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Latest ‘genius grant’ recipients announced

Oliver Guyon, 36, an optical physicist and astronomer at the University of Arizona who designs telescopes and other astronomical instrumentation that play a critical role in the search for Earth-like planets outside this solar system, works on his handmade telescope in the garage of his home in Hilo, Hawaii. Guyon is among 23 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
Carla K. Johnson Associated Press

CHICAGO – Mandolin player and composer Chris Thile learned the hard way that when you get a call from the 312 area code this time of year, you should probably answer the phone.

Thile is among 23 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” which are given in a secrecy-shrouded process. Winners have no idea they’ve been nominated for the $500,000 awards until they get the call, and nominators must remain anonymous.

Thile ignored the incessant phone calls from the foundation at first, thinking they were election-year robocalls. Then he received an ominous message: “Don’t tell anyone about this call.”

His tour manager searched for the number online and told him, “It appears to be from something called the MacArthur Foundation.” It was a name Thile recognized.

“I think I must have turned white,” he said. “I’ve never felt so internally warm. My heart was racing. All of a sudden, I felt very askew physically. I was trying to catch my breath. … I thought, ‘Oh my God, did I win a MacArthur?’ ”

The grants, paid over five years, give recipients freedom to pursue a creative vision. Winners, who work in fields ranging from medicine and science to the arts and journalism, don’t have to report how they spend the money.

Thile said he may use the grant to fund a chamber music project for a bluegrass quintet.

Northwestern University historian Dylan C. Penningroth said he now can expand his search for court records of property owned by slaves in the pre-Civil War South.

For other winners – there have been 873 so far, including this year’s recipients – the grants bring prestige, confirmation and, in some cases, moments of profound reflection about life and fate.

Maurice Lim Miller saw the MacArthur nod as validation of his project, called the Family Independence Initiative. The project rewards self-sufficiency among residents of low-income neighborhoods by bringing groups of friends together and asking them to track the steps they take toward saving money, finding jobs, helping their children do well in school and other goals.

“Our work falls between the arguments that are being had between the right and the left,” Lim Miller said. “The argument that people DON’T take personal responsibility is wrong. But the argument that they SHOULD take personal responsibility is right.”