www.slate.com/id/85794
assessment Taking stock of people and ideas in the news. Illustration by Charlie Powell The MacArthur Geniuses How to become one of them. By David Plotz Posted Friday, July 7, 2000, at 6:30 PM PT When Peter Hayes learned that he had won a $500,000 MacArthur genius gran t last month, he was stunned: It's "like being hit by a Mack truck. It 's a little disorienting," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. It would have been surprising if he h adn't collected a MacArthur. He helps North Korea develop windmills as a n alternative to nuclear power. He takes underprivileged kids sailing in San Francisco Bay during his free time. Since 1981, the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation has awarded 588 "fellowships" worth nearly $200 million to Americans "who show exce ptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." ") The fellowship is a no-strings-attached grant: Each 2000 winner will get $100,000 a year for five years. MacArthur calls the cash a gift of time, because it frees w inners from financial constraints on their art, science, or activism.
The MacArthur has become the United States' most famous philanthropy proj ect not because it rewards stellar peoplethough it doesbut because it' s mysterious. Several hundred talent scouts, whose identities are secret , suggest nominees to the selection committee. The committee, whose memb ers are also secret, covertly gathers dossiers on the nominees and selec ts two-dozen-odd winners. In a nation where self-promotion is a constitu tional right, the MacArthur is endlessly frustrating: You can't nominate yourself, you can't nominate a friend, you can't lobby for it if you ar e nominated. Don't fear, the MacArthur is less cryptic than it seems. You may not be able to guarantee yourself half-a-million bucks and a re putation for brilliance, but you can certainly improve your odds. Here's a how-to guide for becoming a certifiable genius. New Yorkers and San Franci scans act like they're the most interesting people in the world. Fully one-sixth of all MacArthurs live in Manhattan , and nearly as many live in the Bay Area. Southerners rarely qualify as ge niuses unless they're sensitive writers or colorful advocates for the po or. Specifically, be a professor at Harvard or St anford, where they hand out MacArthurs like candy. If you're a humanitie s professor, choose Harvard (which has 35 MacArthurs) or University of C alifornia, Berkeley (which has 23). Hard scientists should land a job at Stanford (24) or Princeton (20). Physicists at one of those two univers ities seem to win MacArthurs more easily than tenure. In a pinch, Univer sity of Chicago, University of Michigan, Columbia, and New York Universi ty are acceptable backups, but avoid Yale! Y ou'd be better off with Bard College, whose tiny faculty has won four Ma cArthurs. Revisionist scholars of cl assical Greece do well, and MacArthur has identified not one, but two ge niuses who decipher ancient Mayan glyphs and a third who deciphers ancie nt Andean knotted mnemonic devices (whatever they may be). Literature, p hilosophy, and history all win plenty of MacArthurs. Economics is unprom ising, unless you study something odd. Physics, m ath, and computer science are beloved of MacArthur. Biologists should study evolut ion, dinosaurs, or primates, and little else. Preferably in N ew York: One in 10 MacArthurs is a writer, choreographer, artist, musici an, or director in New York City. Novelists, painters, and film directors seem un derrepresented. Among musicians, jazz is good, and free jazz is even bet ter. Needless to say, no matter what kind of artist you are, be avant-ga rde. Many MacArthur genius es advocate government activism, but all fellows assiduously avoid publi c service. I found only two MacArthur winners from the public sector, sm all-town Mayor Unita Blackwell and then-Congressional Budget Office Dire ctor Alice Rivlin. Similarly, geniuses should not soil themselves with e arning a profit. It's fine to run a nonprofit that helps disadvantaged p eople start their own businesses, but almost no MacArthurs run or work f or profit-seeking corporations. You don't have to be right, but yo u must be provocative. You mus t, like 1999 winner Eva Silverstein, "question the fundamentals of quant um physics." MacArthur honored the classicist who reinterpreted the Part henon friezes as a human sacrifice and the paleontologist who says that Tyrannosaurus Rex ate carrion rather than hunted. If you're a mathematic ian, set yourself one of math's great insoluble problems: MacArthur knig hted Andrew Wiles for cracking Fermat's Theorem and Michael Freedman for proving the four-dimensional case of Poincare's Conjecture. MacArthur adores folks who foresee the end of the world, especially if that end is caused by W estern avarice or stupidity. MacArthur has blessed Paul "Population Expl osion" Ehrlich; Richard Turco, who popularized the idea of nuclear winte r; and several scientists who have sounded warnings about global warming . O nly a handful of the 588 genies could be considered conservative. The foundation likes artists who campaign for racial minorities and the needy. Alfredo Jaar, a 2000 winner, creat es art that "focuses on injustices around the worldpoverty, exploitatio n, genocide." The foundation favor s activists who fight for low-income housing, disability rights, and rac ial justice. Libertarians, religious conservatives, and free marketeers are never geniuses. MacArthur routinely consecrates the causes clbres of the left, from sex discrimination to right-wing human rights abuses i n Central America (see: Mark Danner, Tina Rosenberg, and Alma Guillermop rieto). The MacArthur's reliable support of left-wing causes makes it fun to gues s future winners. My bets: 1) Jerry Berman from the Center for Democracy and Technology for lobbying to protect Internet privacy; MacArthur favors th e eccentric choice over the ordinary. Economist Rabin wears tie-dyes, li stens to Abba, and has Johnny Depp posters all over his office wall. And it surely h elped Seattle "sound sculptor" Trimpin that he goes by only one name. All the rules suggest that the perfect MacArthur genius is still out ther e: a one-named Berkeley professor who choreographs interpretative jazz d ances about how genetically modified food will destroy humanity.
Here is the fo undation's terse biography of John D and Catherine T MacArthur. It doe s not note that the second-richest man in the United States lived in a s mall two-bedroom apartment filled with buckets to catch drips from the l eaky roof.
READ MESSAGES Reader Response from The Fray: I decided that your article sounds a lot like me. I excel in math, I volu nteer regularly at a local hospital, run track, play the piano (Lois Arm strong all the way baby), and write poetry and study art in my spare tim e I wanted to know if you think I have chance of someday being a MacArt hur nominee, or if I just spoiled it by writing this letter.
Question: What is the typica l outcome of having won a MacArthur? Are the recipients then better off in more than a monetary way for having won? And do the professors among the MacArthur winners then go fort h to become better teachers or better researchers?
Android thinks being lefty is the main issue, Laura wonders i f being Jewish helps. And Karaoke Ernie is a genius who would "much rath er brighten the lives of the common people around me" than be discovered by the MacArthur Foundation.
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