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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2009
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Meet This Year's MacArthur 'Geniuses'

Journalists, scientists, artists among 24 awarded $500K grants

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(AP) – A newspaper reporter who refuses to forget decades-old murders is among 24 recipients of this year's $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grants." As in previous years, a wide variety of fields are represented on the list of recipients: There is a novelist and an applied physicist, a photojournalist and a molecular biologist, a painter and a biochemist, physicians and a short story writer, a bridge engineer and poet.

Jerry Mitchell, a reporter with the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has spent two decades investigating Civil Rights-era slayings, reminding readers that among them were graying old men who had gotten away with murder. Mitchell's reporting on the 1963 murder of civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was instrumental in a new trial and conviction, in 1994, of Byron de la Beckwith. For the complete list, see the link below.

Timothy Barrett, paper maker and historian.
Timothy Barrett, paper maker and historian.   (University of Iowa)
A book on New York painter Rackstraw Downes.
A book on New York painter Rackstraw Downes.   (Amazon.com)
Theodore Zoli, bridge expert.
Theodore Zoli, bridge expert.   (HNTB.com)
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Deebles
Sep 21, 09 11:35 PM CDT
You don't get to comment about this unless you know that MacArthur got Dorothy Parker pregnant and walked away from her with neither a fair thee well. She wrote a great short story about it and then he married Helen Hayes and they had a son who was that guy in Hawaii Five O that was supposed to book people. James MacArthur. Dorothy, of course, had an abortion in the thirties which any woman could get from her doctor until Roe v Wade screwed that up. So, OK, sometimes the people squawking about the government are right. But Rowe didn't give a woman a right: it made doctors not criminals. I think the Supreme Court was trying to do a right thing, and instead they turned abortion which was like the biggest non-issue but happening all the time thing into a Conservative wet dream. Reply
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I_hate_to_say
Sep 22, 09 1:23 AM CDT
I once fell in love with a MacArthur award winner who's working with Obama on the healthcare reform compromise as we speak, and I'm told we have Teddy Kennedy to blame for the fact that Nixon's legislation (which was better than anything we're likely to get now) was shelved back in the early 70's. And it was Billy Graham and Frank Schaeffer Sr. who put the seal of approval on the Jerry Falwell disinformation crusade and took it mainstream with the Hollywood treatment. Best book I've read in years is Frank Schaeffer Jr's CRAZY FOR GOD: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Sorry Deebs. ;-) Reply
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Deebles
Sep 22, 09 1:35 AM CDT
Don't be sorry to me--I read Schaeffer's book. And I agree totally about Nixon's legislation and am very upset that he spoiled what was a damn good time for legislation and opening up China by being paranoid. As for how Teddy and his antics shit on everything he touched? Hello? Not the early seventies though. If the left in this country had voted for a Republican Ford, well everything would have been different. And I know of your genius, and your love was well placed.
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