Atul Gawande and Shahzia Sikander are among the 25 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation grants, announced yesterday. The MacArthurs, widely known as “genius grants,” give the winners $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached. You don’t apply for a MacArthur; it just turns up. It’s really a beautiful thing.
Two other things of beauty: First, the fact that the MacArthur committee makes brilliant choices that reflect a whole range of human endeavor, and isn’t afraid to reward young “geniuses” — many recipients are in their 30s. And second, the style of the foundation’s epigrammatic citations, which are concise and finely crafted:
Atul Gawande: Surgeon/Author applying a critical eye and fresh perspective to modern surgical practice, articulating its realities, complexities, and challenges, in the interest of improving outcomes and saving lives.
Shahzia Sikander: Painter merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media.
The full list of winners is here. Gawande, 40, is a surgeon, an innovator in surgery ethics and technique, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a columnist for the New England Journal of Medicine. Oh, and he’s also the author of the best-seller Complications, which Amardeep blogged about here. Sikander, 37, is a New York-based painter who trained in the art of miniatures at the National College of Art in Lahore and re-imagines the form in work that extends into digital media. Congratulations to the full crop of this year’s Geniuses and massive props to Atul and Shahzia!
A macaca-licious story.
our brown did us proud… complications is a great book…
Siddhartha, the irony of this post is that you’ve consistently misspelled Shahzia’s name (you forget an h)! Please see your own MacArthur link or her homepage.
I’m a terrible speller, too, which is why neither you nor I have won this award yet, buddy. 😉
here here… meeeee toooooooooo! it’s okay….perfect brownies are soooooo boring and overrated.. a few flaws make it more scrumptious ;)….
BrooklynBrown, not sure how that’s ironic, but thanks for pointing out the mistake. Fixed. I’m actually an excellent speller but only after I’ve had my morning coffee.
Let me bring you your morning coffee chickory coffee sludge, sah. Sorry, am still on the old bottle, haven’t quite caught up with the new regime. 😉
ironic in the Alanis Morissette definition, which is more about juxtaposition than any actual irony. Sorry about that. But I am a sucky speller, morning coffee or not; I spell JetBlue with three K’s.
A hidden desi angle among the award recipients is through Victoria Hale, visionary founder and CEO of One World Health in San Francisco, a non-profit pharmaceutical company with a focus on treating ‘third world’ diseases. They have just had a drug approved by the Indian authorities to combat Kaala Azar (leshmaniasis), a parasitic disease prevalent in India, esp. Bihar.
I know you guys are just joshing, but let’s be serious for a moment. Is there any link between genius and spelling? Even if we are talking about specifically literary genius, the link is tenuous…William Butler Yeats was an atrocious speller, and it got worse as he got older. Horrible handwriting, too.
And yet, in my opinion (and that of some others), the poems Yeats wrote after winning the Nobel Prize were even better than the ones he wrote before winning it. If there was ever a guy who should have gotten the prize twice…
I’m a pretty good speller myself, except when it comes to words with double letters like “occasion” and “necessary,” which some unresolved psychological issue won’t permit me to master. Anyway, methinks the myth of the spelling-bee is one that needs to be deflated. End of digression.
Shall we celebrate general macaca-genius with a task force lunch this weekend?
Hmm, loox lyk dey fergot to menshun my naym on dis yeer’s lyst… ~ I did my own show-me-the-desis scan of the list yesterday. Not to get mushy, but in doing so I felt confident that on some not too distant day, someone from the Mutiny – blogger, poster, lurker – will be a MacArthurite.
You heard it here first.
I’m sure of it.
The MacArthurs are some of my favorite awards because of the diversity of the fields and the surprise factor. In addition to the macaca winners, other highlights for me were George Saunders (amazing short story writer), Linda Griffiths (biomol engineer), and Victoria Hale (low-cost drug developer). These people are really amazing.
Haha! SM readers are kinda slow talking about geniuses. Nothing gets us mutineers in the mood like desi hotties and discussions about skin color and oppression.
On a funny note one of the winner’s was a African American Professor at NorthWestern University and her work is to prove that all white people are racist by using MRI images of people’s brain’s. Even the white people who are extremely liberal show sign’s of fighting back racist thoughts when talking to people of color.
The funny thing was watching the white news anchors on tv smile and congratulate her on her grant for proving that white people are racist.
Bah! I hereby am creating our own Gosh-Dang! Award, the Macacarthur Award for Smartest-Brown-Ever-This-Week.
Prizes: I have 75 cents in change in my pocket and a box of Oreos, plus a VCD of “JISM: The Dark Side of Desire.”
How to win: So far the pool of nominations are…well, everyone on this site. I’ll probably pick someone I like a lot, so start kissing some ass, fools.
i say give it to PG 😉
salil: i’ll even add in a few things for the prize.. my hot pink bottle of nail polish and a viagra pen… hows the prize looking now? hmm.. maybe i can even my copy of curious george… ding ding ding..
wow. no takers at all?
chickpea, I think this prize goes to you, since it would be unseemly to award it to myself, no matter how deserving I am or how badly I want an Oreo. Or pink nail polish.
The Viagra pen is like coals to Newcastle, though. My dad’s a urologist.
And that makes me sound kind of like I’m bragging. Someone shoot me.
B-A-N-G