I Come Bearing Gifts

The Positivity Parade continues to march. I freely admit that the path of the parade feels a little rougher today than most days, but that's why we need to see some light. Thus, I'm breaking out some big guns today.

The 2018 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and there is a wide variety of awesome and important stuff to unpack. I'm not going to go through everything, but I'm going to pull some highlights, because this is seriously cool.

First, a little on the MacArthur grants. The MacArthur Foundation provides unrestricted fellowships (this year, $625,000) to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creativity, a promise for important future advances, and potential for a fellowship to help create more creative works. The first grants were given in 1981, and to date, 1,041 people have received them.

Because the criteria is so broad, the people receiving these grants are all over the spectrum in terms of what they do and how they create.

For example, Livia S. Eberlin is an analytical chemist who is developing new methods to quickly and accurately find diseased tissue during surgery. She and her team have come up with a pen that essentially tells the doctors if something is cancerous or not before the doctor goes to remove it.

Then you've got Lisa Parks, a media scholar researching how the flow of information through new media technology is impacting culture, politics, and humanitarian ideas. Bet you never thought about how your Netflix subscription changed the way you view politics, did you?

Finally (for today's post, at least), you have Wu Tsang, a filmmaker and performance artist whose works explore hidden histories and marginalized narratives while studying the act of performance itself. Her work shows many of the stories that are left out of the history books or the day-to-day relations, as she delves into things like the discrepancies between public and private personas of people in the spotlight.

Across the board, you've got people who are doing amazing work to help the world be better - improving it directly or indirectly just by learning more about what we do and why we do it. Congratulations to the MacArthur Fellows Class of 2018!