there’s the rub. If you’re looking for people like Pāṇini, Sappho, Cervantes, Florence
Nightingale, Sequoia, Murasaki Shikibu, Goethe, and Thelonius Monk, you aren’t just looking for
ability. You’re looking for the fit between ability and cultural need. That’s much harder to judge.
As we all know, the times they are a changin’. Massively, rapidly, unpredictably. And
those elite colleges and universities are grounded in 19th century institutional structures. It’s not
simply that they are inherently conservative, but that what they are conserving is rooted in a world
that’s becoming obsolete at an accelerating pace. As I note at the end of “Cultural Factors” (p. 26):
Remember, when the dinosaurs ruled the earth mammals were pitiful little
creatures who had to live off their leavings. Sixty-five million years ago an
asteroid struck the earth, changing living conditions worldwide. The dinosaurs died
out and the mammals came to thrive.
Is the current regime of world-wide cultural ferment the social analog to that
asteroid of old?
The effort the foundation devotes to choosing tenured academics is basically effort devoted to
picking the best dinosaurs. They may be a few mammals here at there, but not many. If they want
mammals, they’re better off looking outside the universities. Finding good ones will be difficult,
but at least they’re there.

Set an example
The MacArthur Fellows program is the most visible program the foundation has, though it’s a
relatively small one. For that matter, it may be the single most visible philanthropic program in the
country, if not the world. What other philanthropic program has, for example, all but reserved
annual slots in major news media? If the foundation changes this flagship program, everyone will
see it.
One can certainly argue that, in the early days when the foundation had no track record, it
had no choice but to make its awards to “safe” choices, choices that would be approved in the
world of elite philanthropic institutions. In that way it would itself become recognized as a fully
legitimate institution. But the MacArthur Foundation has long since passed through this
legitimation phase. It is now a well established and highly respected foundation.
It is now a source of legitimacy. It has its own cultural capital. Why not expend it on
something that is in fact innovative? Why not set an example? And if others were to follow that
example...who knows? (See pp. 11-13, 14-16, 38 ff.)

Waffle Tallies
Here’s the Big Mac “waffle” tally (percentage of awards to people with secure gigs) for the last six
years, including 2018:

2013: 63%
2014: 52%
2015: 54%
2016: 57%

Page 50
 2017: 50%
2018: 52%

The 2018 tally cuts it close: 13 at secure university gigs, 12 at other gigs. Note, however, that two
of those other gigs are a tenure-track university posts No guarantees there, unlike the tenured jobs,
but they’re pretty safe. There are no starving artists in this crowd.

Current Class
I’ve divided them into four groups:

Secure university posts: 11

Pre-tenure university: 2
Other-employed: 7
Self-employed: 5

Here’s what those categories mean:

Secure University Positions: These people have the rank of Associate Professor or
above. As that rank normally carries tenure I assume these people have lifetime
employment. They DO NOT need this award in order to put a roof over their head,
or food on the table. For various reasons, above and beyond the mere fact that life
is tough, these people may not be happy with their secure jobs. But that’s a
different matter.
Tenure-track University Positions: These are assistant professors, which is
normally pre-tenure. I am assuming that they are in salary lines intended for
tenure, but tenure is not guaranteed.
Other-Employed: These people work for someone else, but not a university. In a
number of cases they’re working at organizations they’ve founded.
Self-Employed: Just what it says. There people are on their own, though most of
them have some substantial recognition along with high-class track records.

Secure University Jobs – 11

Clifford Brangwynne, Biophysical engineer Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
40
Natalie Diaz, 40 Poet Arizona State University
Deborah Estrin, 58 Computer scientist Cornell Tech, New York
Amy Finkelstein, 44 Health economist Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Mass.
John Keene, 53 Writer Rutgers University-Newark, Newark
Kristina Olson, 37 Psychologist University of Washington, Seattle
Lisa Parks, 51 Media scholar Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Mass.
Rebecca Sandefur, 47 Sociologist and legal University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign,
scholar Urbana, Ill.
Allan Sly, 36 Mathematician Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
Sarah T. Stewart, 45 Planetary scientist University of California-Davis, Davis, Calif.
Doris Tsao, 42 Neuroscientist California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
Calif.

Page 51
Pre-tenure University Jobs - 2
Livia S. Eberlin, 32 Analytical chemist University of Texas-Austin, Austin, Texas
Gregg Gonsalves, 54 Epidemiologist Yale University,New Haven, Conn.
Other Employed - 7
Matthew Aucoin, 28 Composer and conductor American Modern Opera Company/Los
Angeles Opera, New York
Rev. William J. Pastor and civil rights Goldsboro, N.C.
Barber II, 55 activist
Vijay Gupta, 31 Violinist and speaker Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles
Becca Heller, 36 Human rights lawyer International Refugee Assistance Project, New
York
Raj Jayadev, 43 Community organizer Silicon Valley De-Bug, San Jose, Calif.
Dominique Playwright Signature Theater, New York
Morisseau, 40
Ken Ward Jr., 50 Journalist The Charleston Gazette-Mail, Charleston,
W.Va.
Self-Employed - 5
Wu Tsang, 36 Filmmaker and New York
performance artist
Julie Ault, 60 Artist and curator New York
Titus Kaphar, 42 Painter NXTHVN, New Haven, Conn.
Kelly Link, 49 Writer Northampton, Mass.
Okwui Okpokwasili, Choreographer and New York
46 performer

Page 52
Page 53
Louis Armstrong and the Snake-Charmin’ Hoochie-Coochie Meme

Some years ago I was looking for a way to open the final chapter of a book I was writing about
music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001). The chapter was to be a
quick tour of black music in 20th Century America, starting with jazz and blues and ending with
hip-hop. So, I thought and thought and, finally, an idea crept up on me.
I had this book of Louis Armstrong trumpet solos that I’d been working from ever since
my early teens. The solos had been transcribed from recordings Armstrong had made in the late
1920s and had been circulating ever since, all under copyright, naturally. These were classic
Armstrong, “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Struttin’ with some Barbecue,” “Gully Low Blues,” “Muggles”
(nothing to do with Harry Potter, muggles was Armstrong’s favorite inhalent, the one that President
Bill Clinton never inhaled) and a few others. One of those others was called “Tight Like This” – an
open-ended title that asked you to use your imagination. During his improvisation in “Tight Like
This” Armstrong quoted a certain riff, not once, but twice.
How did I know it was a quotation? Because I was familiar with the riff from other
contexts. For one thing, it showed up in cartoons, often to accompany a snake charmer, but also as
general all-purpose Oriental mystery music. For another, I knew it as a children’s song that me and
by buddies used to sing, with lyrics to the effect that the girls in France didn’t wear underpants –
hotcha! But how did Armstrong know this tune? He recorded “Tight Like This” in 1928, the same
year that Walt Disney produced “Steamboat Willie,” generally regarded as the first cartoon with a
fully synchronized soundtrack. So Armstrong’s recording predated the tune’s use in cartoon
soundtracks. Did he learn it as a kid growing up on the streets of New Orleans?
I made a few phone calls, sent some emails to friends, queried a trumpeter’s listserve
(sponsored by TPIN, Trumpet Players’ International Network), and information began trickling in.
In the first place, other people remember this tune from their childhoods. One Eric Johnson. from
the TPIN list, told me that his daughters remember these lyrics:

All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,

And the way they shake is enough to kill a snake.

Karen Stober, also from TPIN, tells me the tune was sung by two children facing one another and
clapping hands to the lyrics:

On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.

Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969! [whatever year it is].

We’ve moved from France to Mars, but there’s that snake again, and now we’ve got cigars – a
regular Freudian wonderland of sub-rosa implication. What fun. I found a somewhat fuller version
on the web where the dance was characterized as a “hookie-kookie dance.”
I then followed a lead suggested by my friend, David Bloom, who suggested I check out
the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a major event in American cultural life. It
was the first large-scale use of AC electricity, and the first ferris wheel. The exposition hosted
deligations from all over the world, including Japan, the first chance Americans had to experience
that nation and its people – who were here, of course, to learn about us as well. This is when and
where hamburgers became all-American fast food; Pabst Blue-Ribbon Beer flowed freely on the

Page 54
midway; Kellogs Cornflakes debuted here as well. And, wouldn’t you know it? Elias Disney,
Walt’s father, was a carpenter on the construction job. But all this is beside the point.
The point is about the entertainment on the midway. Yes, we had Wild Bill Cody, and we
had John Philips Sousa. But we also had a lithe young woman who danced as “Little Egypt.” The
exposition’s press agent, Sol Bloom, claimed that he had written our little tune just so Little Egypt
could dance to it. The tune was a hit and was subsequently copyrighted under various names,
including Dance of the Midway, Coochi-Coochi Polka, Danse de Ventre, and The Streets of Cairo.
Just how it was copyrighted several times is a bit of a mystery, but the fact that several folks
claimed it as their own testifies to the tune’s popularity. One of those folks, W. J. Voges, included
it as the Koochie-Koochie Dance in the second edition of Pasquila Medley published in New
Orleans in 1895. We’ve now got the tune in New Orleans at a date prior to Armstrong’s birth.
Another of my TPIN informants, trumpeter’s trumpeter Jeanne Pocius, told me that this
melody appears in Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet as one of “Sixty-eight
Duets for Two Cornets,” which follows “150 Classic and Popular Melodies.” Our tune is called
“Arabian Song.” Arbans as it is known among trumpeters, is the central method book for “legit”
trumpet and cornet pedagogy. It was writtena and compiled by Jean-Baptiste Arban, a cornet
virtuoso, composer, conductor and teacher on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory. He first
published his Grande méthode complète pour cornet à pistons et de saxhorn in 1864, well before
Sol Bloom claimed he’d written the tune for Little Egypt. Was Sol Bloom telling a stretcher – as
Huck Finn called it – when he claimed that tune as his own?
Where did Arban get it? Roughly half the book is a set of technical exercises graded from
elementry to extremely advanced. Those exercises are followed by complete tunes and
compositions, real music. And that’s where we find our snake-charmin’ shimmy-shakin’ tune. The
melodies Arban collected comprise what appears to be a European Songbook of the 1860s. Some
of these tunes were by recognized masters of the European high art tradition—Mozart, Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Bellini, von Weber, and Haydn, among others. But many were just tunes, attributed
to no one. And so it is with “Arabian Tune.” As I said in Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 253-254):
When we consider the lyrics this tune has attracted, its use in cartoons to accompany snake
charming, and its title, it seems to be a musical icon of the Mysterious Licentious Orient,
which had fascinated European peoples at least since the Crusades. It is the only song
identified with the Orient in Arban’s collection, but other tunes have national or ethnic
identification. Thus we find a “German Song,” a “Neapolitan song” and a “Swiss Song,” a
“French Air” and an “Italian Air,” a “Russian Hymn” and an “Austrian Hymn,” as well as
“Blue Bells of Scotland” and “Yankee Doodle.” In compiling his collection of melodies
Arban clearly wanted to present music from all the civilized nations he could think of. It is
thus in the service of a truncated ethnic inclusiveness that he included an “Arabian Song”—
or, more likely, the one-and-only “Arabian Song” he knew.
Beyond this, the opening five notes of this song are identical to the first five notes of
Colin Prend Sa Hotte, published in Paris in 1719. Writing in 1857, J. B. Wekerlin noted
that the first phrase of that song is almost identical to Kradoutja, a now-forgotten Arabic or
Algerian melody that had been popular in France since 1600. This song may thus have been
in the European meme pool 250 years before Arban found it. It may even be a Middle
Eastern song, or a mutation of one, that came to Europe via North Africa through Moorish
Spain or was brought back from one of the Crusades. For all practical purposes we can
consider it to be nearly as old and widely dispersed as dirt. And, on the evidence, equally
fertile.
We still don’t know exactly how Armstrong and the tune found one another, but that no longer
seems like much of an issue. That tune got around. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he learned it as a
child, and that it had lyrics similar to those that I learned, and that others learned after me.
If we think of that melody as a meme, or perhaps several memes, then Armstrong’s uses
would be mutations and his use of only part of the melody would seem to be a kind of memetic
recombination. But what is that fragment being recombined with? For one thing, it was being

Page 55
combined with other licks, or riffs as musicians call them. Some of these fragments may have come
from the same pool that floated the “Arabian Song” across the Atlantic from Europe. Others may
have been indigenous to the United States or even local to New Orleans or Chicago. Jazz culture,
like any musical culture, is full of these licks, which can come from any place.
Musical quotation is rife among jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie often inserted a fragment
of the “Habanera” from “Carmen” into his “A Night in Tunisia.” Dexter Gordon liked the opening
phrase of “Mona Lisa.” Lee Morgan recorded an improvisation in which he quoted Ziggy Elman’s
licks from Elman’s famous solo on “And the Angles Sing,” which he recorded under Benny
Goodman. Morgan was too young to have seen Elman perform live and so must have learned those
licks from a recording. As for Elman’s licks, they came from Europe with Elman’s Jewish
ancestors.
Anyone who’s read a number of jazz biographies has read many accounts of jazz
musicians hearing jazz on records or on the radio, becoming intrigued, inspired, and learning from
these secondary sources. These secondary sources may well have been as important in jazz’s
evolution as direct person-to-person transmission, for they allowed memes to spread over great
distances in a matter of days or weeks. Musicians learned, not only from those whom they knew
directly, but also from those who recorded and broadcast. Jazz culture was thus able to develope a
huge pool of memes which musicians could use in performance. Thus, when jazz musicians play,
they call on various intersecting pools of material which they then assemble into a performance.
Of course, jazz musicians and would-be jazz musicians weren’t the only ones to hear the
broadcasts and the recordings. Everyone heard them. Thus everyone was familiar with the tunes
and riffs, the licks and phrases, the memes of jazz culture. The audience was thus primed to hear
and appreciate what the musicians played. And that priming is as important to cultural life as the
performances by the musicians themselves. As I wrote in Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 255-256):
The greatness of an individual musician such as Armstrong is a function, both of his power
to forge compelling performances from the “raw” memes and of the existence of that
meme pool. While Armstrong may have been ahead of his fellows, he couldn’t have been
very far ahead of them, otherwise they could not have performed together. Beyond this,
without a large population of music-lovers familiar with the same meme pool,
Armstrong’s recordings would have had little effect. By the time he went to Chicago, a
large population had been listening and dancing to rags and blues, show tunes, fox trots
and Charlestons and marches, all with a hot pulse and raggy rhythms. Armstrong’s
improvisations gave them a new wild pleasure, and their collective joy made him great.
Where would Armstrong have been if he’d had to clear copyright on every lick and phrase and tune
he used from the common culture?

******

If you’re curious about the hoochie-coochie meme, check out the Wikipedia entry listed below,
which lists a good many video games that use it, and Shira’s web page, which tells more of the
history and has links to mp3’s of various versions and links to some cartoons that use it.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Streets_of_Cairo,_or_the_Poor_Little_Country_Maid
Shira: http://www.shira.net/streets-of-cairo.htm

Page 56
From Two Geniuses to the Rest of Us

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1992, 532 pp.

John von Neumann, by Norman Macrae, New York, Pantheon Books, 1992, 405
pp.

Students of cognitive evolution and of twentieth century thought are fortunate in the simultaneous
appearance of these two biographies. No doubt the simultaneity is mostly coincidence. The
physicist Richard Feynman is most widely known, alas, for two autobiographical collections of
anecdotes which reveal him to be a waggish and riggish anti-establishment sort; he is most deeply
known for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics. John von Neumann was a thoroughly
establishment sort - soldiers guarded his hospital room as he lay dying of brain cancer just in case
he let out defense secrets in his sleep - and is most widely know as the name which appears in
phrases like “computers using the von Neumann architecture.” The two men crossed paths in Los
Alamos, where they worked on the atomic bomb. That crossing is a reasonable place to begin our
review.

Los Alamos
Feynman was recruited to Los Alamos while still a graduate student. He was in charge of group T-
4, Diffusion Problems. The problem was to figure out how neutrons, which drive the fission
reaction, diffuse through the explosive core. Knowing the rate and pattern of diffusion was
essential to determining the mass and configuration of fissile material. Since the late 30s von
Neumann had been working on similar problems in connection with shock waves and explosions in
general and so was able to help the Los Alamos effort between 1943 and 1945.
The difficulty was that the relevant equations could not be solved analytically. Rather, it was
necessarily to simulate neutron diffusion numerically by calculating the step-by-step motion of
individual neutrons. That requires lots of calculations, which were performed by a group of people
operating calculators. The problems would be broken into components; each person would be
responsible for one component, with each problem being passed from person to person as
individual components where calculated.

Computing and von Neumann

That, of course, is the general way computers solve problems, with the computational plan being an
algorithm. But, they did not have computers at Los Alamos. Computers came after the war and
von Neumann was central to the effort. He understood that the computer is essentially a logical
device and clarified that logic with the concepts of the stored program (Macrae, pp. 282-284), the
fetch-execute cycle (pp. 287), and conditional transfer (see Bernstein 1963, 1964, pp. 60 ff.). That
is to say, von Neumann clearly differentiated between the physical structures and connections of
the devices from which the computer is constructed and the logical requirements which those
devices have to fulfill. For that he is the progenitor of the computer.
Later on von Neumann initiated the use of computers in weather modeling. This, plus his
earlier work on shock waves and the atomic bomb, makes him one of the founders of numerical
analysis, a loose collection of techniques important in many scientific and technical fields. While
pursuing the conceptual foundations of life, he worked out the concept of the cellular automaton, a

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highly parallel kind of computational device which is much favored by current theorists of chaos
and dynamical systems. His work on game theory created a new field of economic and strategic
analysis. Before the war von Neumann did important work on the mathematical foundations of
quantum mechanics.

Feynman and Quantum Mechanics

And so we segue to Feynman, whose most important work was that which he in the late 1940s on
quantum electrodynamics. The quantum world is notorious as the domain where the fundamental
stuff of the universe acts sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle. Particles and waves are
readily visualized. But how can you visualize something which is both and neither? And, if you
can't visualize it, then how do you get the physical intuition which is, for many, so important to
scientific thinking (cf. Miller, 1986)? It was Feynman's genius to create diagrammatic conventions
for quantum interactions which made physical intuition much easier and facilitated calculation as
well. The so-called Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous once Feynman introduced them and, in
1949, Freeman Dyson [father of George Dyson] proved the diagrams to be equivalent to the more
rigorously mathematical, and less intuitive, axiomatic approach of Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itoro
Tomonaga.
Feynman went on to do important work in superfluids, weak nuclear force and, while on
sabbatical, did some creditable molecular biology. In the wake of the Challenger disaster Feynman
received a great deal of attention by performing a simple demonstration with ice water and a rubber
ring. That simple demonstration unmasked the self-serving bureaucratic disregard for reality which
led to the Challenger disaster. He also served on the board of directors of Thinking Machines, Inc.,
whose massively parallel computers are often used to implement models based on von Neumann's
concept of the cellular automaton.

Mental Math, Computing, and Late 20th Century Thought

With this return of von Neumann we get to the point of this review: When taken together, what do
Feynman and von Neumann give us? Their intellectual lives crossed paths only once, albeit in a
caldron whose intellectual fecundity may, in the long run, outlive the bomb which was its
immediate purpose. For the most part, they worked in separate arenas. But taken together those
various arenas encompass much of the deepest and most rigorous scientific and technical thinking
of our century. Perhaps by looking at their work we can gain some insight into the basis of that
thinking.
Mental mathematics is a motif which crops up in both books. Feynman and von Neumann
worked in fields were calculational facility was widespread and both were among the very best at
mental mathematics. In itself such skill has no deep intellectual significance. Doing it depends on
knowing a vast collection of unremarkable calculational facts and techniques and knowing one's
way around in this vast collection. Before the proliferation of electronic calculators the lore of
mental math used to be collected into books on mental calculation. Virtuosity here may have
gotten you mentioned in "Ripley's Believe it or Not" or a spot on a TV show, but it wasn't a vehicle
for profound insight into the workings of the universe.
Yet, this kind of skill was so widespread in the scientific and engineering world that one has
to wonder whether there is some connection between mental calculation, which has largely been
replaced by electronic calculators and computers, and the conceptual style, which isn't going to be
replaced by computers anytime soon. Perhaps the domain of mental calculations served as a
matrix in which the conceptual style of Feynman, von Neumann, (and their peers and colleagues)
was nurtured.

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Enter, Piaget
Piaget (1976, pp. 320 ff.) talks of higher mental processes which operate on lower level processes;
perhaps the world of calculations is the lower level world over which all these thinkers built their
higher level processes. In the terms David Hays and I introduced in our account of cognitive
evolution (Benzon & Hays, 1990), these higher level processes implement models. Earlier science
had been based on theories, while philosophy is grounded in rationalization, with modeling,
theorizing and rationalizing understood as distinct types of abstract conceptualization. I'm
suggesting that these conceptual models, which are central to 20th century thought, were originally
constructed in a mental space richly populated with the tricks and procedures of mental calculation.
It is in such a mental space that von Neumann and Feynman made their contributions to our
thought.
If so, does the advent of the electronic calculator and computer mean that we have just
thrown away the possibility of such deep thought by raising a generation of thinkers who routinely
turn to calculators and computers for tasks that Feynman, von Neumann, and their many colleagues
would perform in their heads? It is possible. But, another possibility is more interesting, and not
nearly so depressing in its implications.
Yes, the models of Feynman and von Neumann are built on a foundation of calculational
wizardry. But most of that wizardry was irrelevant to that genius. It turns out that the relevant
component is not only required in programming computers, but is used there in a form
unadulterated by a vast collection of mere facts and details. Thus programming, with its own
collection of tricks and procedures, provides a much more effective basis for creating the
conceptual matrix required to understand particle physics, game theory, and, of course, computing
itself. A student who has learned to program need not be a Feynman or a von Neumann to grasp
matters which, not so long ago, only Feynman and von Neumann and very few others, could grasp.
Thus, far from destroying the necessary conceptual matrix, computers may make that matrix more
readily available.
This is, of course, only a speculation; not even that, it is that most fragile of conceptual
objects, a Mere Speculation. Disreputable as they are, Mere Speculations are nonetheless
unavoidable, for they are starting points. One can only wonder at how many Mere Speculations
von Neuman and Feynman must have considered as they worked their way toward their more
substantial contributions.

References

Benzon, W. L. & Hays, D.G. (1990) "The Evolution of Cognition." Journal of Social and
Biological Structures, 13, 297-320.
Bernstein, J. (1963, 1964) The Analytical Engine. New York: Random House.
Miller, A. I. (1986) Imagery in Scientific Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Piaget, J. (1976) The Grasp of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Four Extraordinarily Creative Communities, But Maybe Five
Shakespeare, Ellington, Disney, Apocalypse Now, Mana Contemporary (?)

I was thinking about Apocalypse Now, an extraordinary film, as I often do. But not about the film
itself, rather about how it was made, the production spread halfway across the Western Hemisphere
(Hollywood to the Philippines), several years, a typhoon, a heart attack, and miles and miles of
footage – well, not miles and miles, but you get the idea. Basically, Coppola was riding herd on a
small town of talented people devoted to making this film.
From there my mind drifted to the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo in its glory years
(which I’ve already discussed, pp. 30 ff.), then to Duke Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney – the
glory years of the five early features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia,
Dumbo, and Bambi. Extraordinarily creative communities all, organized at different times and
places and to different ends. Now there’s Mana Contemporary, right here in my own backyard, a
unique for-profit non-profit art complex on the West Side of Jersey City. In this context it’s a
question mark: Will it spawn an extraordinarily creative community??
Let’s start with Ellington and work our way through the list and back to Mana.

Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington was an American composer and bandleader whose career spanned the middle half
of the 20th Century. During the latter part of that period he maintained his band at a financial loss.
It was his instrument and he needed it as such; by that time his royalty income was sufficient to
cover his costs.
First, Ellington did not write music in the abstract. He wrote specifically for the personnel in
his band at the time. When the personnel changed, he changed the arrangements if needed. The
band’s roster was unusually stable. Harry Carney, his baritone sax player, stayed with him for his
entire career. Other key musicians had long tenures – Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart on trumpet;
Juan Tizol and Sam Nanton on trombone; Sam Woodyard on drums; Paul Gonsalves, Johnny
Hodges, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard on woodwinds, and many others. And then there’s his
alter ego, Billy Strayhorn, who contributed much of the band’s repertoire – including its theme
song, “Take the A Train” – once he joined up in 1939.
Ellington was open to ideas from his men. Many of the lines and riffs, not to mention a tune
or three, in his music came from them. So many, in fact, that when Lincoln Collier published his
Ellington biography in 1987 he decided to cast doubt on Duke’s genius because of that. He was
right to emphasize Ellington’s permeability to ideas from those very talented musicians he gathered
specifically for that reason, but as for genius, who knows what THAT is, anyhow? Keeping those
folks together and pointed in the same direction was no small task. Surely we must give Ellington
credit for having the good taste needed to dream it up, and for having the wile and guile needed to
pull it off.
The fact is we have been so besotted with the Romantic idea of the genius as a solitary
creative figure pissing in the wind of stale bourgeois conformity that we have no effective way of
talking about how people work together in groups. And that’s what Ellington’s band was, a very
creative group, with Ellington as cat-herder in chief and front man.

William Shakespeare
And I’ll bet Shakespeare was much the same. Of course we don’t know much about the man, so
little in fact that nominating others for the honor of having written those plays has been a minor
academic sport for over a century. But, like Ellington, he didn’t write in a vacuum, he didn’t write
for some distant audience. He wrote for a specific company, his company. He knew who would

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speak those lines, what resources of gait, gesture and posture, of facial expression and vocal nuance
– a raise of the brow, the twitch of a lip, a stutter coughed up on the fly – they commanded. Did
they suggest lines to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. Did he accept their suggestions? Sometimes yes,
sometimes no. Did they get pissed-off at him for hogging the credit? I suppose, but they’re the ones
who took the bows, no?
Just as we know little about the man, we know little about the process by which his plays
came to be published in the form we have them – two different sets of texts, most plays in two
different versions, some with significant differences between the two versions. Were they based
strictly on Shakespeare’s original scripts or did they reflect improvisations and inspirations that
happened in performance? We don’t know. But I rather suspect that Shakespeare’s working
methods were more like Ellington’s than our prejudices in these matters can accommodate.
So, Ellington and Shakespeare, individual men who surrounded themselves with bands of
brothers, channeling and shaping their creativity so they spoke with one voice.

Walt Disney
That, according to his biographers, such as Neal Gabbler and especially Michael Barrier, is how it
went with Uncle Walt as well. His brother Roy handled the business side of the company while
Walt was the creative magus. While he did animate and worked the camera very early in his career,
that had ended by the early to mid- 1920s. But he remained deeply involved in the production of
each cartoon.
He looked at everything – character models, background, storyboards, test animations – and
tweaked it and corrected it. He would often act out parts in production meetings. When he finally
decided to go ahead with Snow White he gathered a group of 30 or 40 people on one of the sound
stages and acted out the whole story, voicing every role, over the next couple of hours. Alas, we
have no record of that session beyond the fact that it happened. For what it’s worth, he was the
voice of Mickey Mouse until 1947.
It’s absolutely clear that he couldn’t have made those films – and here I’m thinking
specifically of those five early feature-length animations – without a very large number of very
creative people. But those movies couldn’t have existed without Walt corralling all those wild
creative horses (and without Roy pointing to the bottom line to keep Walt himself in line).

Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now differs from our other cases so far because they were all ongoing concerns –
Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney. Francis Ford Coppola is himself an ongoing concern, and he
certainly had and has a small group of trusted associates he works with from one project to the
next, but films these days – after the old studio system was killed in the late 1950s – are organized
as independent business entities. Some films may be quite small, but Apocalypse Now was a large
production. It started with a script John Milius had written years before. And some of that script
actually did make it onto the screen, e.g. the famous helicopter attack sequence.
But the ending was unsuited for Coppola’s purpose. Still he had no choice but to start
shooting. So this large film lurched into production without a complete script. Coppola kept a copy
of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with him and drew inspiration from it. The scene where the Chief
gets speared is right out of the book, though structurally displaced, and Brando’s phrase “the
horror, the horror!” is from Conrad. The scene at the end where the caribao is sacrificed was a gift
from the Philippines. The sacrifice was a real ritual, not something staged with actors and props.
That footage is thus more or less documentary in kind. When Brando finally arrived on set he was
overweight, so ways had to be figured out to disguise the bloat. Nor was he at all sure he even
wanted to play the part, despite his handsome fee. One of the pivotal scenes in the film, the sampan
massacre, was scripted by Walter Murch (personal communication) when Coppola was back in LA

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recovering from a typhoon that had wrecked the production. Murch was otherwise doing sound and
cutting film, not script-writing or doctering.
Yet somehow Coppola – who’d mortgaged his house to raise the money – managed to pull it
off. They shipped a ton of footage back to LA and cut a film out of it, two films, actually,
Apocalypse Now, and Apocalypse Now, Redux, and there’s another somewhat longer version or so
floating around in the cinematic ether.
But how’d this all happen? We don’t know. Coppala’s wife, Eleanor, put together a
documentary. Various accounts of this and that have been given here and there. So we have pieces
of the history, and more are available for the interviewing. In the end, though, we don’t know how
to think about these things, intense extended interactions within a relatively small group that
manage to birth magnificent art.

Mana Contemporary
That brings us to Mana56 Contemporary57, an arts complex on the west side of Jersey City, which
is, in turn, a mid-sized city (c. 250K people) on the west bank of the Hudson River across from
Lower Manhattan. New York City has long held claim to being the world’s most creative city, and,
while those bragging rights are growing a bit strained, it’s still a force to be reckoned with. Mana’s
located in old warehouses, at this point roughly 2 million square feet.
I don’t know how that space is currently deployed. I’m sure that much of it is yet
undeveloped. Of the developed areas, I’d assume a significant portion is used for fine-art storage, a
profit-making business, and another large portion is for studios. They’re rented out at market rates,
which are, of course, lower than similar footage would be in Manhattan. The rest includes a dance
studio, exhibition spaces, a café, there’s now a screen printing operation, arts supplies, frame shop,
a sculpture garden, a small foundation or two, and more this and that.
So we have a mixture of profit and non-profit enterprises assembled in the same space, with
more facilities to come, more studios, an auditorium, and so forth. And a lot of very talented people
walking the halls.
What’s it all going to become?
We don’t know. Three of the other communities we’ve looked at were assembled by and
around individuals: Ellington, Shakespeare, and Disney. A fourth individual, Coppola, assembled a
temporary community for the purpose of making a film, Apocalypse Now. Mana Contemporary is
yet a different configuration, and we don’t know what will come of it. I assume that any artist who
can pay the rent can take a studio there. But the place has a vibe, an ambiance, and that will
certainly influence the artists. There’s a café where people can meet and talk over food, always
important. I don’t know how much of that goes on.
A critical mass of creative people may already be there, and more will be arriving in the next
few years. But they’ve not been assembled with an eye to doing something. Will Mana go nuclear?
Something could well happen, perhaps even several or many somethings, that would get various
groups to work together to make something – groups, that is, beyond the group that’s putting it all
together. But we don’t know and can’t predict what will happen.
We live in interesting times.

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Allan Kozinn, From Moving Van to an Arts Complex, The New York Times, May 16, 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/nyregion/mana-contemporary-in-jersey-
city.html?pagewanted=all
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This URL links to all New Savanna posts discussion Mana Contemporary, http://new-
savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/mana

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